Situationism leading to a story?
1. Although I own a car, I hate driving.
2. Although I hate driving, I love car-chase movies.
3. Because I hate driving, I walked to see a car-chase movie.
4. Because I walked home from a car-chase movie...
... I got to thinking: shouldn't it be Tokyo Dérive? In 1996, Kristin Ross wrote Fast Cars, Clean Bodies (MIT Press), a scopic-academic-intricate study of the automobile and its accelerating effects on the modernization of post-war French social, capital and cultural life. And not-so-unlike the idle physics of the flaneur (ie: Baudelaire's magic-dynamic wandering, Freud's clinamen, Benjamin's modern tourism, Debord's detournement), The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift, while vernacularizing a fancy street-racing term for what amounts to a controlled skid, also offers up an unpredictable swerve of attention towards not just the psychogeography of Tokyo (as vertically oriented, with cars sidewinding up spiral parkades and down pastoral hills); nor even the too-easy simultaneity of Japan's own modernity with the auto industry; but rather on how the proportions of french theory goes: a) global; and b) commercial.
Thus, from 18th Century Paris to 21st Century Japan, and a meandering line of thought that, by definition of the dérive, comprises the oblique trajectory of "another path". And it is the allotrion of "another path" that declinates the discourse of the flaneur towards the unpredictable vista of international speed-racing. What started with Baudelaire, the inspiration of the city and "the great medley of their interrelations" ambles slowly/progressively/furtively towards TFATF:TD's Hollywood automated view of the city-as-spectacle. In other words, a walk becomes a drive; all the while proving Debord's adage that popular culture will eventually/inevitably/always repurpose theoretical material as latent forms of capital.
