Fast and Furious Films and the Transformation of the Natural World

From an eco-critical perspective, Rob Cohen’s The Fast and the Furious (2001) and its sequels, John Singleton’s 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) and Justin Lin’s The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006), Fast and Furious (2009), and Fast and Furious 6, like the 1954 John Ireland film, The Fast and the Furious, which inspired them, not only illustrate the devotion to souped-up high-speed cars and the stylish culture they represent; they also take environmental degradation to hyperbolic levels. These films go beyond merely highlighting the car as an American icon and valorizing a concrete highway built for racing. In spite of the more liberal class and race politics in the later films that serve to critique human exploitation, all these Fast and Furious films advocate a heightened abuse of nature and ecosystems. They rest on transformed natural and man-made environments, and on the environmental impact that is inherently a part of car culture. 

In the contemporary Fast and Furious films, the situation is the same as it was in 1954—car culture celebrates speed and control, as well as the transformation of the natural landscape into a man-made landscape that is, in turn, itself transformed without questioning the environmental expense. These films demonstrate that the environmental impact of cars and the car culture in America has been treated as natural and desirable, as a given. Drivers in all the films appear to rebel against a conformist suburban culture that uses roadways for commuting and garages for parking instead of racing; however, they also conform to this same culture through their acceptance of environmental degradation in the form of both a transformation of natural and man-made landscapes, and reliance on nonrenewable fuels that contribute to global warming.

Drivers in all six films not only use artificial landscapes built on ecosystems, but they also further exploit this artificial landscape, transforming its former utility into a roadway for speed, thrills, and status. The 2001, 2003, 2006, 2009, and 2013 films merely mask their attitude toward the landscape by including one inconsequential difference, from an environmental standpoint: an updated race and class politics rooted in post-World War II Southern car culture that responds to The Dukes of Hazzard (1979-1985), a television series with similar roots. While racial and class hierarchies may have been deconstructed in the later films, exploitation of the environment is not only accepted but is presented as a way to even the class and race stakes. Even though hierarchies appear to have changed from 1954 to 2013, when it comes to the natural world, environmental degradation is not only a given but a goal. An eco-critical reading of these films suggests that little has changed between 1954 and 2006 in an ideology that worships speed and advocates the conquest of the natural world as a transformative development aligned with progress and democracy. The thematic and plot parallels between the films crossing 60 years are striking. They highlight a car culture that juxtaposes elements of consumption and consumerism, food and fast cars, with sex and power. Linking sex with food is a staple of cinema, since both work together to elicit desire and stimulate our appetites. In these films, viewers are asked to have our appetite for consuming the environment further stimulated and to think of that consumption as empowering and pleasurable.

Food links all of these Fast and Furiousfilms. Produced by Roger Corman and directed by Edward Sampson and John Ireland, the 1954 car culture film, The Fast and the Furious, begins with a truck crash that is juxtaposed with a shot of high-end foreign cars racing down a two-lane road. The plot then focuses on Connie (Dorothy Malone) driving into a diner (The Paddle Creek Lodge) in her two-seat Jaguar for a sandwich. This low-key scene escalates to a kidnapping and car hijacking when Frank Webster (John Ireland) grabs Connie and escapes the diner in her Jaguar. Webster has broken out of jail after being wrongly accused of murder—as seen in the film’s opening truck crash—and now seeks to prove his innocence and redeem his life. The film’s thin plot line is meant to showcase the high-end sports cars at the road rally and race that make up much of the film, as well as the constructed all-asphalt landscape further transformed into a racetrack. Like the 1954 film after which it is named, Rob Cohen’s The Fast and the Furious begins with a shot of a truck on a highway in an acrobatic high-speed hijacking. Cohen’s film also introduces its main characters over food, in a discussion about tuna fish sandwiches that ends with a jealous fight in the street outside. 

Food, sex, and speed serve to foreground the social construction of cars and the car culture as desirable items of consumption. In the sequel, 2 Fast 2 Furious, sandwiches are replaced by lunch on a mansion patio, Brian O’Connor’s (Paul Walker) and Roman’s (Tyrese Gibson) reward for winning a race to retrieve a Cuban cigar. In 1954’s The Fast and the Furious, Dorothy Malone’s character (Connie) must ride off in her two-seat Jaguar as Frank Webster’s hostage (before eating her sandwich).  In The Fast and the Furious, Tokyo Drift, Sean Boswell (Lucas Black) makes connections with Tokyo-bound Americans in a high school cafeteria before meeting them and other teenage “drifters” in a parking garage. Even in the latest Fast and Furious 6,  Han (Sung Kang) and his romantic interest, Giselle (Gad Gadot) share a meal from a street vendor in Tokyo.

All of these films also foreground an existing landscape that is already man-made, thus making it easier to forget that it is an already transformed landscape. The real natural landscape that serves as the basis of this transformation is not even evoked anymore. In Baudrillard’s term, it is all a simulacrum already. The receding natural landscape that is the basis of these films becomes furthered erased by the multiple transformations of the man-made landscape. It is not so much the landscape that is transformed—as the frontier closed in 1890— but the use that is made of this landscape. The only available frontier left is the new use one can make of what is there, following, of course, a similar ideology as the one that informed the transformation in the first place—a particular version of landscape and power.

As important as food, romance, and sex are, the cars, asphalt, and transformed landscape are the centerpieces of the films.  In the 2001 The Fast and the Furious, for example, kicked-up Japanese compacts are driven on Los Angeles pavement by an assorted group of multi-racial young male hellions. With an ethnically ambiguous leader—Vin Diesel’s Dominic—and street racers of Asian, African American, and Hispanic descent, the film shows us a globalized car-crazy, hip-hop-driven subculture where urban youth in their twenties invest thousands of dollars to soup up lightweight Toyotas, Mitsubishis, and Hondas for inner-city ultra-speed. Two big races and three car chases make up most of the movie, providing speed-driven highs to drivers, passengers, and (if box office numbers speak the truth) audience members. This loud and fast underworld thumbs its nose at the establishment—in this case represented by the FBI and, at first, its undercover agent, Brian. They even appear to reject the utilitarian reasons behind the construction of the asphalt and concrete landscapes they exploit, even as they reappropriate it for their own use in a semblance of rejecting all that is bourgeois. 

No one can deny that The Fast and the Furious (2001), 2 Fast 2 Furious, Tokyo Drift, Fast and Furious, and Fast and Furious 6 highlight a racially diverse cast that appeals to a broader demographic and makes a seemingly progressive point about race and class politics, especially in terms of the new ethnically ambiguous look. But the films also show what can happen to an urban landscape already altered—paved over—to accommodate the car and its driver. These films use the concrete landscape to assert individuality and a refusal to knuckle under to authority. With the exception of Brian and perhaps Roman, these inner-city car racers don’t want to be reintegrated into society. They race cars to gain status and money, to impress sexy women, and to defy the police—just like Junior Johnson and the Dukes of Hazzard. But, like the conformists and suburbanites they reject, they act like everything in nature exists to be consumed and exploited. To them, the concrete paved landscapes of inner-city Los Angeles, Miami, and Tokyo are natural. Only their exploitative transformation of them provides them with what they see as a radical edge. When concrete landscapes go unquestioned, so do their transformations. 

Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment Conference 2013: Ecomedia and the Multimodal

Two panels at the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment illustrated how multimodal ecomedia and ecocriticsm have become. The first of these, “Prosthetic and Posthuman in Contemporary Science Fiction,” included three presentations representing at least four text types: novel, film, television, and comic and graphic novel.

Pelin Kumbet’s “Posthumans as Supplement Prosthetics to Natural Human beings: Liminality of Beings in Never Let Me Go” highlights how clones become prosthetics in the novel and film, Never Let Me Go. According to Kumbet, the film adaptation faithfully captures the struggles the posthuman Kathy endures to delay her and her boyfriend’s inevitable end. In the horrific context of both novel and film, natural humans survive because posthumans have been cloned to provide them with needed body parts, living prosthetics that have been “grown” for them. Kathy demonstrates her own humanity through her artistic ability, but even those creative manifestations cannot save her in the dystopia of the narrative. Instead, Kathy is seen as resource grown for harvest, as an element of nonhuman nature with less value than the natural humans her body parts support.  

Donna Binns’ “The Bionic Woman: Machine or Human?” explored how the bionic woman of the 1970s television series complicated views of prosthesis and bionics that suggest such physical additions only augment the body rather than disfiguring or disabling it. Unlike the bionic man, the bionic woman, Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner) rejects her bionics both emotionally and physically. Although she survives the initial physical rejection, she never completely accepts the bionic prosthetics forced upon her. According to Binns, prosthetics transform Jaime less into a superhero than a person with disabilities. Binns notes several examples that illustrate how much Jaime’s body continued to reject her bionics, suggesting the incompatibility of nature and technology, as well as the limitations of both bionics and prosthetics.

Micha Gerrit’s “Concrete, Swamp Thing, and the Posthuman” explored issues of the posthuman illustrated by comic books and graphic novels. Gerrit demonstrated well the humanity of the characters Concrete and Swamp Thing, despite their nonhuman and/or posthuman representations with the context of the comics. Ultimately, the panel not only highlighted the interdisciplinarity of ecocritical readings, but also the burgeoning possibilities of applying ecocritical approaches to multimodal texts and ecomedia.

The panel, Ecocriticism and Chinese Culture” demonstrated how broadened visions of text cross cultural borders to include literature, as in Liu, Bei’s Shandong “On Zhang Wei’s Sense of Place and its Contemporary Cultural Significance,” visual art as in Kiu-wai Chu’s “Neon-Greening New Landscapes in Contemporary Chinese Art: From Daoist Ecology to Eco-materialism,” documentary, as in Xinmin D. Liu’s “Emotive Intervention in “Documenting” China’s Manufactured Landscapes,” and nonfiction, as in  Song, Lili’s “On the Pathos of Chinese Environmental Writings.”

Bug (1975): Cockroach Movies and the Sometimes Mad Scientist

Bug and Mimic: Cockroach Movies and the Sometimes Mad Scientist

God-like qualities of the cockroach underpin the narratives of cockroach horror films whether or not cockroaches are presented as survivors or victims, and whether or not they are constructed as benefactors or destructive forces of nature. The suggestion that the cockroach will outlast all other life forms, including humans, permeates popular film, including positive appearances as the only friend of the hero in WALL-E (2008) and negative portrayals as villain in Men in Black (1997) and Starship Troopers (1997). In horror films such as Bug (1975), however, their “villainy” is a product of transformation through deliberate genetic alterations. Bug examines the destructive repercussions of genetic engineering meant to alter cockroaches for human benefit but move beyond historian William M. Tsutsu’s suggestion that “these cinematic big bugs [represent] ambivalence about science and technocratic authority, and repressed Freudian impulses” (1). In Bug both humans and the “bugs” they study turn monstrous.

Cockroach horror films reinforce this stereotype as they highlight humanity’s ambivalence toward cockroaches. To a certain extent, Bugdraws on positive qualities associated with cockroaches, including their contributions to human health, their intelligence, and their longevity. Although Bug anthropomorphizes roaches on a higher level, however, neither the insect nor the scientists that transform them are well-treated. Based on the novel, The Hephaestus Plague, William Castle’s final film, Bug, highlights what happens when a scientist tampers with nature: roaches that belch flames remain vulnerable and easily destroyed until another entomologist, James Parmiter (Bradford Dillman), attempts to mate them with other roaches. The roaches then become more like humans as they gain intelligence and grow deadly as they breed, producing carnivorous offspring. Eventually, these offspring also mate and kill, creating a flying burning insect that drags Parmiter and the science he represents to hell.

Despite the heightened anthropomorphism, then, in Bug, both cockroach and scientist are constructed as monstrous. Although the film’s scientist, Parmiter is a biology teacher who explains many things, he is also, as entomologist James W. Mertins explains of the scientist image, “shown … as detached from reality,” a “psychotic” (86). Parmiter tells his students, “Earth, soil, wind, temperature are all part of an exact pattern.” He mesmerizes a squirrel. He tells them about a Florida beetle that scalds its enemy. But when a farm boy shows him his dead cat, burned by the flaming cockroaches, the teacher is intrigued, so much so that he makes the roach his life work, even after the roaches kill his wife by crawling into her hair and lighting her up like a human torch.

Aided by the insect photography of Ken Middleham, who also filmed the documentary The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971) and the science fiction thriller Phase IV (1974), Bug provides an authentic portrayal of the cockroaches, at least until breeding ignites their intelligence to such an extent that they can read and write. The prehistoric roaches that appear after the quake, for example, produce sparks not unlike the bioluminescence of the South American cockroach, called “pronatal headlights” in Bell et al’s Cockroaches. As Bill Gibron of PopMatters declares, close-up shots of these roaches mandibles also “make[] their actions seem almost plausible.”

The monstrous nature of these roaches is shown in a variety of scenes before Parmiter decides to breed a new species. His friend Mark’s (Alan Fudge) wife Sylvia (Patty McCormack) is killed by a roach attack, for example, and a roach also climbs in another woman’s ear (Jamie Smith Jackson) and destroys her. Although we do not see her killed on screen, Parmiter’s wife Carrie’s (Joanna Miles) death is gruesome. But as Mark explains, these new roaches live very short lives and cannot reproduce, at least without intervention, so the danger associated with them should be finite.

The horror of the film becomes amplified when Parmiter further anthropomorphizes the roaches by facilitating their reproduction. In a dark and deserted farmhouse setting, the now reclusive Parmiter breeds this new species of roach with what looks like an American cockroach specimen, a process that will transform a dying species into a menace.  When Parmiter sees the roaches write “We Live” on the wall with their bodies, he knows he has created unbeatable human-like monsters and is helpless against their assault. After their flames engulf him, we see him burning, but in an odd twist that emphasizes the parallels between the roaches and their creator, Parmiter, the offspring of the original breed drag him into the crevice left by a second earthquake. The fissure’s bottom looks like the bowels of hell, with fire and brimstone deep below, and the earth explodes and covers them, closing off the opening.

This sudden ending turns horror into camp but demonstrates negative associations with both science and anthropomorphized insects found in most bug features. It also serves as a not too subtle moral attack on science and the cockroach monsters it could create. As Bill Gibron states, “Naturally, whenever you wander onto God’s domain, things get out of hand and more people die. And it takes an unexplainable divine intervention (a second earthquake and a noble individual sacrifice) to end the debacle.”  Because the evolutionary transformation Parmeter attempts involves a cockroach pest, however, his violation of nature becomes even more monstrous.