Staying on, or Getting off (the Bus): Approaching Speed in Cinema and Media Studies

It seems only appropriate to introduce this In Focus by invoking the 1994 Jan de Bont movie Speed—a film peculiarly fixated on the spectacle of human bodies moving at dangerous velocities, whether trapped in elevators, handcuffed to runaway subway trains, or (most memorably) hurtling down a half-constructed freeway on a Santa Monica bus rigged with a bomb set to detonate if its speedometer drops below fifty miles per hour. Much of the suspense of this high-concept movie hinges on the pressure that such fast-paced movement puts on both characters and spectators to react physically and affectively in time with the flow of action. Protagonist Annie Porter (Sandra Bullock) acts as both the focal point of the drama and surrogate for the audience as she takes command of the bus, weaving it dexterously through rush-hour traffic, deflecting danger, and thwarting disaster at regular micro-intervals. At a moment of particular dramatic intensity, Annie approaches a freeway exit; with the bus flanked on both sides by traffic, she looks anxiously at police officer Jack Traven (Keanu Reeves), shouting at him to make the call: “Stay on or get off ? Stay on or get off ?” As with other climactic moments in the film, Speed responds to this question not by slackening pace but by ramping it up and pushing straight through—each of its suspenseful situations being “resolved by acceleration.”¹ On the one hand, this film confirms the long-standing axiom that speed equals danger but that danger is thrilling, suspenseful, and makes for good cinema; on the other hand, it also admits to a less openly avowed—but perhaps increasingly nagging—cultural suspicion that “to slow down is to die.”²

From our vantage point, Speed’s central conceit that we have no choice but to accelerate seems like a particularly prescient description of the condition of technological, economic, and cultural speed-up that characterizes daily life in the twenty-first century. In recent years, questions about speed, tempo, and pace have become the focus of keen and often polarized debate across a range of aesthetic, political, and critical contexts. It has become something of a truism to say that we live in “a 24/7, always on, and on-the-go world,” defined by ever-accelerating rhythms of media, technology, and capital.³ As the dust jacket of James Gleick’s Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything apocalyptically warns, “We have reached the epoch of the nanosecond. This is the heyday of speed. . . . Our computers, our movies, our sex lives, our prayers—they all run faster now than ever before. . . . We have become a quick-reflexed, multitasking, channel-flipping, fast-forwarding species. We don’t completely understand it, and we’re not altogether happy about it.”⁴ In response to this context of technological and economic speed-up, a set of “slow” cultural practices have emerged—from slow food and tourism movements to slow media manifestos, slow art and film festivals, and slow technology and computing movements.⁵ These cultural practices figure slowness as an emblematic mode of resistance for our time, offering the kind of hope denied by Speed: namely, that it may be possible, after all, to simply pull the hand brake and get off the proverbial bus.

Such anxieties about speed as a symptom of our cultural malaise have likewise transferred over onto debates about cinema aesthetics. On the “fast” side of the spectrum, critics and film scholars have noted the emergence of “intensified continuity,” “post continuity,” or “accelerationist aesthetics” in contemporary cinema, terms that refer to the flamboyantly hyperkinetic, adrenaline-charged style that has been embraced by recent blockbuster films, including franchises such as Transformers (Michael Bay, 2007–2014), Bourne (Doug Liman, Paul Greengrass, and Tony Gilroy, 2002–2012), and Fast & Furious (Rob Cohen, John Singleton, Justin Lin, and James Wan, 2001–2015).⁶ In both form and content, these “fast” films reaffirm the visceral thrill of speed as part of what Siegfried Kracauer identified as the medium’s basic affinities, citing the chase scene in particular...