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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Bender Buses? (Sorry)
October 1st, 2008 at 00:47

Last night I went out in trendy/dodgy east London to see some stand-up comedy with 66.67% of my housemates, Paul and Jim. It was a mixed bag of entertainment but was certainly worth going to. What made this exciting and notable was what happened on the bus on the way home. You mileage may vary on the phrase “exciting and notable”.

To get to Liverpool Street from the comedy club we had to take a bendy bus. It was a pretty exciting experience – it was my first time on a bendy bus, and I really can’t see what Boris’s problem with them is. We were so thrilled by the concept of a bus that bends, we decided to stand in the bend itself. Basically we were having the time of our lives.

As we approached Liverpool Street, a bloke who was perhaps in his mid-twenties leant over to us and say “they don’t allow faggots on buses”. Which was, er, a useful piece of advice, I guess? The thing that bothered me about this most that was my concern that he was passing on inaccurate information, and that he himself had been misled. And I think I’m pretty justfied in thinking this.

I don’t think he was a bus conductor, or an employee of TfL in any capacity – unless hoodies are now part of the uniform. Even if we accept his premise as true, and TfL did try to impose the “no faggots” rule, it would be almost impossible to enforce as it would be overruled by various pieces of anti-discrimination legislation, and would require getting some sort of system installed or at least training staff to detect them. I don’t think this technology exists, at least in a way that is deployable to the many thousands of buses in Greater London. And I don’t remember participating in any sort of test to determine whether or not I was a “faggot” upon boarding the bus – even if there was I would have “passed” anyway. Being a straight, white, male has many advantages, such as having society hugely balanced in my favour, but it does have one disappointing downside: I’ll never be able to fulfill my goal of being the next Rosa Parks and acting as a figurehead to some sort of great civil rights movement. I guess I’ll have to pursue my second and third life goal instead, of winning a MOBO award and successfully suing the campus LGBT society for discrimination instead.

So this leads me to the question as to why he acted as he did. One possible explanation is that he was trying to impress the girl – possibly his girlfriend – sitting next to him. Whilst I wouldn’t like to jump to conclusions and claim that he thought his homophobic language would endear him towards her, it is certainly a possibility – I must admit, even though he is misguided, when he used the word “faggots”, I thought he was a cool dude. Maybe this is where I’m going wrong? Maybe women prefer men with uneducated prejudices?

There is, however, an equally likely alternative hypothesis: that the guy was implicitly implying that all other men were homosexuals, in order to leave the girl next to him with no other choices – if he could convince her that every other man was gay, then she’d have nowhere left to turn.

So really, I think rather than being a rather lame attempt at some off-the-cuff wit, I think he was trying to provoke this much discourse in understanding his actions.

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