Race and Representation in the Fast & Furious Series

Abstract

In this essay I will be writing about, for the most part, three of the first four entries in the Fast and Furious series. In the first chapter, I will take a look at what has already been written about these films, academically as well as in popular film criticism, while also examining the idea of "cheering fictions" as coined by screenwriter Hanif Kureishi, and whether or not these films fit into that bracket. The second chapter will focus on The Fast and the Furious (2001) and the similarly titled Fast & Furious (2009), and how despite sharing the same Los Angeles setting and characters, the ways the two films differ in how they each choose to portray their central character, Dominic Toretto's cultural background. Also covered in chapter two are two short films directed by Vin Diesel, Multi-Facial (1995) and Los Bandoleros (2009), both of which give valuable insights into the franchise's main star's crises of identity which end up being directly tied to the aforementioned feature films. The third chapter will shift focus to the Japan-set third entry, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006), and will examine how the film depicts the assimilation of its white lead into Japanese culture (or lack thereof), and what Hollywood pitfalls it avoids and which ones it falls into. It will also look at Tokyo Drift in the context of the career of prolific Fast and Furious director Justin Lin who makes his series debut with this entry, and the expectations that this particular film comes with given his Asian-American heritage. The conclusion of the paper will delve into the increased transnationalism of the series starting with the entirely Brazil-set Fast Five (2011), and continuing through to the casual globe-trotting and drone attacks of Furious 7 (2015), as well as looking at how the targeted audiences may have changed over the years.