Hi Octane: Sofia Coppola’s starry 90s series feels like a gen X fever dream
Sofia Coppola has always lived in the kind of cool girluniverse where popular culture records your youth for you. Her “awkward” years were captured when she appeared in Sonic Youth’s 1991 music video Mildred Pierce. Her early interest in fashion was immortalised through her cult clothing line Milk Fed. Her ideas about girlhood were explored in films like Lick the Star and The Virgin Suicides. Even the demise of her young marriage to Spike Jonze resulted in the Oscar-winning Lost in Translation.
Or take Hi Octane, her short-lived, star-studded Comedy Central series created with her pal Zoe Cassavetes in 1994. In the arms of any other early twentysomething, that description could sound nightmarish. But like so much of the director’s later work, subjects that should be gnawing (the inner lives of the rich, beautiful and bored) are totally hypnotic.
To be fair,the show’s watchability is hugely inflated by Coppola’s network of 90s alternative-It Girls. The hosts, Coppola
and Cassavetes, get in trouble for goofing off at Monster Truck school before pulling over to offer Keanu Reeves roadside assistance. The model
Jenny Shimizu provides mechanic tips (and hints at a previous three-way with Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista). Andre Leon Talley and Beck ponder the mechanics of sex in a car. In another backseat, Good Will Hunting and My Private Idaho director Gus Van Sant predicts the rise of mobile phone cameras.
Off road – and in an alley behind his apartment – Thurston Moore hosts an appropriately named regular segment called “Thurston’s Alley”, where he interviews the likes of Johnny Ramone, Sylvia Miles and Anna Wintour (although she makes him come to her office). Rumour has it Liv Tyler’s appearance was cut. It all feels like a gen X fever dream.
Occasionally, Hi Octane does falter. Watching someone else’s cool friends goof off can get old – even when the cool friends are the Beastie Boys. But most of the time, the format is addictive.
A cynic might say any rich, pretty, popular girl in a 1960s Pontiac could make something similarly appealing – Coppola’s dad did produce it. But amid the chaos there are glimmers of Coppola’s talents and signatures. Her impeccable taste is signalled with a cameo from a pre-Kids Chloë Sevigny at an X-Girl fashion show she produces. Hyper-femme aesthetics are explored
and teased through Chanel-clad alter egos. At one point, Karl Lagerfeld tells her to enunciate.
At the time of production she was five years away from her directorial debut with The Virgin Suicides but her preoccupation with nostalgia, sex and fame are already clear – as is her unique view into the intimate and casual lives of famous people. It’s not hard to see the warped perspective of The Bling Ring or Marie Antoinette as Debbie Harry gazes at a portrait of herself escaping a (real-life) brush with Ted
Bundy.
And despite her infamous early foray into acting, Coppola herself shines. Watching her awkwardly attempt to play bass or mug for a fisheye lens,there’s little confusion as to how she became a mainstay of Pinterest boards the world over.
Last year Coppola took back the role of record keeper from her many admirers with the publication of her book, Archive. After a career fascinated with other people’s pasts, the book offered an intimate glimpse into her own. Hopefully the trip down memory lane was rewarding enough to inspire plans for Hi Octane season two.
Hi Octane is available to watch on YouTube. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
pattern that causes sea temperatures to rise in the Pacific, affecting weather worldwide, and the climate crisis for creating the conditions in which fires can spread uncontrolled.
Raúl Cordero, a climate scientist at the University of Santiago, Chile, and the University of Groningen, says both played a major role in recent blazes. “The concurrence of El Niño and climate-fuelled heatwaves boosted the local fire risk and decisively contributed to the intense fire activity.”
Francisco de la Barrera, an associate professor at the University of Concepción, says the climate crisis is a “big part of the equation”, causing a long-term drought across the region and increasing the risk of fast-spreading fires. “I think we are in a new era of megafires that we have not seen before,” he says.
The Chilean environment minister, Maisa Rojas, says the climate crisis contributes to these events becoming “more frequent and stronger”. “Climate change is not a problem of the future,” she says. “It is a concern of today. We are already experiencing the effects of this phenomenon.”
Other local conditions also play a role. The area devastated by fire in Chile this week has huge, densely populated forests made up of non-native trees grown for the timber trade. This allowed the fire to spread quickly, De la Barrera says.
Governments have increased funding for fire prevention and response – but some critics argue that more must be done to prevent fires starting.
***
South American countries have introduced new measures and passed environmental laws to prevent wildfires. However, critics argue that implementation has sometimes been patchy. Chile, for example, was already investing £80m a year in firefighting but extended this by a further £40m after last year’s deadly fires.
Despite this, the events of the past few weeks show that funding is not enough, according to some experts. “Resources alone do not determine outcomes,” Cordero says. Despite an early warning system, he says some residents ignored an evacuation order because of concerns for the security of their homes. “Some people feared the thieves more than the fires,” he says.
Estefanía González, the deputy director of Greenpeace Chile, says that a proposed law restricting land-use change in areas affected by fires has failed to advance. The most significant danger, she says, is in areas where humans coexist with combustible plant species, regions that are “not considered in Chile’s land-use planning policies”.
“We still do not have regulations that include the risk of fire in the designs for construction or construction of buildings,” she says.
Rojas highlights some of the government’s work in protection against fires and points out that the number of fires has decreased compared with the previous year.
“However, it has affected urban areas, generating a very important impact on people and their homes,” she says. “The government is acting quickly and in a coordinated manner to continue fighting the fires and to deliver the necessary aid to the people.”
In Argentina, successive governments have passed environmental legislation – including a general environment law and laws to protect forests and glaciers – but regional authorities have not universally adopted them.
Ana Di Pangracio, the biodiversity director at the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation in Argentina, says that while recent funding increases have been welcome, some regions have not properly implemented fire-management protocols, meaning in some cases it is not clear to which authority central government is supposed to distribute funds.
“It’s not only about money,” she says. “We need a paradigm shift when it comes to fires. We must go from a warlike emergency approach to a more preventive management. If we don’t do that, we will always run behind the fires.”
The government needs to warn people to act more responsibly, such as not lighting fires during a drought, but also to support other preventive approaches, she says.
Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei, has also been trying to strip back some environmental protections.
Di Pangracio says: “In South America,
fires have become really severe and problematic. Of course, climate change is not helping at all with that because we know it makes natural processes like flooding or droughts even more extreme.
“It is even more worrying when you have a president that claims not to believe in climate change.”
Climate change is not a problem of the future. It is a concern of today. We are already experiencing the effects of this phenomenon
Maisa Rojas
answer lies mostly with bigger vehicles such as buses and lorries.
Liebreich said he was convinced that batteries would still dominate energy supply for heavy goods vehicles – to the point of co-founding a lorry charging company. “There might be some hydrogen in HGVs but it will be the minority,” he said.
Even Toyota acknowledges that hydrogen in cars has so far “not been successful”, mainly because of the lack of fuel supply, according to its technical chief, Hiroki Nakajima, speaking to Autocar in October. Lorries and long-distance buses offer a better hope for the technology, although it is also prototyping a hydrogen version of its Hilux pickup truck.
The verdict
The economics of hydrogen will change as governments’ enthusiasms wax or wane. Other things could change: technology could improve (within limits) and make the gas more attractive, and prospectors may be able to find cheaper “white hydrogen” drilled from the ground.
Yet for cars the die appears to be cast: batteries are already the post-petrol choice for almost every manufacturer. In the UK there have been fewer than 300 sales of hydrogen vehicles over 20 years, compared with 1m electric cars, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.
Batteries’ domination is likely to be extended as the money pouring into research and infrastructure addresses questions of range and charging times. Compared with that flood of investment, hydrogen is a trickle.
Hydrogen’s advocates now face the question of whether they can build profitable businesses in longer-distance, heavy-duty road transport. They need an answer soon on where they will source enough green, cheap hydrogen – and whether the gas would be better used elsewhere.
Many energy experts do not share the enthusiasm of the hydrogen carmakers