The Problems with Knowledge

Keanu Reeves in Speed

Chris Neumer watched Speed for the first time in twenty years and was amazed what gaining a knowledge of the Los Angeles area roadways did for his opinion of the movie. Sometimes knowledge isn’t power.

by Chris Neumer

I first saw Speed the weekend it opened in June of 1994.  It opened on June 10th and I saw it June 11th.  For reasons that both elude me and scare me, I know this information without looking it up.  I also know that the Spanish Armada was defeated on July 29th, 1588 and that Avogadro’s constant is 6.02 times 10 to the 23rd.  I could probably speak 15 languages fluently if I could just figure out how to remove these trivialities and others like them from my brain and replace them with knowledge that could actually help me in some capacity.  I’ve tried, I can’t find any possible scenario where it’s helpful to know that the Kansas City Royals’ shortshop Buddy Biancalana hit .188 in 1985.

After walking out of the theater showing Speed, I spent the next week irritating the hell out of my then girlfriend by constantly yelling, “My name is Jack Traven!  L.  A.  P.  D.” in my best Keanu Reeves voice.  It was a horrible imitation, as all my imitations are, but it was incredibly fun to say.  So I said it a lot.  I also worked the movie’s signature line ‘Pop quiz, hotshot…’ into just about every sentence I could, in response to anything.  It didn’t even have to make sense.  If my mom asked me to walk the dog, I’d answer, “Pop quiz, hotshot…”

I saw the movie a second time when it came out on video, but that was the last time I was part of the Speed universe.   I was 18 years old, in my sophomore year of college and had never traveled out of Chicago to go anywhere that wasn’t A) the family vacation spot in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, or B) some place I had relatives I was visiting.  If you could name a city, I hadn’t been there.  Big or small, east or west, warm or cold, I remained blissfully unaware of the local geography, practices or reputations of any areas outside of Chicago.  This meant one thing: I would believe anything presented about other cities that I saw on the big screen.

When I saw Seven, I didn’t think twice of the fact that it deluges throughout the entire movie despite the fact that LA gets, on average, about 18 inches of rain a year.  When I saw Con Air, I had no problem with the wet streets of Las Vegas gleaming brightly at night.  And, when I saw Speed, I didn’t have any issues with, well, any single point in the movie upon which the entire plot is based.

Then twenty years passed.

I was recently reflecting on my supremely annoying “My name is Jack Traven.  L.  A.  P. D.” period and for kicks decided to rewatch Speed.  I hadn’t seen it in twenty years and didn’t recall much about it other than enjoying it the first two times I saw it, the bits of dialogue I had seared into my memory by repeating ad nauseum years earlier and the fact that the bus couldn’t go below 50.*  I had so few actual memories of the movie, I was actually surprised when I saw Sandra Bullock come running onto screen.  I didn’t even remember that she played Annie, Traven’s soon-to-be love interest.  Lest we forget, there was a time when Bullock wasn’t an above the line talent.  Speed was the last film of this brief era; an era that also included The Vanishing, Wrestling Ernest Hemingway and Demolition Man.

* Whenever the plot of this movie is discussed, I instantly go back to :  Quoth Homer, “I saw this in a movie about a bus that had to speed around a city, keeping its speed over fifty, and if its speed dropped, it would explode. I think it was called, The Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down.”

The main plot of the film begins in earnest after Los Angeles SWAT team members, Traven (Keanu Reeves) and Harry Temple (Jeff Daniels), foil a mad bomber’s attempts to get money for releasing a dozen or so hostages he’s taken.  Several days later, Traven heads to a local Santa Monica coffee shop early in morning for coffee and muffins.  The mad bomber blows up a bus outside the coffee shop and tells Traven that there is another bomb on another bus; the second bomb will be activated once its bus hits 50 miles per hour and will detonate if the bus slows to under 50.  The mad bomber says, “It’s [bus] number 2525, running downtown to Venice.  It’s at the corner of Ocean Park and Main.  Should be heading onto the freeway right about now.”  Upon hearing this information, Traven starts sprinting towards his car and—

Wait, did the mad bomber just say that there was a bus that ran from Venice to downtown and that bus was in Santa Monica at present?  Indeed he did.  An express bus from Venice to downtown?  And that bus was filled with a construction worker, a tourist and a petty thief?  And that construction worker not only brought his tools on the bus, but wore his hard hat while sitting down?  And the tourist explained to anyone listening that he was a yokel who somehow managed to spend three hours getting from LAX to Venice despite the fact that the two locations are only about four miles from one another and he wasn’t robbed?  And, hold on, people actually talk to one another on public transportation?  And people actually take the bus anywhere in LA… and have reason to go downtown?  From Venice?

Sorry, yeah, I got distracted.

Upon hearing this information, Traven starts sprinting towards his car and driving frantically towards the bus to stop it before it hits 50.  He follows it onto the 10 Freeway and watches helplessly as the bus, yes, speeds by him.  It soon hits 50 in the breezy, open lanes of morning rush hour traffic on the 10.  Traven then does the only thing he can think of, he—

Wait, the bus got on an expressway in Los Angeles during daylight hours and managed to hit 50 miles an hour?  And it did this on the 10 during the morning work commute?  And it wasn’t even driving in the HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lanes?

A man has his breaking point and that was mine.  Not only was the bus going 50 on the 10 in rush hour, but it was doing this in a normal lane.  This would be fine if you’d never been in LA and had never driven on the 10 in the morning rush hour, but this is absolutely, positively not fine if you are even remotely familiar with Los Angeles traffic.  I mean, the only way it could have been worse was if they set the action on the 405.

How bad is traffic on the 10 and it’s Los Angeles tributaries?  They make up five of the ten most congested freeways in America, including numbers one and two on the list.  The 10 west is number seven and the 10 east is number six.  Traffic there is so bad, the most entertaining reading I’ve done in ages was on the 10’s Yelp page.  My three favorite statements on the 10’s Yelp page were this one from Justin Y.: My favorite freeway evvvvvver. No seriously….. I spend about 90% of my time on this freeway; and this one from James D.: Imagine that in some parallel universe a genocidal Walt Disney recreates the Bataan Death March in sunny California – the result would be the 10 freeway.  The crème de la crème of the bunch though was this review by Jennifer Y.  If you want to know how intensely people hate the 10, Jennifer Y. accurately captures the soul-crushing nature of traveling on a highway where your top speed comes when you hit 25 on the off ramps.  And this is the highway on which the bus in Speed hit 50 and then stayed at 50 for miles on end?

When I connected the dots on the (incredibly, incredibly fictional) driving locations of Speed’s bus, having it hit 50 seemed laughably false.  I began wondering what speed I would have believed a bus could have traveled at continuously on the 10 during morning rush hour.  40 seemed ridiculous too.  I thought about 30 for a minute before finally realizing that anything above 20 miles per hour was going to strain the limits of what I could accept.  When I was forced to drive on the 10 in morning traffic, I kept myself entertained by timing the length of the full and complete stops I would come to.  My record was a stop that lasted 2:18.  There were no accidents slowing things down, no stalled vehicles nor any lane closures, it was just traffic as usual on the 10.

Fortunately and intelligently, Traven gets the bus off the 10 as fast as he can, emulating the desires of just about everyone who has ever traveled on that highway and marking the first time in human history that the word ‘fast’ has ever appeared in the same sentence with mention of the 10 Freeway.

The movie progresses forward from there with Jack Traven, LAPD doing Jack Traven, LAPD like things.  In Speed’s final scene, having vanquished the bomber and saved the girl, Traven embraces Annie, relieved that his day from hell is finally over.  In the years to come, I’m sure Traven will look back at that day and marvel at all he accomplished.  He saved nearly two dozen hostages, caught the bad guy, managed to jump a bus over a 50-foot gap in a highway and serve as the engineer on a train that ended up traveling down Hollywood Boulevard.  Chances are good though that he won’t ever think twice about his most impressive achievement of the day: he was in a vehicle going 60 on the 10 Freeway during rush hour.  It took me twenty years to appreciate it.