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.