Guy attempts to collect every single VHS copy of ‘Speed’ in existence

Facebook / eBay

 

Meet Ryan Beitz — a guy with a serious need for speed.

It’s not the high horsepower, wind in your hair type of speed he craves. It’s the movie Speed on VHS.

What started off as a joke during the holidays has turned into an obsession, a Kickstarter campaign and a cross-country journey to collect every single VHS copy of the movie that made Sandra Bullock a household name.

Beitz is embarking on The World Speed Project — here’s more from the official Facebook page.

Our mission really is a simple one: Every copy of Speed on VHS. However, this should not be understood as some form of hoard-mongering. Rather, The World Speed Project is something more like an exercise in what Sigmund Freud referred to as “The Repetition Compulsion” or the “unconscious compulsion to repeat”.

Seen in this light, the practice is something impulsive, not-to-be-reflected-upon, because, as is also a common criticism of psychoanalytic practice and theory, to forever spend your life examining our own unconscious compulsion is to leave yourself without an existential grounding from which to operate in the world. Or perhaps, to be fair, we might say that there is a grounding, but one purely predicated upon questioning. This questioning, sometimes referred to as the “examined life”, may have its use in the right area of application, but the World Speed Project moves toward the future unapologetically, unabashed, unwavering in its commitment to a goal compulsively conceived in the winter of 2007-2008.

It is an existential projection, a fantasy in imaginary terms, never to be questioned.

With these words, we already border on crossing a threshold of intellectual reflection that threatens the radically UNreflective grounds of the project. Onward.

Good luck, wildcat.

Chris Illuminati avatar
Chris Illuminati is a 5-time published author and recovering a**hole who writes about running, parenting, and professional wrestling.