The Fast and the Curious
Police chases are a common form of entertainment in Los Angeles, and if you live here long enough, you'll witness one!
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Shit gets cinematic the moment I exit the dispensary. Police sirens. Helicopters. Shouting.
I haven’t done anything wrong, but I freeze. My knees go weak and turn to jelly. Paranoia envelops me. We legalized weed, didn’t we? Yes, of course we did. Along with a majority of Californians, I voted to legalize it, despite misgivings about the law’s half-baked social justice provisions. Still, old fears die hard for this middle-aged stoner. And for a moment, I worry that the fuzz is closing in, that they’ll “hippie profile” me because I bear a passing resemblance to Jerry Garcia, and that after the fuzz busts me, they’ll seize my organic vegan gummies!
“Chase! Chase! It’s a chase!”
The man shouting wears a mask with a pineapple print pattern. He points to the sky. Two police helicopters make tight circles above us. They’re low in the sky. Really low. I don’t know much about aerial surveillance, but I grasp two things:
We’re in the center of the action.
That’s exactly where Mr. Pineapple wants to be.
I take a few steps away from Mr. Pineapple and head toward the security guard.
“What do we do?” I ask.
The security guard wears a bullet proof vest and a gun on his hip. His mask is a black neck gaiter. Even though he guards a dispensary that looks like an Apple Store, he looks like a character out of the Call of Duty video game franchise.
“Should we run and hide?” I ask the security guard.
The security guard just shrugs.
I look over at Mr. Pineapple. He’s filming the police helicopters. He’s narrating the action too. Another iPhone auteur.
“A real live Los Angeles car chase…”
A real live Los Angeles car chase? As a native Angeleno, I’m familiar with this local genre. You might call it our civic pastime. Everyone knows about OJ and his white Ford Bronco, but the genre is so popular that it doesn’t need a celebrity guest star. The minimum basic tropes are as follows: a suspect in a car, police pursuit, and a news chopper to cover it live. As for the audience, we tune in for a variety of reasons:
We want to see the police get their man (it’s usually a man).
We have a thing for villains, and so we root for the suspect to escape the long arm of the law.
We’re too drunk / stoned / lazy / sleepy to change the channel.
We watch car chases as wish fulfillment because LA traffic is terrible and the fantasy of cutting loose is real.
We’re amateur media critics who never miss an opportunity for commentary.
No matter our motives for watching this bizarre only-in-LA genre of entertainment, you’re supposed to watch from the safety and comfort of your couch. At least, that’s always been my policy. But now that I’m smack dab in the middle of the story (cast in the role of bystander), my feelings about the genre are mixed. On the one hand, safety first. On the other hand, HOLY SHIT!
“Look at the news choppers,” Mr. Pineapple says. “They’re hovering above the police choppers. We must be on TV!”
My god, he’s right. Those two little dots high in the sky are news choppers. We are on TV. Should I wave? No, that’s too cliche. Besides, why should I squander this earned media opportunity? Briefly, I consider asking my fellow stoners to lay down in the parking lot and spell out: SITUATION NORMAL. But there are only six or seven people present, not nearly enough for the kind of promotional stunt I have in mind.
“Holy shit!” someone shouts, “they’re coming this way!”
They’re coming this way! We better act fast. Andy Warhol was right. You only get 15 minutes, and sometimes that 15 minutes is actually 15 seconds, and it zips by you in the form of a high-speed chase.
“There!” another bystander shouts.
The sirens grow louder. Mr. Pineapple pans his camera down toward the street behind me. I’m in the shot. Do I plug my Substack, or my novel? Think fast, damn it.
“Move,” Mr. Pineapple says.
I know how to take direction, so I step aside.
Suddenly, the crowd cheers. At first, I don’t know why everyone is cheering, but then I see a grey car race by. The stoners are Team Suspect. Or, maybe they’re Team Wish Fulfillment; we fought traffic to get here, and we’ll fight traffic to get home too.
A second later, three LAPD cruisers speed down the street. Nobody cheers. Well, that settles that. We’re not Team Long Arm of the Law. But to be fair, there was a time, not too long ago, when Team Stoner was called Team Suspect, so maybe old rivalries linger, even if Team Stoner now plays for Team Bystander.
Just then, we hear the screeching sound of rubber tires breaking hard on concrete. Mr. Pineapple runs toward the action. To his credit, Mr. Pineapple keeps the camera rolling, but without a steady-cam rig on his iPhone, I doubt the footage will make it into the final cut.
“It’s over,” Mr. Pineapple yells. “They got him!”
But Mr. Pineapple doesn’t yell cut. He keeps shooting and saying, they got him, they got him! Hopefully, Mr. Pineapple will add better dialogue in post-production. Something like: he ran, they chased, I made a cinéma vérité TikTok.
“That was awesome,” the security guard beams, “just like on TV, huh?”
But I don’t know about that. On TV, they tell you the make and model of the vehicle, they share information about the suspect, and the “eye in the sky” provides running commentary of each beat of the chase. Plus, if the chase lasts long enough, the TV news puts their law enforcement analyst on so they can talk about tactics like the “PIT maneuver.” Above all, the news delivers what audiences really want—resolution.
Did we get resolution on the set of Mr. Pineapple’s production (working title: The Fast & The Curious)? In a technical sense, I suppose we did. But wasn’t the story muddled, chaotic, and riddled with tropes? Where was the character development? The theme? And what are we to make of the location’s connection to the narrative? Was Mr. Pineapple trying to say something about the arbitrary nature of crime by juxtaposing a legal cannabis business with car chase and an overly militarized police pursuit? And then there’s the guard. We clocked his gun in act one, but was that gun fired in act three? Mr. Pineapple should brush up on his Chekov.
This critic says puff, puff pass on this shaggy dog story.
