Inside a strip mall older than my small town’s Walmart lies what used to be the entry gates to the at-home theater experience; Blockbuster. 20 years ago, this cornucopia of entertainment was truly the equivalent of letting a kid loose in a candy store. Every aisle was filled with cases promising unforgettable experiences with speeding cars, women in distress, chiseled and oiled men doing something heroic or sexy and likely, explosions in one form or another.
While I only got to hold the Blockbuster experience for the first five years of my life, I still remember how it felt to walk in. You’d always enter unsure of what you were going to pick, walk out with a vague idea of what you did pick and hope that it was worth the $1.70 rental fee. Now and then, you’d hit gold. That’s how 76% of viewers and 95% of critics felt after watching “Speed,” 1994.
Available for rent and purchase on Amazon Prime Video and other movie rental services, “Speed” is an unapologetically fast-paced movie. The film follows a cop (Keanu Reeves) who gets trapped in a manipulative loop with a terrorist who wants $3.7 million for an uncompensated injury he acquired during his time as a bomb technician. Scored by Kiss, Billy Idol and The PlimSouls, the movie never really slows down with action beginning in the first two minutes of the film and continuing until the credits roll.
The terrorist, Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper) places a bomb under the bus that will activate once the driver goes above 50 mph and detonate once the driver goes under 50 mph; this is where most of the movie takes place. Many pedestrians are caught on this bus including the love interest, Annie, who is played by everybody’s love interest, Sandra Bullock.
If you’ve yet to see this movie that came out 30 years ago, don’t worry, you’re in good company. However, I highly recommend going over to Amazon Prime Video before finishing this piece. You’ll thank me later.
While Blockbuster was still around in my lifetime, I was vastly uninterested in any movies that didn’t have personified animals or consistent musical numbers to grab my short attention span. The point being: “Speed” was not on the setlist in my living room. I never got to experience picking out the VHS with a fire-lit cop and the burning bus behind him. I never got to be forced onto the edge of my seat for the hour and 55 minute run time, unsure if Sandra Bullock would make it to the day that she would inevitably fall in love with Keanu Reeves.
My experience viewing this movie for the first time last night certainly had similarities to the BlockBuster experience (name patent pending). I did rent this movie and will only be able to rewatch it for the next 24 hours before I have to rent it again. Similarities aside, some of the magic of what can only be achieved through the Blockbuster experience was certainly lost on me.
In an age where entertainment is about three clicks and some scrolls away, we’ve lost the art of anticipation. Immediate gratification has forced us into shorter attention spans and impatience which is more common than its counterpart. Though many people are more equipped to talk about the science of what fast-paced entertainment can do to the brain, I believe at this point it’s naive and unrealistic to think that college-age people don’t recognize that prolonged time on our phones isn’t doing us much good.
While yes, deciding to rent a movie, driving to the store, scanning through all of the movies, paying, driving home and finally putting in the movie to watch is a much longer process than opening the Netflix app and picking the first thing that looks mildly interesting, when did we decide that efficiency was the most important thing?
Being out in the car on the way to BlockBuster forced my four-year-old self to talk to my best friend’s mom, dad and siblings — something that isn’t necessitated when you hand a kid a remote. Renting DVDs forced me to practice decision-making and compromise with my older brother, as this movie we chose would be the only movie we would get to watch for the week. Going to BlockBuster and running up and down the aisles waiting for my mom to finally be done picking her movies forced us to look at movies we might not have otherwise been interested in. Furthermore, we had to read the backs of the movie cases to know what they were about since the small TV in the corner only played trailers for boring grown-up movies like, “Speed” (this of course is an opinion metaphorically posed by my small-brained four-year-old-self. Go watch the movie, seriously, you won’t regret it.)
I think that since we’ve begun to absorb the fast-paced content of TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest, we’ve started valuing efficiency above all else. In the movie, there are many moments where, while the bomb is still a clear threat, tension is lowered. I think this is because the directors knew that by going too quickly through the movie, viewers would likely leave uncomfortable and unhappy, even if the action was good. To create the best ending, the directors slowly built up anticipation. I think there is wisdom for everybody to be found in this director’s choice; even if a fast-paced and exciting life is good, you need to slow down now and then, or else you’ll likely walk away feeling uncomfortable and unhappy.
What we’ve lost is clear: an easy avenue to a slower way of life. Through the death of Blockbuster and many other tangible renting fronts, we’ve lost the art of anticipation. Like Keanu Reeves and the bus of screaming pedestrians, we can’t slow down.
