My Heart Is A Bus That Never Slows Down: Speed (Jan De Bont, 1994)

Clayface: Celebrity Dirt #2 is out now at comic shops and digital platforms. Issue #3 is coming on September 9.

In the meantime, you can pick up Be Not Afraid in collected edition; DILF in both book and smell form; and put in a pre-order for the collected edition of Dead Teenagers, due out October 6.

In the past month, I’ve tried to revisit the gay cinema of the ‘90s, particularly the movies I wasn’t allowed to watch, due to being a repressed Catholic teenager. However, I don’t want to give you the impression that I was deprived. This week, I want to address the gayest movie of the 1990s, which I did watch, many times, upon its release: New Queer Cinema classic Speed (1994), starring Keanu Reeves. 

It’s commonly believed that Speed is about a bus that cannot slow down. This is an example of how queer art can sometimes be impenetrable to cishet audiences. In fact, Speed is a movie about how you, the bookish young lad watching it at home, are sexually attracted to men, a gender shared by both you and the actor Keanu Reeves. 

Let’s examine some of the subtle homoerotic coding within this movie. 

1) There’s a part where Keanu Reeves looks like this: 

2) Keanu Reeves chews gum consistently for at least the first ten minutes of this movie. Discovering bombs, disarming bombs, engaging in banter with his partner about the discovery and disarming of bombs: In none of these scenarios does Keanu Reeves not chew gum, nor does Keanu Reeves run out of gum to chew. Every moment of action in this movie is accompanied by the hypnotic rippling and flexing of jaw muscles in the face of Keanu Reeves. This is foreshadowing that you, the viewer, are going to be attracted to men. 

3) There’s a part where Keanu Reeves looks like this: 

4) After disarming the bomb with his male partner, Keanu Reeves looks over and says “was it good for you?” “It was great for me,” his male partner affirms. This is a playful reference to the fact that two men can have sex together, and sometimes, one of those men is the actor Keanu Reeves. 

5) Dennis Hopper is in it. 

5a) Dennis Hopper yells “don’t fuck with Daddy” at the actor Keanu Reeves, for non-sexual reasons.

5b) Dennis Hopper’s first starring role was in the 1961 killer-mermaid movie Night Tide, an extremely unsubtle queer-coded film by the gay occultist-slash-filmmaker Curtis Harrington. In the 1961 movie Night Tide, Dennis Hopper looked like this: 

6) Keanu Reeves finds himself on a bus which must proceed forward, at a speed equal to or greater than 50 miles per hour. If the bus slows down, or stops, people will die. This is a metaphor for social progress, indicating that the bus is gay. 

7) There’s a part where Keanu Reeves looks like this: 

8) Keanu’s fellow police officers arrive to help the bus (gay bus) on a truck that says “OVERSIZE LOAD,” which feels suggestive. 

9) There’s a part where Keanu’s male partner dies, and Keanu deals with this by leaning forward and sort of manfully gripping the gay bus while grunting and making intense, pained faces, and this whole sequence — though you’re a pre-teen, at this point, and you’re not remotely ready for sex, and you won’t be for a long time, and you also have no idea what sex even looks like — instantly sets off some kind of structural change in your brain, so that you now know for a fact that sex is real, and you’re going to have it one day, and when you do, you’re going to have sex with men. 

9a) Your brain immediately course-corrects from this realization by deciding that you must instead be feeling intense compassion for the actor Keanu Reeves, whose gripping and moaning and jaw-clenching all indicate that he’s really sad. 

10) Anyway, there’s a part where Keanu Reeves has to go under the gay bus, and he stabs it with a screwdriver, and it spews, like, gas and motor oil all over him, and he’s already really sweaty, so at that point, Keanu has to strip down to his undershirt so that his wounds (all of which are on his biceps) can be appropriately tended, but no-one wipes off all the sweat and motor oil, and they also leave him in the undershirt for the rest of the movie, and that’s how you get to the part where Keanu Reeves looks like this. 

These are just a few incidences of the subtle queer coding in the 1994 action movie Speed, starring Keanu Reeves. Many great films were made, during the decade — both action movies, and, for that matter, movies about vehicles — but of all the action movies set on vehicles of the time period, this one was by far the most bussy. 

Goodnight! 

Speed (1994) is streaming on Netflix. This happens in it: