Twilights

By Stuart Klawans

This article appeared in the June 16, 2008 edition of The Nation.

May 29, 2008

Even though I'm five decades beyond the target audience, I submitted myself to Speed Racer. My kids are interested; and besides, the film's perpetrators cling to a respectable image, which they acquired with The Matrix. The writing-directing Wachowski brothers supposedly are innovators, iconoclasts, post-whatever-the-hell philosophers working in a medium of pop thrills. But who, other than the Platonic 9-year-old boy, is meant to go gai with the savoir of Speed Racer?

Which figure in this retooled version of a clunky old TV cartoon might represent the audience? I'd say the Wachowskis see us as the pet chimpanzee. What oppositional, anticorporate message is conveyed to us chittering apes? Win! Win all you can! And how does it feel to be the chimp, watching this nightmare of saturated primary colors? Save your money and find out at home. Have someone squirt ketchup and mustard into your eyes for two hours.

I detain you with this abuse of Speed Racer only because the picture so dismally exemplifies the tradition of filmmaking-by-condiment that long ago became standard in America whenever we head toward barbecue season. Steven Spielberg's Jaws first laid the hot dogs on the grill, according to all the conventional histories--and if you think of summer blockbusters primarily as marketing schemes, then the conventional histories are surely right. But if you also think of summer blockbusters as bearing a definable attitude toward their content and their audience, then the true precursor of Speed Racer did not appear until Star Wars.

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About Stuart Klawans

The Nation's film critic Stuart Klawans is author of the books Film Follies: The Cinema Out of Order (a finalist for the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Awards) and Left in the Dark: Film Reviews and Essays, 1988-2001. His film criticism and reviews for The Nation won the 2007 National Magazine Award. When not on deadline for The Nation, he contributes articles to the New York Times and other publications. more...
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