Movie Culture

Rating: 4/10 (24 January 2002)

It's always interesting to look at movies through history as if they were all part of the same overall culture, drawing on similar behavioral conventions and technologies. Like living cultures, movies have a historical context, undergo innovations, evolve over time to reflect changing folkways, and so forth. Speed gives us an ultimate example of innovation and originality, leading through convention, to utter decadence.
There have been speed movies ever since there were movies and they were new and exciting at the beginning. The Keystone Kops were pretty good. Then they became conventional, with Model As careering around urban corners, tommy guns blazing out the windows; Bogart wheeling his speeding coupe up the slopes towards Mount Whitney in accelerated time. The big ones were saved until the movie's end usually. Then the car chase underwent what anthropologists call a revitalization movement. I'm talking about Bullitt. Nothing like this chase had (or has) been put on film.
Then we enter a period of decadence, which we may define as increasingly perfunctory repetition and variation of a once-original idea. (The ancient Egyptians drew very careful open hands in their hieroglyphic script. Over the millenia, with less attention being paid and with a good deal of sloppy borrowing going on, the open palm managed to turn into a simple delta shape, from which we get our letter D. That's decadence. It's a real thing.) Well, if it's good once, let's do it again and make another nickel.
Other outrageous chases followed in The French Connection, the Seven Ups, and so on; nicely choreographed but no longer original. Now the public has seen enough car chases. Let's introduce other vehicles into the chase. We can use a runaway cruise ship. Let's put the chase at the beginning -- why make the audience wait until the end? Beverly Hills Cop STARTS with a chase involving a car and some kind of garbage truck.
Finally we reach a sort of climax with Speed. With the exception of some shenanigans on and in an elevator, the entire movie is one big chase involving diverse vehicles, most prominently a bus. Sandra Bullock is cute as the wisecracking girl drawn into the plot. Keanu Reeves is clean-cut and handsome, no more than that. But none of that matters. The only important thing is that lumbering behemoth banging cars off the freeway, leaping through 50 feet of open space, and smashing everything in sight. It's thrilling. Of course it's thrilling. We could dispense with the characters entirely and it would still be thrilling -- a thrilling hour and a half of a bus zipping along the streets of Los Angeles like a juggernaut and demolishing everything it can.
I'm wondering. Surely they have a video game for children out by now, called "Speed." One point for each traffic sign or highway cone. You get five points for squashing a pedestrian. Ten points for a wrecking a car. Fifteen points for a truck. Glancing blows earn you half credits. If you turn too quickly and flop over, or if you hit a locomotive, you lose.