Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Only now does it occur to me... SPEED (1994)

Only now does it occur to me... that the SPEED franchise shares peculiar connections with the David Lynch universe. Now: to merely cite that it contains Dennis Hopper doing a poor man's Frank Booth from BLUE VELVET
 
is obviously not enough, because most post-1986 Hopper villains are some variation on "poor man's Frank Booth."


We could go the philosophical route and examine how Hopper's retired cop character is a corrupted, insane, dark-side-of-the-mirror version of Keanu Reeves' young, clean-cut, and aggressively Boy Scout-ish cop––in a similar way to how Hopper's and Kyle MacLachlan's characters mirror each other in BLUE VELVET... or we could point out Hopper's penchant in both instances for calling himself "Daddy":

...or the gruesome particulars of how each of these Hopper villains makes their exit:

"He lost his head."  –Keanu Reeves

Or we could consider the fact that SPEED 1 takes its villain from BLUE VELVET and that SPEED 2: CRUISE CONTROL casts Willem Dafoe as its baddie (who was the villain of Lynch's WILD AT HEART). Does this mean that if there ever were a third film, let's say, SPEED 3: FAST AND LOOSE, that the villain would have to be Robert Blake, portraying his character from LOST HIGHWAY?

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