Alex Cox is very simply a punk-film phenomenon. He represents that rare breed of film-maker whose love of underground, off-centre and unseen cinema has resulted in him creating a series of defiantly independent works which continually fly in the face of the cinematic orthodoxy.

As a director, Cox first bedazzled and bemused mainstream Hollywood with his offbeat comedy/conspiracy-theory/road movie-inspired début Repo Man. The film featured an up-and-coming young Emilio Estevez as a disenfranchised punk rocker who is thrown into a number of surreal encounters after joining a vehicle-repossession agency hot on the trail of a nuclear-powered vehicle from outer space.

With its penchant for genre mixing, as well as its pounding Los Angeles underground music score, Repo Man was inextricably linked to the punk philosophy informing its creator. For cultural studies critics such as John Fiske, the subcultural activity of such marginal movements can be defined by the concept of ‘bricolage’, whereby ‘the subordinated make their own culture out of the resources of the “other”’ (Fiske 1990: 150). As Fiske notes, this function was seen in the punk movement's unorthodox conflation of pre-existing styles and modes of performance which ‘signifies their power to make their own style and to offend their “social betters” in the process’ (ibid.p.150).