Research Paper. Dominic Toretto, Vin Diesel s character in the iconic street racing movie The Fast and the

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1 Bennett 1 Shaun Bennett 10/23/2018 Roadside America Dr. Bob Bednar Research Paper I live my life a one quarter mile at a time. This is the famous line that is spoken by Dominic Toretto, Vin Diesel s character in the iconic street racing movie The Fast and the Furious (2001). The movie has now spawned 9 sequels, 8 filmed at the time of writing this, and one spin off. The franchise has taken its characters all around the globe and has moved from a basic movie about street racing to being over the top action movies with many twists and turns. I will be only focusing on the first movie and how it helped change car culture from the hot rod era to the new era of import tuners. As Fitzgerald writes It started around 1992 and the movement began when young Asian-Americans began altering Honda Civics and other small import coupes to perform like hot rods. (Fitzgerald 1). Unlike the hot rod culture many consumers buy new cars with values over $15000 and then invest more then the car value in after market parts like new engines, super chargers, and even high-tech entertainment systems so they can be heard from a far. While it started with the Asian-American youth it then branched out to other cultures particularly of Latino and white youth. The current import scene includes a diverse group of enthusiasts across the nation and internationally (Kwon 1). When the scene

2 Bennett 2 started it was primary Japanese sub-compact cars but has branched out to European models and more recently domestic cars such as the Ford Focus, Dodge Neon, and Chevrolet Cavalier. (Kwon 8). The film The Fast and the Furious is part of a different genre of film which Dave Greven dubs the double-protagonist film (Greven 22). Unlike the other road movies that have come out it goes against the normal arc type of the couple on the run, or when two of the same sex main characters the buddy movie. The film like Greven states in his premise is the central conflict is a complex negation for power between two protagonists (Greven 22). In the film you have two different characters both trying to shift the narrative. One being Dom who is the leader of the street racing crew and like a father figure to the others. Dom is always looking out for his family no matter what even if it puts himself into danger, as you see with the fall out of what happens to Jesse. Then you have Brian who is this undercover cop who is supposed to infiltrate the street racing scene to find out who has been robbing trucks. The two do not start out as friends but more as enemies due to Brian picking a fight with Dom s best friend Vince. Brian decides the only way he can make it into the upper echelon of the street racers is to jump into the next race, his entry into the next race is cash and the pink slip to his car. He loses the race to Dom due to blowing his engine and is forced to give Dom a 10 second car. Through the film you can see the shift in the relationship from enemies to family much like in another cop/outlaw film Point Break. While Brian is searching for the culprits he is looking everywhere but at Dom s crew due to being in with them. After race wars Dom decides to pull one more job even though they are down a man in Jesse. This leads to Brian having to admit that he is a cop to Dom sister Mia to get her to help him track down Dom. From there it is then admitted to the whole crew and Brian is now forced to try and bring Dom in. the end scenes show one final street race between

3 Bennett 3 the two as enemies again but afterwards Dom wrecks his car. Brian still owing Dom a 10 second car decides to give him his, so he can get away from the police. Just like in both films the cop has the chance to bring in the outlaw but does not due to the time spent together. Films in this genre show a different way to tell the story now its not so black and white on who is right and who is wrong you know have a chance to be able to decide who you feel is right even thought the moral obligation may be wrong. Also this helps bring the road movie away from the two types that you hade of the outlaw couple always on the run or the buddy/ buddy cop movie where you were forced to side with the main characters of the film. I grew up in this culture, when the film came out in 2001 I was eleven years old. My older brother Mikey was seventeen years old and was just getting into the culture. He had other friends that were also in the culture, and all of them worked on each other s cars. The first car I remember he had was a Nissan 240SX. Which is one of the prominent cars in the culture. In Japan the car is known as the Nissan Silvia which in japan was a well-balanced rear-wheeldrive coupe was prized as the perfect car for the extreme sport of drifting. (Lerner 80). While many jumped on the band wagon that was the 240SX, another car that many tried to tune due to how cheap they were was the Honda Civic. The issue with the Civic was the stock engine Lerner makes a valid point the first step to a fast Civic: junk the engine (Lerner 80). The Civic was one of the cheaper cars that you could get your hands on. I remember a time when my brother bought two Civics for $1500 one that was going to be the car worked on and the other was just a junk car to get spare parts off. The Civic was the tuner car of the late eighties because of the cost of the car Ben Stewart writs especially cheap and plentiful Honda Civics, much the way an earlier generation of hot rodders reworked affordable family cars from the 50s (Stewart 70) Most of my brother s friends all got into the culture due to the film. They saw it as a way to be

4 Bennett 4 with the changing times, but also found as something that could do with friends that was a cheaper hobby. Ten years later I was stationed in Japan. While being out there I saw another aspect to the culture. While state side many where trying to make the cars go faster down the track, in Japan since most of the cars are rear wheeled drive they built their cars for drifting. A sport that started in the early 1970 s with a former motorcycle racer named Kunimitsu Takahashi at the helm. At the time Takahashi was a sport car racer who occasionally purposefully oversteering to power through the corners (Axion Magazine). Drifting shows the brute force that the car has. In Japan I had a lot of friends that got into the drift scene, many of them driving the Toyota Supra due to how readily available they are. Many military personal get into drift cars and track cars while out there due to being trapped on the small island of Okinawa because it gave them the freedom to work on something and make changes to it while being stuck in a life that was set in stone. With the change in the cars that were being worked on and showed off also came a change in the way the cars were showed off. Car shows went from being in big show rooms with little life, that made you feel like you were walking around at the antique roadshow. The new car shows were described as one part car show, one part night club and two parts bikini contest (Stewart 70). This new car show was called hot import nights which began in years prior to the release of The Fast and the Furious in This new car show went away from just showing off the car, it went further and showed all the aftermarket parts now that you can buy and use. Just like the sound systems that are used in the culture the show room is a buzz with heavy bass from EDM. With the new tuner culture also helped bring around the DJ culture both cultures evoke strong emotions: the sensation of mastery, the love of a chosen community, and the feeling of joyful escape from the routines of everyday life (Onion 276).

5 Bennett 5 In conclusion the film The Fast in the Furious not only helped shift the culture from Asian-Americans to the youth Latin-American and to white youths from middle America. It also helped further the new genre of film of the double-protagonists in its films. Even thought in the long run the movies get more into buddy assemble movies.

6 Bennett 6 Bibliography Fitzgerald, Kate. "Import hot-rod market fuled by youth." Automoive News (2000): 28. print. Greven, David. "Contemporry Hollywood Masculinity and the Double-Protagonist film." Cinema Journal, 48, number 4 (summer 2009): print. Kwon, Soo Ah. "Autoexoticizing: Asian American Youth and the Import Car Scene." Journal of Asian American Studies vol 7 number 1 (February 2004): print. Lerner, Preston. "Tuning Japanese." Popular Science vol. 262 iss. 3 (march 2003): 80. print. Magazine, Axiom. "The Legendary Toyota AE86 and the Origins of Drift Racing." 2nd july injapan.gaijinpot.com. webpage. 20th october Onion, Rebecca. "Driving Off Into the Sunset: The California Street-Racing and Mobile-DJ Scenes." Virginia Quarterly Review (2015): print. Stewart, Ben. "Wild in the Streets." Popular Mechanics (2005): Web. The Fast and the Furious. Dir. Rob Cohen. Perf. Paul Walker Vin Diesel DVD.

Japanese Super cars. In alphabetical order these cars are:

Japanese Super cars. In alphabetical order these cars are: Japanese Super cars If you want a seriously fast and exclusive car for not much money, this section is for you! Some of the cars listed below can be bought for as little as 3000 / R40 000 in the UK None