** SPEED
With Keanu Reeves, Dennis Hopper, Jeff Daniels, Sandra Bullock, and Joe Morton.
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Speed amplifies our discomfort to action-film proportions, exaggerating some of the most common aggravations for mass-transit riders–drivers who don’t stop for passengers racing after them, buses that cut off cars and narrowly miss pedestrians, construction and repairs that cause delays and inconvenience. Here these routine nuisances become life threatening, the stress they normally induce replaced by sheer terror. The film also makes a life-or-death issue out of one of contemporary urban life’s daily challenges–the attempt to avoid getting stuck in rush-hour traffic–wittily exploiting the urban commuter’s teeth-gnashing frustration and sense of powerlessness in the face of traffic jams.
Part of our culture’s discontent with mass transit, Speed suggests, is that the individual motorist’s wish for complete, unencumbered personal freedom conflicts with the need to relinquish control that comes with being a passenger. However maddening it may be to be stuck in traffic, you have the sense (or illusion) that you’re empowered as long as you’re behind the steering wheel. At the beginning of the film a passenger in an office-tower elevator chides a coworker for pressing an already lighted elevator button. Focusing on this futile, universal act, the film illustrates how badly we need to feel in control of the machinery that moves us from place to place. Surrendering that authority leaves us helpless, at the mercy of the stranger operating the vehicle. In Speed these individuals are repeatedly incapacitated (the drivers of the bus and the subway train don’t remain in charge of their vehicles for long), leaving the passengers in danger.
