Liquid Modern Fantasies of High-Speed Rail
Culture and languages
Guest lecture by Johannes Riquet, Professor of English Literature at Tampere University, Finland.
Lecture
Guest lecture by Johannes Riquet, Professor of English Literature at Tampere University, Finland.
This talk examines cinematic representations of high-speed trains as literal and metaphorical vehicles of what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘liquid’ or ‘light’ modernity. If the nineteenth-century steam train epitomised ‘heavy’ or ‘solid’ modernity’s focus on bulky machineries and the conquest of territory, the smooth, simple, and silent aesthetics of the high-speed train (see Revill 2012, 249) suits the flexible, invisible, and extraterritorial socio-economic structures of light modernity and contemporary consumer society. I will examine liquid modern fantasies of high-speed rail in three filmic and cultural contexts: the high-speed train as a troubled image of European integration in SAS: Red Notice (Magnus Martens, UK, 2021), the fictionalisation of the Japanese Shinkansen as a vehicle of techno-orientalist fantasies in Bullet Train (David Leitch, USA, 2022), and the critical interrogation of the debate about American high-speed rail in the Canadian TV series Departure (2019–2022).