Running with Thieves: Baby Driver and The Beat My Heart Skipped

Rhythms and movement are also embedded in the trajectories of individuals as they navigate complex networks of communication, production, and desire which often leave one at a formidable junction: of an epoch as defined through its prevalent symptoms, with the various ways in which individuals try to position themselves in relation to contemporary cultural demands, and the inalienable it, which is fidelity to one’s desire. Usually, it is burnt-out individuals who are supposed to be emblematic of the above encounter today, their compromised state marking the ferocity of the system and its impossible demands on subjectivity. The protagonists of Baby Driver (2017) and The Beat My Heart Skipped (2005), Baby and Thomas are not driven by any teleology or superegoic sense of injustice, theft, or enjoyment. They endure (in the psychoanalytic sense of the term) rather than suffer; they run along, ride along, and go through territories and boundaries in distinct trajectories of movement without much concern about agency or the law (symbolic law as well as the traditional separation of right from wrong). Drawing on the two films, this chapter explores how ordinary lives embrace speed and movement as (external) characteristics of a milieu or an assemblage in ways which chime with desire and singularity of being.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Movement, Velocity, and Rhythm from a Psychoanalytic Perspective: Variable Speed(s) on 21 Oct 2022, available online: https://www.routledge.com/9781032046396