Yeah okay I did not expect, upon rewatching this movie, to actually tear up

My previous defense of this movie is that it's an avant-garde tech demo, not a story -- but that IS the story

This movie is a story about the Wachowskis and filmmaking https://twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/1292692634541031426

It's a movie about itself

It's a movie about the Ws being stuck in this scummy business full of cynical con artists and trying to justify not giving up

The cheesy Act 1 framing device of Royalton trying to seduce Speed into selling out is the moral core of the movie

Which is why, compared to what another movie would've done with this framing device, it goes on so long and so deep

Letting Speed tell the long involved story about how he and Pops almost gave up on the whole business, until one night they watched a tape of the '43 Grand Prix

And they found themselves cheering and rooting for their guy and screaming at the finish as though they were watching it live and not history that happened decades ago

This flashback is shown to us with washed-out color, as though it were a black-and-white film

This is Lana and Lilly's story

When you get the shit beaten out of you, you go back to your happy place, the moment you fell in love

That moment when you were a teenager and you saw some old classic chestnut that's been done to death and it blew your fucking mind

"Is that ALLOWED? Can you DO that? A human being made something this FUCKING COOL? Is that something I could do someday?"

And Royalton systematically takes it apart

The race was fixed from the beginning, the best racer on that track had his car sabotaged and spun out in the first lap, the purpose of the race was just to manipulate the stock market and solidify one CEO's monopoly

This is something that could apply to any field kids dream about going into

But holy shit does it ever apply to the entertainment industry

Sports is full of fixing and rigging scandals but in entertainment it's not even actually against the rules

"This guy did it first, you've never heard of him, he crossed the wrong people and they fucked him hard -- never worked again"

"We all know the Academy was pulling hard to shut her out of Best Actress after all the toes she stepped on"

"He's a loser and a hack but he'll never lack for jobs, not with who his parents are"

"...Did you hear what he does to women in the industry? Well, don't go talking about it, you don't wanna make waves"

Story after story after story like this

It is cheesy, sure, but it sure as hell hits different after hearing Lana and Lilly talk about being basically shut out of the industry after Sense8 underperformed and Jupiter Ascending flopped

About all the doors suddenly getting slammed in their faces after Lana came out and they were no longer the geeky Golden Boys, the Wachowski Brothers, but the awkwardly phrase "The Wachowskis"

After they became controversial

Speed Racer IS THE MOVIE that was they were trying to get in the can while Buck Angel was blabbing to the tabloids about Lana screwing around with his wife and being a pervy crossdressing fetishist

She had this dark cloud hanging over her that the whole movie might fail, that her career might permanently come to an end -- that the world would reject her transition, the history books would be rewritten "LEGENDARY MATRIX CREATOR EXPOSED AS SEXUAL DEVIANT"

Royalton snarling with relish in Speed's face

"I'll tell you what's going to happen. You're going to march out of here all self-righteous and you're going to do everything in your power to prove what I've told you is a lie."

"But you won't. You won't win, you won't place, you won't even finish the race. You'll never win a race again, no matter what you do.

Because [Hollywood] isn't about [movies], and it isn't about [filmmakers]. It's about money, and it's about power."

(Lana's shockingly frank interview before Jupiter Ascending, seven years later in 2015

"We've never had a #1 box office hit since V for Vendetta. This is the last chance they're giving us to do so, and if we fail this time, I don't think we ever will again.")

It fucking hurts like hell to think about

I can only read this movie in that real-life context, that making this movie itself was an attempt to escape from all the bullshit, to make a movie that's about the love of making movies

Everything else -- money, fame, fans -- is bullshit, it's a distraction

The reward for making a movie is *getting to make a movie*

The reward for being a racecar driver is *they let you drive a fucking racecar*

The character's experience of driving the car and the creators' experience of actually making those scenes is one and the same

Marveling at the beauty of the technology, the power of it, the way the machine and the human controlling it harmonize with each other

Mom Racer's little speech that it's not about the trophies or the cash prizes or even keeping their business afloat

It's just about watching him race

"Like painting a picture, or playing music... the things you do that no one else can do... it's beautiful"

The Wachowskis, of course, were not literally attacked by ninja assassins and did not literally have mail bombs sent to them and their competitors in the film industry were not literally trying to run them off a cliff to their deaths

But in 2008 it sure must've felt like it

And that cheesy family adventure movie question -- "Why do you keep doing it if it just puts you and your family in danger? Why keep doing it if everyone's spreading lies about you and your fame turns to infamy? Why do it if you know they'll never let you win again?"

I'm pretty sure Lana has actually said in interviews the same line she gives Speed Racer here

"I have to [make movies]... It's the only thing I can do"

Everyone else sees this machine, this device, this tech, this hunk of metal, as a tool

It's a business -- it's for transporting people to and from work, it's for hauling cargo across the country, it's to provide customers for tourist traps and fast food restaurants

(It's to make commercials and trick people into buying shit

It's for putting in every corner of every public place to create a ubiquitous surveillance state and get people arrested

It's for making blurry selfies and sexting and other random social garbage)

You are one of the only ones, the lucky ones, who gets to use one of these things *just because it's cool*

Who gets to push it to the limit, to see how fucking cool it is, this miracle the eggheads invented and never understood when they did

The feeling of moving faster than any animal with legs has ever moved, the landscape turning into a colorful blur, the G-forces clutching your body like a fist, your eyes and hands and nerves becoming one with a steel beast with the power of five hundred fucking horses

Knowing how steadicam and greenscreen and VFX workstation fit together just like engine and transmission and wheels

Pointing and clicking and like magic here's a hail of gunfire, here's a fiery explosion, here's a majestic sunset and a moon that fills half the sky

I'm allowed to do anything, no speed limit, no red lights, no traffic laws of any kind

I get to go as hard as my skill and my tech and my courage can take me

I can film a flashback that takes place *during* the framing scene flashing back to it, literally overlapping each other through superposition

I can break the rules of cinematic space, I can have things and people my character imagines literally physically wander into frame

(Speed Racer walked where Sense8 ran here, and Rian Johnson, again, owes Lana and Lilly a cup of coffee)

I can use modern VFX to make "live-action" transitions -- wild whip-pans and absurdly long zooms -- only dreamt of in the tackiest Saturday morning cartoons

I can do anything I want, because for now I'm in the driver's seat, and even if tomorrow I wake up a bankrupt laughingstock, if the money men never let me touch the wheel again, right now I'm redlining the engine and I just broke the sound barrier and nothing can fucking stop me

("I don't -- I don't believe it! SPEED RACER IS DRIVING UP A SHEER CLIFF! THIS SHOULDN'T BE POSSIBLE!"

A moment that, as we say, addresses the audience on multiple levels)

In this appreciation thread I will add one more thing

I don't know if Lana Wachowski has an ADHD diagnosis, but this movie is an absolutely ADHD movie and I mean that in the best possible way

The movie makes that clear from the very first scene

It's literally little kid Speed Racer being unable to focus on his schoolwork, compulsively stimming, his mental landscape morphing into a racetrack

His teacher bringing in his parents for the concerned family meeting

When he's in that zone, when he's hyperfocused on getting to that finish line, everything makes sense, everything fits together, he's on top of every single thing he needs to know and he's fucking unstoppable

When he's not in the car and it's just him, he's helpless

(I think this is notable because it's a major shift from the original character, who was a stereotypical all-around awesome dude including being a straight-A student

This little detail feels... very real)

(Lana's interviews about her tough childhood, struggling with dysphoria and with just generally being a lonely nerd

Never feeling actually present in the world around her, throwing herself into theatre and movies hoping they could teach her to really *be*)

The message of this movie, corny as it is, is this message about eudaimonia, about what it means to really succeed in life, as a human being

That the purpose of art isn't to make money or to earn fans or get laid -- it's not even to make the world a better place and fix society

Speed gets all of those things in the end -- even changing the world and fixing society, thanks to the hilariously unapologetic way this world is built completely around Racecars Are Serious Business ("The world economy rests on the outcome of a children's card game")

But that's not the reason to do it

The reason to put the bad guys in prison and to usher in a new era of freedom and prosperity is... he gets to keep on driving

The reason to make a movie you hope will save the world is so there will be a world where you can make more movies

The point of being alive is to have that one thing you're damn good at that no one else can do quite the same way you can, and to fucking NAIL IT and know that in that moment YOU ARE AWESOME

And to look at your loved ones and see that joy reflected between you and them

(As @FilmCritHulk points out one of the ways this movie nails it, where a wussier movie would just be schmaltz, is the unapologetic use of quick cuts and sensory overload

We fully see his victory in the rapid-fire succession of everyone else reaction to it)

(The whole story is told this way -- nothing stays in one place as long as it should, it meanders, it wanders, it jumps back and forth through time and space, things overlap and carry over from scene to scene

Talking and talking in one long string without punctuation marks)

(They diagnose minds like this as broken

Always moving *too fast*, speeding toward the horizon, that moves on four wheels and not two legs, that can't change direction without accelerating, that needs to travel down an open road without obstacles or it will shudder to a halt)

(And in a world without roads, it would be

A racecar trying to go where a racecar can't -- trying to hike through the woods like an animal bred for the rough terrain of nature -- is a sad, useless, expensive hunk of metal)

(But maybe, just maybe

If you can, somehow, scrape together the seed capital

Give that car a pit crew, fill up its tires and its gas tank, clear a path for it down the smoothly paved track a racecar needs

And watch it do the things ONLY a racecar can do

Watch it fucking GO)

This movie is a pretty great demonstration of "show, don't tell" and the power of form over content in cinema

Talking about it at all in words sounds schmaltzy

But the movie works because it is, in every way, in every shot and every cut and every frame, a demonstration

Like, maybe it's my meta knowledge of the Wachowskis' struggles in Hollywood

Or maybe it's how the years since 2008 have gone for me, personally

A lot of harsh lessons, about talent, and success, and neurodivergence

But when Speed crosses the finish line I was fucking bawling