- This video is brought to you by Magic Spoon.
(soft upbeat music)
Hey Wisecrack, Michael here.
When you hear Fast and Furious you may think
car go fast big man flex muscle or, if you're like me,
you may think, Powerful Mount Rushmore of BaldMen.
(bell dinging)
But while the franchise thrives on ridiculous stunts
involving giant bank vaults and nuclear submarines,
it also asks some pretty big questions,
like when is crime actually the answer?
Let's find out in this Wisecrack Edition
on the Fast and Furious.
And spoilers ahead. (buzzer buzzing)
And before we dive deeper, I need to take
a quick meal break with this week's sponsor Magic Spoon.
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Now, back to the show.
For those of you who have been living under
a non-Dwayne Johnson-related rock
the Fast and Furious follows a scrappy gang of street
racers, thieves, international super-spies
led by one Dominic Torreto.
In its humble beginnings, the series was just about
Dom stealing the way to a decent living while
evading the authorities, often in spectacular fashion.
But with each sequel, the scale and the stakes
get exponentially larger, and before you know it,
the crew's doing antiterrorism work
for a shady government agency.
Still, no matter what the mission is, the series always
circles back to what Dom and his crew
are really about freedom and family.
- Money'll come and go, we know that.
The most important thing in life
will always be the people in this room.
- They live as outlaws, eschewing the comforts
of civilian life for an existence that feels truly free.
And while they don't care much for the letter of the law,
it's not like they lack any moral code,
their own word is treated as sacrosanct.
When Dom or a member of his crew promises to do something,
you can guarantee that they'll do it.
Even if that thing is dangerous or potentially suicidal
like, driving a car through a yacht or out of an airplane.
As a result, they are able to trust one another completely.
- Here take the wheel! - What do you mean take
the wheel? - Take the wheel!
Put your foot on the gas!
- The stunts get crazier with each passing film but they are
all built on the crew's collective faith in one another.
But why?
I mean, sure, family is nice but isn't that
what the Olive Garden is for?
And isn't freedom just the experience
of eating unlimited breadsticks until I puke?
(bell dinging)
To understand why this kind of freedom
and family is different from low-brow carbo-loading,
we need to think of Dom and gang not as muscle-car-driving
DVD thieves but as pirates.
Or, at least, pirates on the high seas
of the California interstate.
Ahem.
Yarg.
No seriously.
While plenty of action franchises offer
beefy men pummeling each other in the face
the Fast and the Furious is unique in that it can be best
appreciated with a little side of buckeneering history.
That's because pirates, at least the Golden Age pirates
who inspire the media trope, were out for the same thing
as the Fast crew, freedom.
Many were former sailors who,
sick of being mistreated by society,
looked to the open sea as a place where they could be free.
You might even say they lived their life,
a quarter knot at a time. (bell dinging)
God I should have been a professional tennis player.
And it's not hard to see why they made that choice.
Life as a sailor was absolutely brutal.
The crews were barely fed, routinely beaten
by their employers, and confined to tiny, horrid lodgings.
Many sailors, especially of the British variety,
were either African slaves or impressed men who were
forced to serve in the Royal navy.
In short, it was awful, and piracy was their only escape.
Famed pirate Bartholomew Roberts summed it up neatly,
claiming that in merchant work There is thin commons,
low wages and hard labor, in this, ie pirate work,
plenty and satiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power.
No, a merry life and a short one, shall be my motto.
I'm gonna get that tattooed on my back after this.
While Dom and his crew never suffered the cursed existence
of a 17th century British sailor,
the parallels aren't hard to see.
The world of street racing, like the world of pirating,
offers a kind of freedom and agency,
you won't get from working in
the service industry or for the FBI.
And for high-school dropouts like Jesse,
or just people with a criminal record it's a line of paid
work that's a little more lucrative
than punching in at a Pep Boys.
- I live my life a quarter mile at a time.
Nothing else matters, not the mortgage,
not the store, not my team and all their (beep).
For those 10 seconds or less, I'm free.
- For pirates, freedom meant everything.
They'd often go to the gallows satisfied with their choices,
proclaiming a Pyrate's Life to be the only
Life for a Man of any Spirit.
Our street-racing family is equally unwavering
in their commitment.
At one point in the films, Dom distances himself from Letty,
hoping she'll return to a safer civilian life.
She stays steadfast, though, and the two are soon back
catching each other's falls and watching each other's backs.
- You will never be alone again.
I vow wherever you go, I go.
You ride, I ride.
You fight, I fight.
And if you ever die on me Dominic Toretto,
I'm gonna die with you.
- [Michael] They'd rather live well than live long.
And in a society full of mostly garbage options,
Dom and his crew offer a glorious escape route.
- Life's simple.
You make choices and you don't look back.
- [Michael] Of course, pirates weren't just rejecting
the order of life they encountered on ships.
They were rejecting British society at large,
with its rigid hierarchy in which the few at the top
profited while the working masses lived in squalor.
Pirates threatened this order, and authorities went to great
lengths to demonize them and scare away potential recruits.
They'd even hang their dead bodies outside of ports.
Meanwhile there were brutal wars and starvation wages
and rampant slavery but hey, look, there's an evil pirate
that might say argh!
Which is scary!
Captured pirates were even told to make statements affirming
the righteousness of the British crown,
with the potential of being given a lighter sentence.
And with its cops and robbers plotlines,
the Fast and Furious series immediately suggests a similar,
us against them moral dichotomy.
But the series complicates that simplicity,
from the SWAT raids in the first movie to Hobbs'
heavy-handed approach in the fifth, they call attention
to the way the authorities often rely on the same might
makes right approach as any other gang or colonial power.
In doing so, the series calls into question the relationship
between morality and law, with characters like
cop-turned-Toretto-family member Brian
caught right in the middle.
- Maybe you're lying to yourself.
Maybe you're not the good guy pretending to be a bad guy.
Maybe you're the bad guy pretending to be the good guy.
- [Michael] Both Brian and Hobbs start out
as lawmen who believe
that they are making the world better by enforcing
the letter of the law.
But through their interactions with the Toretto family,
they come to realize that things are a lot more complicated.
- [Man] He didn't kill those feds, it was Rayes.
- I don't give a (beep).
I'm just here to bring in two assholes
who's names hit my desk.
- Yeah.
That sounds like a real hero.
- Compare this to a story about
Alexander the Great capturing
a pirate and furiously asking him how
he dares to molest the seas.
The pirate replies How dare you molest the whole world?
Because I do it with a small boat,
I am called a pirate and a thief.
You, with a great navy, molest the world
and are called an emperor.
Of course, the powers that be were occasionally able
to dispense with their moral outrage about pirates
so long as the crews were proved useful.
In times of war, authorities would enlist pirates as
privateers" and send them off to rob their enemies.
The Fast and Furious crew similarly find themselves
recruited by the government to use
their skills in its service.
And while we're not here to defend everything every pirate
ever did, they did stay committed to their vision
of fostering a less oppressive society.
Some basically pioneered their own brand of egalitarian
democracy, radically subverting the top-down power
structures found on land.
Now that's something to sing about.
♪ Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me ♪
While each pirate ship had a captain, their power
was checked and balanced by the pirate assembly,
in which every crew member had a voice,
with the quartermasters stepping in to make final rulings.
They voted on all major matters, split the profits
of their plunder equally, and provided ample food,
decent lodgings and healthcare to all.
Wait, did pirates invent medicare for all?
They even ensured that anyone who lost
an arm or a leg was fairly compensated.
This, in broad strokes, is a lot like how Dom's crew
and their family values operate.
Sure, Dom is ultimately in charge.
But he's not gonna throw you out and forget you exist
after you lose an eye being pummeled by Jason Statham
He almost never has to wield power over the other members
of his family except to make sure
they say grace before eating.
Aw, just like a midwestern dad!
- Because you were the first out of everybody here
to reach in to get the chicken, you say grace.
- [Michael] Instead, we see the crew
continually working together, for each other.
Their family barbecues allow everyone a chance
to voice their opinions and concerns about the next job.
And when they inevitably pull it off, the payday allows
each of them to pursue their own goals in life
whether that's opening a garage or starting
a new life in Tokyo.
In Fast and Furious, Family isn't dictated by blood,
it's treated almost as a sacred pact,
signaling the depth and strength of the crew's bond.
- I don't have friends, I got family.
- [Michael] Now, commentators have called Fast and Furious
a post-racial franchise.
That's because, while having an incredibly diverse cast,
each character is understood entirely on their own merits.
And it's not dissimilar from pirates who, having broken free
of an international trade system built on colonialism
and slavery, could meet one another on level terms.
Native Americans and enslaved Africans escaped oppression
by joining pirate ships, often then using their local
knowledge to help their crews confound the imperial forces.
Even women were sometimes welcomed at a time when
conventional superstition claimed that if they even
stepped on a ship it would bring bad fortune to the voyage.
- [Man] It's bad luck to have a woman on board too.
- And while the Fast and Furious
isn't exactly feminism 101,
it does gradually find a way to place characters like Dom
and Letty on equal footing through parallel storylines.
In the sixth film, Dom risks his life to save Letty even
after she has been manipulated into trying to kill him.
In the eighth entry, the tables are turned and its Letty to
the rescue after Dom is blackmailed into betraying the crew.
Pirates claimed to be from the seas, that is, from nowhere
and everywhere. And you could, in the same way,
say that Dom is from the road.
Of course, pirates aren't the only
outlaw predecessors to Dom's crew.
The gunslingers who became symbolic of the Wild West defied
the encroaching social order to live
by their own ideas of justice.
Whether they truly were as honorable as the legends say
is debatable, but figures like Jesse James and Billy
the Kid remain a fascination for the way they stood
in defiance against an unfair order.
Even if, like Jesse James, they didn't do a lot
of sharing and just murdered a bunch of people.
You can even take it all the way back to the ballads
about Robin Hood, which celebrated a lowly thief
forcibly redistributing some of medieval England's wealth.
Sure, some of these might be gangs that take through brute
force, but are they all that different from the governments
that tried to crack down on them?
We don't even need to celebrate the deeds of outlaws
like Dom or Billy the Kid to consider the saying from German
playwright Bertolt Brecht: What is the burgling
of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?
Whether it's sailing out on the wide blue sea or cruising
through the streets of Brazil, these outlaws are ultimately
in pursuit of a place where they can live freely
and authentically, defined by who and what they love.
- Father thank you, for the gathering of friends.
Father we give thanks for all the choices we made
'cause that's what makes us who we are
and most of all, thank you for fast cars.
- For all its insanity, and all the twists and turns
it's taken along the way, the Fast and Furious series
is essentially a new rendition of the outlaw
hero myths we've been telling for centuries.
The crew creates a space in which people from all walks
of life can shed the constrained identities
they'd be forced to assume in mainstream society
and carve out a path uniquely their own.
So, what do you think Wisecrack, should we have stopped
at car go fast big man flex muscle or is there something
more going on under the hood?
Let us know in the comments.
Thanks as always to our patrons.
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And as always, thanks for watching.
Later.
(upbeat music)