Thoughts Had While Watching the Entire Fast & Furious Franchise Against My Will

Sep 17

“Finally,” Nico, my partner, said when I told him my editors were requesting I watch the entire Fast & Furious franchise. “Finally, you'll be writing about culture.”

I only agreed to my editors' suggestion because I'm trying to figure out how we got here, with three or four active intellectual properties — the MCU, Justice League, Star Wars, and Fast & Furious — being stretched out into endless sequels, spin-offs, and “in the universe” side projects. Every story can be told, as long as it can be crammed into one of these already existing worlds. I want to know when this is going to end, because I do not like it.

The Fast and the Furious franchise has lasted for about as long as America's Forever War. With the first in the series opening a few months before 9/11, it ushered in the strange, garish first decade of the millennium. It was a time of mass shootings, Paris Hilton, boys playing games that looked like war on their consoles and soldiers waging war that looked like video games from drone centers. It was both nu metal and boy bands, although the rock stars came from inherited wealth and the corporate shills singing pop songs crafted by committee came from towns with boarded-up main streets. Everything was synthetic, from our weaves to our lucite heels to our justifications for waging wars on multiple fronts.

It was supposed to balance itself out. The auteur 70s were followed by the blockbuster 80s were followed by the Miramax 90s were followed by the Fast & Furious 00s. Something was supposed to happen in the 10s, but it just continued being a comic book universe instead, and it looks like the 20s are going to be even worse. It wasn't like millions of people were suddenly up for sad, soft French films or black and white intellectual queries about the meaning of life. The majority of filmgoers still wanted things to blow up. But the attention, the media focus, some of the money, the awards, the acclaim, the freedom went to the critical darlings and their work was allowed and supported. Now Chloé Zhao, the minute she gets an Oscar for her middling but promising explorations of the concept of freedom as expressed in the American West, turns around and signs on for a Marvel film. Zack Snyder is our new idea of an auteur. Greta Gerwig is doing a Barbie movie. I didn't even like anything Greta Gerwig has ever done, but now I am thinking, come back to us, Greta Gerwig.

Still. The Fast and the Furious — Still. *The Fast and the Furious*

Where are we on the cultural assessment of The Fast and the Furious films, I am so out of the loop. For a while they were Problematic because of the women in the tiny shorts and the women in the tiny bikini tops and the women in the Barbie car or whatever. Then they were regarded as trash because there is not a single beautiful moment in the whole series, and the first one is put together like a low budget early 90s music video filmed by someone's cousin in a suburban backyard. And for a while it was easy to score a laugh by pointing out how dumb and bad and ugly this all is, all of it, everything happening on the screen is visually repulsive, but then all of a sudden it was decided that you should Let People Enjoy Things, criticism based on any aesthetic or technical or narrative basis was bad now. You can only hate comic book films because they are funded by the Department of Defense and create a fascist vision of the future under American Imperialism or something, not because it looks like garbage and all of the jokes are bad.

So then the only acceptable opinion you could have about F&F is that it's good, it's about friends hanging out and doing crimes (or stopping crimes, the division between when these guys are cops and when they are robbers is confusing), and Vin Diesel is a national treasure or whatever. And of course having the big star die gave it a protective sheen, as now it is a literal depiction of lives that are lived too fast, too furiously, beauty is fleeting and all of that. Also I think there's something class-based here, like criticizing how this huge series that makes billions of dollars is hurting our working classes and diminishing their already limited cinematic representation. I think Vin Diesel owns a castle at this point, but sure.

My editor Allison Hewitt Ward at this point would like to note that part of the appeal is that these “uncredentialed working class dudes (and occasional girl)... get to repeatedly save the world. It's like Cinderella for dudebros. I feel a little better about this kind of working class representation than I do about the kind of poor America indie porn movies that were big in the aughts.” I think this is insightful and right. But this makes the trajectory of the films so much more disappointing to me. Because it’s never enough for American dudebros to run around their own country doing and solving crimes, eventually they will get bored and want to go abroad and destroy things there, too. Blow up their buildings, crash their cars, kill their citizens, bring their troubles and make them the troubles of the poor people of the United Arab Emirates, Brazil, Japan. I don’t deny the thrill it must bring to imagine multiple governments standing at your door, begging for your help because you got really good at one thing that you love doing the most (driving), but I find the destructive impulses that accompany all of this repulsive. It’s so deeply American, we want the whole world to fall apart so we can smugly agree to step in and save it through violence and spectacle and then enjoy the spoils by stealing whatever we can in the process.

I do not like driving, so having feelings about the cars paraded out on screen, their specific attributes and customized parts and specialized language, would be a bit like truly caring about having the right blender. I not only do not have feelings like this, I simply can't imagine being the type of person who would. I'm immune to the car ASMR, the thud of the gear shift, the roar of the engine, the squeal of tires that makes up 80% of the soundscape of these films.

This is the ideal form of culture, a never ending narrative that can be plunged (or dipped) into and exited ten minutes, ten hours, two days later. There's no story, just a series of repeated gestures (the manipulation of the phallic gear shift, the squinty glance into the rearview), and a jumbled language of “bros” and “boys” that defies all meaning. Heists, races, transport, they all look the same and sound the same, immersed in the too-loud growls of the engine and exactly three facial expressions: glee, concern, fight. It’s pretty homoerotic, but not in a way that is truly interesting. Men jerking off their cars, men staring deeply into each other’s eyes. But look, we’ve had centuries of trying to see queerness where there is no real queerness out of desperation and deprivation, I can just go to Pornhub and watch some men fuck one another without having to do all of the imaginatory labor.

This is what all entertainment is these days, just a few stock characters onto which every feeling can be projected and through whom every story can be told. There's the ex-con, the cop, the other cop, the pretty girl, the tough girl. But instead of having the courage of something like the original The Taking of Pelham 123, where the characters are credited as THE HOMOSEXUAL, THE SPANISH WOMAN, and THE ALCOHOLIC, the writers pretend like these people have characteristics and back stories and nuance. Just label the women by what skin they are showing — SIDE BOOB, UNDER BOOB, BOTTOM CHEEK — and where the camera is placed to make sure we get plenty of it in our faces and call it a day.

So no wonder they have an amnesia storyline that pops up out of nowhere. You tell one story long enough, someone has to get amnesia at some point to keep people interested. The soap opera might be the greatest influence on our entertainment properties in contemporary culture, because that structure of thirty years of stories all happening in the same hospital tells us how to maintain so many stories told in the same Star Wars galaxy. So characters die and come back. Characters get amnesia, go from bad to good and back again, characters have mysterious brothers, cousins, friends that suddenly show up demanding revenge for something that happened three properties ago.

Still. Fast & Furious 6 — Still. *Fast & Furious 6*

They should have a Fast & Furious streaming channel. One wants to be immersed, one wants to dissolve oneself in the acid green of the fuel injector animation. Like how Disney+ is just everything Marvel and everything Star Wars, and every time one Marvel show ends another one begins, so you never have to log off. But the F&F properties are scattered. There are a couple on HBOMax, a couple on Peacock, some on Fubo. Some you have to pay for, others come free. Then there are the off-shoots, the side properties, the works that have the same actors and feel like part of the universe but are supposedly independent and unrelated. I am remembering a joke the Rock makes about how much he can eat, but is that from this Fast & Furious movie, another Fast & Furious movie, or another movie that is basically Fast & Furious because it's all cars and guns and heists but is, I guess, different. It doesn't matter. You could make a whole channel of this, you wouldn't even have to play the films in order, or even the films in their entirety. The whole thing feels like a montage, all narrative lost in chaotic editing and camera work that is made intentionally shaky not to increase the tension and drama but so you won't notice how the punches are not really landing on bodies and the CGI is not very high quality. You could just remix the whole thing, cut it into one long uber-film and loop it into infinity. Viewers would have to surrender all hopes of meaning or orientation and surrender into the experience of never ending acceleration, use it to transcend space and time.

When I start the second film, after the first scene, I ask Nico, “Haven't I seen this one?” But no, I have not, and the only reason I think I do is because it is built to remind me of other things. Better things. It's all formula, it's all written by committee, it's all joyless mechanical stimulation of the human nervous system and its endorphin production, everything looks like everything else.

But you can tell when the money came in and the budgets got bigger. The stunts start to look like stunts, not just CGI cars on fire spinning through the air as our hero punches on the accelerator and evades the ever-inevitable approaching spin out and crash. But the money doesn't help. It just makes the films look more expensive, not better. The filmmakers do not demonstrate any love or real knowledge of the medium. It looks cobbled together from beer commercials, GoPro videos on YouTube of daredevil stunts, and reaction GIFs. They refer to Pablo Escobar at one point as a heroin smuggler, which leads me to believe they haven't even seen Scarface. But definitely the three second clip of “say hello to my little friend,” probably played on a loop.

Still. The Fate of the Furious — Still. *The Fate of the Furious*

I try to fight off this demand these films have that I submit and surrender by attempting to intellectualize what I am seeing, but the series resists all intellectual entry points. I am constructing a theory in my head about why someone would want to film an expensive car crashing through the air into two skyscrapers in Abu Dhabi as a form of revenge, a visual rhyme to watching planes flown by Middle Eastern terrorists into the World Trade Center, but I realize this is the moment I have fully lost my mind. There's nothing to do with these films, there's nowhere to take the information you've just absorbed. Thinking is a mistake. But it is nice that Jason Statham shows up halfway through the series, he understands how to take up space on the screen as something other than a hulking menace.

That said, someone has to have written a thesis on the spectacle of waste in these films. Wasted fuel, crashed cars, the glamour of shattering glass and collapsing buildings. Other cars, and one assumes drivers, are annihilated for entertainment, just so we can get another smash sound on the soundtrack.

Fast & Furious in Brazil was a lot like when Sex and the City went to Dubai. They are trying to say something, but what? God, these screenwriters love the word “favela,” it is their favorite. It must make them feel so authentic, portraying the real poverty of Brazil on screen as the backdrop to watching the famous and wealthy run around pretending like they are hitting one another.

This is making me miss Tom Cruise. At least if you see a movie with Tom Cruise in it and the Tom Cruise character drops out of a plane at the edges of space and falls to the earth in some cool suit, you know it is Tom Cruise in that cool suit. Everyone's faces here are a little blurry, the stunt doubles are risking their lives so Ludacris doesn't get a hangnail. But everything is a little blurry. They CGI-ed Paul Walker's face onto someone else's body to finish the film they were shooting when he died, but it looks very silly, like they replaced someone's head with a Ken doll and expected people not to notice. It's silly, and yet I'm told by my neighbor that when she saw it in the theater people were weeping. I try to understand why. There's something about the flatness of all of this that allows the viewer to project anything they want onto the characters. This blond... guy, he can be a stand-in for your brother, your father, your friend, your ex, simply because he has no distinguishing characteristics. I think of the Bo Burnham joke about Justin Bieber being as vague as possible about the woman he loves in his songs so all girls can imagine he's singing about them. “You have arms on either side of your torso” and all of that.

Still. Fast and Furious 9 — Still. *Fast and Furious 9*

The movies keep getting longer and longer. I didn't even notice that I accidentally rented the “extended” version, with footage not shown in the original theatrical release, time no longer has any meaning. The longer the films go on, the more pandering they have to do to keep the audience hooked. The eighth one in this series made more than a billion dollars, so they're not really working on audience growth anymore but retention. So every other line is an inside joke or callback to a previous film that will spark some sort of feeling in the viewer that yes, you recognize that reference, you are an insider, you are wanted, you are invested. Look at all of this time you have spent, devoted to these imaginary relationships, living in a made-up world, what's a little more? A new property with new characters, it can't possibly be as satisfying as sitting down to a new version of this old story. You don't even have to think to orient yourself within it, just lie back and consume.

It all begins to feel like an elaborate trap. All of our imaginative powers are being funneled into a handful of corporate properties, and we create fan art, alternative theories, and inclusive fantasies about these properties rather than acknowledge there is the possibility for something outside of them. If I don’t see myself represented in the franchise, I can write an alternative version of the franchise, even if only in my head, where I am included and thriving. That goes for the gay edits of F&F on YouTube and for the founding father fan art of Hamilton. There are no other possible narratives, no other possible sources of inspiration or motivation. A million things happen, explosions and sex and robberies and governmental intervention, but nothing changes. They announced the end of the Fast & Furious franchise at the same moment they announced new planned sequels to the spin-offs.

Twenty years in reality and nine years in the F&F universe later, nothing has changed. No one has learned anything, the stakes get higher, but the endless pattern of mistakes made and corrected with violence continue. We pull out of Afghanistan and the conditions that created the motivation for invasion immediately re-established themselves. I’m not sure if this is real or if it was part of a fever dream, but I think I read somewhere South Park is going to make another 82 movies?

Oh god, there's a Netflix animated Fast & Furious: The Next Generation kind of thing, five seasons of it. If my editors want me to watch this, too, I just don't think I'm going to make it, I....