Point Break (1991)

After surfing all night on the pacific with buddhist surf-mystic Patrick Swayze and his gang of criminals, Keanu Reeves, floating on his board in the rolling waves, says (with classic Keanu emphasis): “I can’t describe what I’m feeling.” Lori Petty replies: “you don’t have to.” According to one mystical tradition these two statements are valid. On the one hand it seems obvious that the attempt to describe surfing on the ocean at night is not only unnecessary but also impossible; the experience is too large to stick into a paragraph (or a movie for that matter). Meanwhile and on the other hand the urge to describe what is otherwise indescribable is no doubt one of those fundamental dynamos that make the world; the transmission of raw human emotion across reams of spacetime is the magic stuff of literature itself. And yet—on the third hand—you may often experience strange and uncanny feeling (or feelings) that are beyond your ability to name, let alone consciously register; in the face of all the ongoing and ceaseless vicissitudes of this modern life (and their attendant emotional vertices), the existing symbolic remains totally inadequate. The story of Point Break, a (pretty dumb and very entertaining) action movie about a cop who quits law-enforcement because surfing, turns on this notion of the limit. Keanu’s mystical experience of the oceanic is the point at which his otherwise highly structured cop-viewpoint breaks down.