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Sometimes it’s hard to tell
who is moving
MOP Projects
Thursday – Sunday, 1 – 6pm
2/39 Abercrombie Street
Chippendale NSW 2008
[email protected]
www.mop.org.au
Writer: Amelia Groom | Printer: Playbill
Edition: 500 | ISBN: 978-1-921661-35-8
© Gemma Messih | www.gemmamessih.com
Special thanks: Amelia Groom,
George & Ron Adams, Debra Phillips,
Richard Crampton, Harrison Finn,
Michael Messih, Lucy Hall,
Aedan Lee, Beth Dillon.
MOP______
This project has benefited from an Arts & Design Grant courtesy of Arc @ UNSW Limited.
Gemma Messih
MOP Projects
1 – 18 August 2013
Never Last
It’s called Speed, but really it’s a film about not going anywhere. Jan de Bont’s 1994 blockbuster has
only three settings: an elevator, then a bus, then
a train. Each of these confined spaces is made to
facilitate transition, but in Speed all is Stuck.
It is a movie without movement, because all
of its moves are looped. Rather than speed towards something, the busload of hostages has
to speed around, in avoidance of everything. After they drive the bus to the airport so they can
circle around the tarmac and never drop below
the prescribed 50mph, they manage to loop the
ostensibly live footage of themselves so they can
get off the circling bus without the bomber registering that he’s watching the same sixty seconds
of them, on repeat. This is how they prevent the
attached bomb from actualising the culminating
explosion that it was made for.
The film’s dialogue is also cyclical and profoundly anti-climactic. At what turns out to be a pseudo-ending, when everyone is saved the first time
around after the bus crashes into a stationary airplane (!) and things appear to be wrapping up,
Sandra Bullock’s character says coquettishly to
Keanu Reeve’s, “you know, relationships that start
under intense circumstances never last.” Then at
the real ending, when the train they’ve been stuck
on is derailed, ejecting them out of an unfinished
tunnel onto Hollywood Boulevard (!!), hero repeats back to heroine, “relationships based on intense experiences never last …”
To which she responds: “we’ll have to base it on
sex then.”
And then the credits roll, negating the consummation. Only when the actionless action movie is
finished can this long-awaited sex finally begin.
With the bomb defused, the other climactic event
– which we’ve just been told is about to form the
basis of a new relationship – is necessarily blacked
out.
In a 2003 article for Critical Inquiry, cultural theorist Fredric Jameson looks to Speed to demonstrate what he calls ‘the end of temporality’ (or,
more accurately – as he comes to realise by the
end of his essay – to demonstrate the indemonstrability of the end of temporality) in the wake
of modernity. He elucidates the ways in which
the spatial confinement of the film, which takes
place primarily within an always moving bus, actually results in its disconnection from temporal
progression. All appears to have momentum and
velocity, but, for Jameson, this only functions as a
“representation of temporality” that is in fact cut
off from time proper.
In this analysis, the maniac bomber played by
Dennis Hopper is only there as “narrative compensation” in what Jameson considers to be the
film’s utter plotlessness. But, I think, far from
merely “plugging the gaps” in Speed’s “pornographic violence”, Hopper’s character is a crucial component in its (perhaps inadvertently)
complex web of counter-culmination. And he has
the best line in the film:
“A bomb is meant to explode. That’s its meaning, its purpose. Your life is empty because you
spend it trying to stop the bomb from becoming. And for who? For what? Do you know
what a bomb is, Jack, that doesn’t explode? It is
a cheap gold watch, buddy.”
Jack’s reply to this is: “You’re crazy. You’re fucking
crazy.”
And the bomber answers, “No. Poor people are
crazy, Jack. I’m eccentric.”
The fact that Hopper was a Bush-supporting
Republican somehow makes this last statement
all the more sinister … But I digress. Maybe appropriately so, though, since this film is really a
thread of digressions, prolongations, avoidances,
and refused culminations – all leading up to an
off-limits climax in the sex that begins after the
end.
With the cheap gold watch attached to it, ticking away, the bomb’s explosion in the film is a
latent, indefinitely deferred finality. Everything
is orientated towards stopping the bomb from
becoming. And this amounts to a suspension of
time: because it’s a threat of complete, irrevocable destruction, the bomb’s presence ensures
that nothing happens. Things are approached but
never realised in this circumambulatory tactic of
evasion. And while we’re dealing with temporal
loops and perpetual postponements of the end,
I may as well finish with the film’s invitingly prohibitive opening line:
“Hey! This area is restricted …”
- Amelia Groom, July 2013