The Cruise (Bennett Miller, 1998) - Some Post-viewing Prompts

[Steven Brence]

1. Speed Levitch suggests that fear is a “theme of all of our lives” and that a byproduct of this fear is creativity and radicalization. How could the latter be a byproduct of the former? How, and in what way, do his references to famous literary and political figures who lived (created, suffered, and/or died) in New York City provide evidence for such a relation? Should such a realization prompt a revaluation of fear?

2. Speed describes his “favorite victory” alternately as “sincerity” and as “the ability to feel”. Aren’t these just manners of acting that we simply need to take up in our lives, or capacities that we have? Is Speed right to suggest that they might be harder won than that? That is, are they really victories? If so, what must be defeated to secure them?

3. Speed holds a very dim view of what he calls “civilization”, describing it variously in his poem as an “amputation”, “suppression”, “molestation”, etc. What, then, does he mean when he suggests that civilization “knew who you were before you were ever born” and “forgave you when you thought you needed forgiving”?

4. Why does Speed hate the grid plan and assert that an inability to imagine changing it would render one unable to individuate oneself or to correct shortcomings and dysfunctions of the past? Most people probably do like the grid plan. Should they? It is convenient and orderly, but what might it (and the civilization of which it is a part) cost us? How might it undermine efforts at progress or change?

5. On the one hand, Speed suggests that, although wherever there is cruise there is an escort of anti-cruise, he is running, every day, from the anti-cruise and that every good day of his life is a day he evades it. On the other hand, he suggests that he is really cruising in so far as he is equally in love with that which is creative and that which is destructive in his life. Can these apparently contradictory claims be reconciled?

6. Speed regards the conventional signifier of success that his grandparents subscribe to, that is having an "occupation' (financial security and a social identity) as made up of merely bland and vague terms that they nevertheless experience as “the most concrete and absorbing goals a person could have”. How might one defend Speed’s view? Is the pursuit of an “occupation” just an abstraction that we have reified? What, might you imagine, would Speed regard as genuinely concrete? Doesn’t he suggest that, although it is everything he believes in, individuality is an illusion?

7. Compare Speed to the Character Maude in Hal Ashby's film "Harold and Maude". What do they have in common? What might Speed have to offer the character Enid in Terry Zwigoff's "Ghost World"? Could he provide her with the positive direction--a conception of an authentic life--that she lacked?