Some of you might notice this piece has some similarities to an earlier essay on the Fast and Furious I wrote years ago. Some aspects of that essay have been considered and incorporated here, but I honestly just wanted to focus on the personal/familial aspect this time. I might even have totally different opinions on some of the movies this time! I’m acknowledging that here, but nowhere else. The opportunity to show my thought process changing over time is unique to the blog format (even one as sparsely updated as this one,) and I’d hate to lose that. Anyway, enjoy! Who knows, I might have an actual review of Fast X later.
From even my earliest age, my parents raised me to be a voracious omnivore of movies. Every kid’s parents try to rear them on their own personal interests to some extent or another, and mine were no different.
My mother, whose rare fond memories of her own mother involved going to back-to-back double features to escape the New York summer heat (let me clarify: TWO double features), and who was essentially raised on television as a latchkey kid, had a laundry list of movies and shows I absolutely MUST see. Mind you, not as a matter of preference, but as a moral imperative. This meant watching a new movie or few episodes of television every night; Columbo, Funny Girl, Harold and Maude, several Alfred Hitchock movies, all of Mel Brooks’ oeuvre, with a special fondness on my mother’s part for The Producers. (“Spring-time, for Hit-ler, and Ger-many! Win-ter, for Pol-and, and France…” was a common singsongy refrain in the house.) Whenever I was sick, we’d watch some fluffy ‘80s/’90s classic or cult classic. The Princess Bride, The Breakfast Club, Grosse Pointe Blank, Better off Dead. And when I, an idiot child with idiot child tastes, enjoyed Steve Martin’s Cheaper by the Dozen in theaters, mom felt the need to feed me every film Steve Martin’s catalogue up to that point, not just to show me her favorites, (Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, Leap of Faith, LA Story, Roxeanne,) but to hammer in the Obvious and Objective decline in his career since Father of the Bride parts 1 and 2.
If nothing else, I now know this scene exists
It was like getting a free education in the lexicon of the wrong decades, plus growing up with no cable or live TV. So, while I had to catch up with episodes of Spongebob years after the fact to have common ground with my friends in elementary school, I distinctly recall only some short years later trying to convince them all to watch Twin Peaks. And you can imagine how insufferable I was when everyone I met in college had (to my view) such a superficial and far-too-recent love of the same show. Not watching it in middle school like me, I understand, I’m not a snob, but not seeing it in high school? What’s wrong with you?
My father, on the other hand, was not nearly as well-versed, but fiercely idiosyncratic in his media taste, and unapologetically so. This is a man who walked out of Toy Story 3 for being too saccharine, (he had a venomous distaste for Randy Newman, as a composer himself with a special chip on his shoulder for what he viewed as undue recognition,) Inception for being “too loud,” but whose favorite film was Cliffhanger, starring Sylvester Stallone. It’d be easy to write off his taste as “dad movie,” but it was weirder than that. He had a blue collar puritanical streak that clashed with my mother’s sensibilities frequently, who cursed like a sailor. For example, he was worried that The Devil’s Advocate was giving me the wrong impression of sexuality and viewing women as objects, and that I didn’t see it as the pulpy fun it clearly was. Or, my mother would frequently quote Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction, “Gentlemen, let’s not start sucking each other’s dicks quite yet,” which, if he overhead, would shake his head, “That’s disgusting.” If his harshest critique was parental concern, though, his highest praise during a movie was a delighted laugh at how stupid something on screen was.
In my father’s defense, what isn’t there to love about Cliffhanger?
So, when I came of age to start watching R-rated movies, I don’t know who was more excited, me or them. Our family’s overlapping viewing interests found a natural common ground in the action film. Mom wanted to show me The Matrix, and had a vested interest in me appreciating Van Damme more than Schwarzenegger. (Hate to disappoint, but I prefer neither—it’s Stallone.) My dad, however, managed to slip in recommendations of movies, regardless of how mediocre they were, starring Catherine Zeta Jones. (Remember the thoroughly average thriller Entrapment pairing off Zeta Jones and a way-too-old for her Sean Connery? Because I do.) To this, my mother would only say, with an admirable restraint in her voice, “He likes Zeta.”
One of our earliest go-to schlocky movie rentals, however, was The Fast and the Furious. It was an action movie, so I was in, it was dumb and doofily masculine as hell, so my dad was in, and mom would watch literally anything, so she was in. (This is a woman who, even when she hates a movie, can’t stop watching it after it begins because she needs to know how it ends.) And somehow, over the course of countless rentals, it went from “something to watch,” to “guilty pleasure,” to “bedrock of our family.” It inspired a binging of every other Vin Diesel movie and Paul Walker movie (not the greenest of pastures,) but we kept coming back. There was just something lovable about it, even though none of us were in a position to articulate why yet. We also kept rewatching that and only that because, and I cannot emphasize this enough, even for die-hard fans like ourselves, the landscape of the Fast and Furious series was far grimmer in 2008. We loved the first movie for two people: Paul Walker. Vin Diesel. Nothing else mattered. We had little interest in watching the so-awfully-named-it-comes-back-to-good 2 Fast 2 Furious, since it didn’t have Diesel, let alone Tokyo Drift, which, from a distance, appeared like a direct-to-DVD spinoff with none of the original cast. (I know, I know, I’m sorry, Han, I’m sorry, I’m going to make it up to you by singing your praises for the rest of my life!)
MY BOY
When Fast and Furious (2009) came out, though, we were all-in. It looked slick as hell, directed by the only true auteur of the franchise, Justin Lin, and brought some truly ludicrous action setpieces that made as all cackle with glee, and with the cast we had grown to love over the last couple of years. I remember all of us just guffawing at the end when Dom ran over Phoenix with his car, only to say, “Pussy.” And that sequel lead-in at the end is an all-timer as far as I’m concerned—I’ve had multiple accidental double features of Fast and Furious and Fast Five with friends because of that ending. And we stuck to our favorites, 1 and 4, for a long time. Until something truly awful and outside this little bubble of my family’s goofy taste came up.
Sometime in middle school, 7th grade, I think it was, my mother and father sat me down in the kitchen, stone-faced, telling me they needed to say something. No stranger to overhearing them argue, my brain went to the worst thing it could think of—divorce? I asked them, my voice thick. No, no, it wasn’t that, they explained.
My father had cancer.
Neck cancer, specifically. They had known for a while now. Well, I asked, why did they take this long to tell me? They wanted to be sure. Also, when they did know for sure, it was Christmas, and they didn’t want to ruin the holidays for me. In that moment, though I would never say it out loud, I wrote my father off as dead. It wasn’t a possibility, but a fact—he was going to die, and I was losing him, and I needed to accept that sooner than later. And while the Christmas sentiment was nice of them, I can’t help but feel the next few Christmases—when he visibly, and more upsettingly, audibly struggled with his illness—more than made up for lost time. One Christmas, I could hear him hacking and violently coughing late into the night, attempting to expel the mucus filling up his throat, unable to sleep for the constant effort. Another, we attempted to watch Miracle on 34th Street, but kept pausing to adjust the IV drip into Michael’s arm. That part was fine, and had long been a normal nuisance to us; in fact, greater concern to us was the effect on the film’s pace. The part that wasn’t so fine was seeing Michael drift in and out of himself that night as the painkillers took their toll. It was one of the few times I was truly scared. The rest of the time, well—upon first hearing the news, I was in shock, and by the time I wasn’t in shock I had become numb to it. Nothing feels especially traumatic when it’s a regular part of your reality, and this was no different.
Eventually, the pain and discomfort was too much for him to keep working. All the time I had become so accustomed to him spending in his recording studio composing music for hours on end was now spent in the living room watching something, anything, to pass the time. Often, I would join him. We trawled for films together on lazy afternoons or evenings, usually when mom was out working. (Where before we could just assume she was the man of the house with dad’s salary as a musician, it was now a fact. She was keeping the house together.) This was in the earlier days of Netflix’s transition to streaming, back when you had a choice between getting something in the mail or what they called “Instant Watch,” the Blue/Red buttons split down the middle of every movie on their site. This Instant Watch library of, let’s be fair, mostly trash, some gems in the rough, was our treasure trove of mid-afternoon viewings for the rest of my father’s life. It was in this manner we discovered many films for the first time—some of them great, like Heat. Others of them… well, others of them were 2 Fast 2 Furious.
This image somehow does not convey just how many cars are on screen in the ending scenes of 2 Fast 2 Furious.
I don’t mean to disrespect or trivialize the memory of my father by saying this, but I think he would agree: it literally took cancer to get us to give 2 Fast 2 Furious and Tokyo Drift a shot. And gosh I’m glad it did. I mean, I’m always going to associate 2, especially, with those last days, but it’s a genuinely fine movie that suffered from fan disappointment around the lack of Vin Diesel. But for a lazy Sunday with my dad where we came in with our expectations already in the dirt? It was great. Today, I appreciate the genuine chemistry between Tyrese Gibson and Paul Walker, the manic energy Gibson brings to the movie, as well as the outright gay-as-fuck text of the film. Plus, the finale, with its hordes of brightly colored cars, is the closest this series has gotten to feeling like playing with matchbox cars or a Hot Wheels set.
(Also, as an aside, let me tell ya what an experience it was seeing Tokyo Drift after Fast and Furious, and just assuming blindly that since Han was in 4, he had to live through 3. This made an already devastating scene hit even harder as it completely blindsided us.)
What a god damn movie.
A year or two later, Fast Five was the first Fast and Furious film I saw in theaters, and the last movie my father got to watch in a theater, ever. Looking back, it’s clear there could have been no better final movie for all of us to see together one last time, the creative high point of our favorite popcorn franchise. Again, my father’s taste was very particular – just months before, he had walked out of Inception. (Which is actually one of my favorite Nolan movies!) But he stuck around for Dom and Brian. It was the perfect ending to our film snob family’s unlikely descent into fandom for this stupid, wonderful series.
A few months later, dad was dead.
Since then, I have watched every Fast and Furious movie opening weekend, on the biggest, dumbest format of screen I can find, demarcating the passage of my life as I do so. 6 came out when I was a still a moody high schooler. I got to watch 7 with my roommate during my first year of college across the country in New York. Opening weekend of 8, I was studying abroad at Oxford, and caught an IMAX screening with my friends (and same roommate!) in London, the weekend of my birthday. My long-distance partner at the time, who well knew about my Fast and Furious obsession by now, caught a viewing back in the States so we could talk about it. I watched Hobbs and Shaw while visiting my friend in Connecticut, nursing my wounds from a rough breakup. 9 came out ages later, when what felt like a lifetime had passed—I was out of college, had moved back from New York and was now a level designer for a video game studio in the first few months of my transition. And now, Fast X has come out literally a few days after a huge, life-changing surgery in my life, the same week.
THIS IS BRAZI — wait wrong character. Though given that this is the son of the villain from Five, it’d be pretty wild if this was an intentional callback.
It hasn’t been an even, smooth-sailing relationship with the series. I rewatch the later films less and less, it’s clear the series has never quite recovered from Paul Walker’s death or the departure of Justin Lin after his legendary hot streak from Tokyo Drift to Furious 6. (Even bringing Lin back for 9 didn’t do it!) But no matter how jaded I convince myself I am, with each new film announced, I find myself irrationally, giddily excited. In an era where I am more cynical, wary, and adult than ever, there is some eternal wellspring of childlike glee within me for any new Fast and Furious movie. And every time that joy bubbles up in me sitting down for another improbable sequel of this family pet franchise, a twang of sadness, comes, too. For I think of my father, and think of how happy he would be to see this series still going. His delighted laugh if he saw a muscle car fight a submarine, or a car drive out of an airplane. And maybe, if I let myself think about it, how proud he would be of me for who I’ve become and the life I’ve made for myself.
I have no clue how Fast X is. Recovering from surgery meant I had to break the streak and not go to the theater, and it could very well be trash. But I’m excited to watch it, and I’ll be just as stupid excited as any chance to sit down and watch a new one comes. I’m wary of the behavior of fandom, of deep, personal, and emotional allegiances to corporate properties like Marvel or Star Wars. Does that make me a hypocrite? Maybe. But I can’t help but feel there’s a difference. That as massive and calculated as new entries to the series are now, this has come forth from nothing but the sheer enthusiasm of its fans and its unlikely heart and success. This wasn’t a safe bet. This wasn’t meant to be a hit. It just was.
All because of sincere dorks like my mother, my father, and I.
