Speed as an allegory for Capitalism
December 27th, 2009 at 00:35

Last night, I watched the seminal action-thriller film Speed, starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, and some other famous people. Obviously this isn’t the most cerebral thing that I could have watched – Hamlet was on today. But it did make me think – given the millions and millions of hours academics waste studying Shakespeare and reading too much into it, I think they’ve missed something. If only they’d stopped examining Hamlet from a post-modernist perspective, and had instead looked at Speed, they would have spotted the most obvious commentary on modern capitalism I’ve ever seen.

Think about it – the bus being unable to stop is a comment on capitalism’s need to constantly move forward and grow, and the jeopardy of the bus exploding is a metaphor for if the capitalist system slows down, the world economy will explode – taking many innocent civilians with it. No one being able to get off the bus is just like how it’s impossible for anyone – or any one country – to opt out of global markets and the capitalist system – because of the hold capitalism has upon everyone, whether they like it or not. Anyone who does try to escape – like one of the passengers – will just get destroyed for trying, not through the fault of the other participants in capitalism (the other passengers), but by the structure of the system itself.

Reeves’ saying “The bomb is big enough to blow a hole in THE WORLD” is not the clunkiest line in cinema history – far from it – it’s actually remarkably prescient, and is actually a commentary about the importance of capitalism in world society. If we were to lose capitalism overnight, society would break down.

The gap in the road that the bus has to jump is a metaphor for the occasional crisis that capitalism faces – and the extraordinary steps that are required to get past it (like bank bailouts).

The villain, an ex-cop out to make money is an allegory for the profit driven nature of the capitalist system – and the corrupting influence of money. The good guys in the film are the governments of the world – trying to correct the inadequacies of the free market and counter-balance the unfettered profit-driven motives of private industry.

And of course, Keanu Reeves’ wooden acting is an allegory for the destruction of trees and other natural resources in pursuit of consumption and the bus never stopping.

Look out for my thesis, Pop Quiz Hotshot: Speed, Society and Capitalism, in the new year…

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Killing Pigeons
December 5th, 2009 at 22:58

One of the major creationist arguments against evolution is that no one has ever “observed” evolution happen, and therefore God definitely did it. The trouble with this argument is obvious – the creationists have never actually observed nature. Nature is horrible and if a deity were to create such a system, they’d have to be sick in the head. Today I was unfortunately a partipant a very vivid example of nature at it’s most horrendous.

Our next-door neighbours have a cat, and far from being adorable, it’s actually a vicious killing machine, and regularly deposits the corpses of pigeons in our garden – or worse still, their still living, half-mangled corpses. Earlier today I looked out of the window and saw a distressed, half-dead pigeon.

So we did what we thought was the most responsible thing – call the RSPCA. If anyone can fix a wounded animal, and cure it of it’s ailments, it’s probably going to be them. And this is when the most horrifying thing happened. The RSPCA turned up and decided that the best course of action was to put the pigeon out of it’s misery. So the man took the pigeon out to the van and killed it right there and then in front of our house. Or so I’m told anyway – I couldn’t bear to watch.

Of course, there was probably no other option – it’s probably pretty difficult to make pigeon-size wheelchairs, and helping all pigeons is probably uneconomic – the RSPCA man wasn’t just the death panel, but the executioner too. But it was still quite upsetting, because as the person who first discovered the pigeon’s plight and triggered the RSPCA being alerted and therefore hastening the pigeons death… did I kill it by proxy? Do I have blood on my hands?

It’s been a rollercoaster of emotions – I think I must feel like the general who orders troops into battle knowing they weren’t coming back alive. Or perhaps more precisely, the general who orders the doctors to treat a patient only for the doctor to instead go on a killing spree.

And I bet the RSPCA man wasn’t terribly happy either. I bet he grew up loving animals, finding them fascinating, enjoying trips to the zoo, and then training to be a vet because of his love of animals and wanting to help them… only to then find out he’ll spend most of his career murdering them.

I’m just glad I didn’t give the pigeon a name, or something that would make the story even more loaded with emotion. In fact, re-read this blog-post but imagine the pigeon’s name was Dale. Dale the pigeon.

Nature is horrible.

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