Gulam, Joshua and Elliott, Fraser and Feinstein, Sarah (2022) Wheel Men: The Blue-Collar Masculinities of The Fast Saga. Contemporaries @Post45.
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Abstract
Time and again in Fast & Furious, Dom and his team of street racers find themselves outmatched and outgunned. In the later films, for example, they are regularly pitted against supervillains – shady individuals such as Charlize Theron’s Cipher, the cyberterrorist with seemingly unlimited resources as her disposal. Yet, each time, Dom and his team find a way to win, improvising rough-and-ready solutions to the world-ending scenarios that confront them. What’s interesting in this regard is how these solutions gesture back to the franchise’s humble origins; so that, even as Fast & Furious has relocated its protagonists within the high-stakes world of international espionage, Dom and his team still display the same affiliation with sites and symbols of working-class culture (the muscle car, the garage, the street, and so on).
In its repeated staging of these underdog battles, the franchise articulates a populist image of blue-collar heroism that merits further critical attention. Scholars and critics tend to focus on questions of race and gender when analysing Fast & Furious, paying attention to the way in which the franchise upholds a post-racial and hyper-masculinist ethos (see Beltrán 2005). Yet, class is just as important to the films’ enduring success and legacy. Indeed, a key part of what has made Fast & Furious so popular is the way that it resonates with issues and debates
around the nature of blue-collar work in post-industrial USA. In this piece, we begin to unpack some of these complexities around class and gender in the franchise, by analysing the blue-collar credentials of the heroes and how these are expressed in terms of a curiously macho brand of techno-phobia.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Keywords: | Fast & Furious; Action cinema; Masculinity; Class; Blue-collar; Fast Saga; Vin Diesel; Dominic Toretto; Charlize Theron; Cipher |
| Faculty / Department: | Faculty of Creative Arts & Humanities > School of Creative and Performing Arts |
| Depositing User: | Joshua Gulam |
| Date Deposited: | 07 Dec 2022 16:58 |
| Last Modified: | 07 Dec 2022 16:58 |
| URI: | https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/3718 |
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