The New Generation in Hybrids

---

drift, v.
1. To be carried along by currents of air or water.
2. To move leisurely or sporadically from place to place, especially without purpose.

 

Universal takes its "Fast and the Furious" franchise to the streets of Japan, hoping to charge the profitable but repetitive series with a bit of exotic variation. Sequels appeal when they straddle the expected and the unexpected, delivering the original’s formula in new packaging so the consumer doesn’t notice how redundant the whole experience really is. The inclusion of the Japanese racing style "drifting" -- where tires skid as they make sharp turns at high speeds -- is merely a fresh substitution into a tested formula. Cars plus kung fu equals box office champion. [Editor's note: Or rather, a still-impressive third-place showing in its opening weekend returns]

Enter Justin Lin. Already a veteran of Asian American independent cinema (having directed or co-directed the landmarks Better Luck Tomorrow and Shopping for Fangs), the young filmmaker has set the bar high as he steps into Hollywood. His mainstream debut Annapolis fizzled commercially and critically. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift should have been a cakewalk to blockbuster success. The car racing formula shoots itself; Lin’s role is to sit back and let the cars do the talking while Universal claims racial diversity behind the camera as it collects the cash.

Lin’s willing to play their game, but he knows there’s plenty of territory to be won within the formula, as long as it still makes money. Tokyo Drift is an above-average Hollywood teen action with two or three well-edited and well-shot race sequences that rival any in the series thus far (and well-surpassing last year’s disappointing Initial D). The handling of space and locations is very strong, particularly in one scene set in a parking structure and another in the mountains. Lin has successfully recreated the generic template to please the studio and fans of the first two films, but he knows that just as there’s more than one definition to the word drifting, there can be meanings to the car racing genre beneath the superficial. The result is a film that doesn’t tackle serious issues, but sinks them into the formula itself. For that reason, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift could be the first Hollywood blockbuster to reflect an Asian American ethos.

The Outsider

Lucas Black plays Sean, a no-good, Southern-accented, high school loner from Arizona whose car-racing mischief has forced him from town to town to escape the law. This time, he’s chased to Tokyo, where his army dad reluctantly takes him in --under the condition he doesn’t touch a car again. Sean’s an outsider, the prototypical hero/loner of the American myth. Like the cowboy, he rolls into town and saves the day. He lives by morals, but they’re his morals and nobody, be it his father or the rival gang, can stop him.

The superficial variation here is to transplant the outsider to the streets of Tokyo. His sense of morality remains, but what makes the film special from a cultural perspective is that we watch Sean assimilate to Japanese culture without the racist American self-smugness seen in Lost in Translation. No peering down on short Japanese; in fact, it often looks like the 5'10" Black is framed to look the same size as the Japanese men around him. And no offensive jabs at Japanese culture. He’s a fish out of water, but the joke is, the fish learns to live without the water. Sean first sighs that he has to wear a Japanese school uniform, but it never becomes an issue again as he discovers there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with it. He at first stares at Japanese food in confusion, before he realizes it’s pretty good. He’s shocked that he’s expected to understand Japanese at school, but rather than arrogantly rejecting the culture, he learns the language so he can interact with his host society, which is far more than we can say about characters (and producers) of Hollywood films today.

Tokyo Drift contains a surprisingly sensitive portrayal of the community of army brats in Tokyo. There’s an understanding between them that they need to stand up for each other, and that they’re outsiders together. Sean asks an attractive Australian-accented classmate, "Where are you from?" She replies, "From here." He smiles, "No, I mean, where are you from originally?" She shoots back, "Does it matter?" Ethnically, racially, culturally, they’re all drifters, obsessively defining themselves as not quite inside and not quite outside. If they were born or raised in Tokyo and speak Japanese, why are they perpetually labeled as foreigners because of their skin color?

The Cars

"The Fast and the Furious" series has been Hollywood’s most successful line of car porn ever, and even reluctant viewers go into the theater under the assurance that "there will at least be great cars to look at." In these films, cars are feminized and exoticized. That they’re sexy and shiny is as important as their speed. Lots of fetishistic close-ups on decals, rims, and grills, accompanied by hip-hop music and scantily clad models grinding in slow motion.

The fetishism is all present here, and while the underlying gender problematics remain, what’s new in Tokyo Drift is the fetishization of another culture’s vehicular sexiness. While the first film in the series made a point of ogling at quintessentially American muscle cars like the Dodge Charger and the Ford Lightning, Tokyo Drift presents a culture shock of brightly colored smaller racers. Sean calls them "toys" when he first sees them, before he realizes that the smaller sizes are what enable them to "drift." Also, everyone -- even the army brat played by Bow Wow -- is infatuated with this line of cars, and there doesn’t appear to be any alternative. Asian culture suddenly isn’t just different; it’s a source of envy and genuine admiration and desire.

The Mentor

The outsider needs a mentor to help him navigate the inside. Here, he’s Han (played by Sung Kang), thematically the most interesting character in the film because he’s an outsider who looks like an insider. When we first see him, we assume he’s one of a gang of wannabe-yakuza (led by DK, played by Brian Tee), but unlike the villains, he speaks with an American-accented English. As an Asian American, he empathizes with Sean because he too was once an outsider in Tokyo. It’s a revolutionary move by the screenwriters: on the boundary between East and West, the Asian American is identified as American rather than Asian.

The Training

Toward the beginning of the auto racing film, the hero must lose. After a rigorous training period, he will emerge able to redeem himself. In Tokyo Drift, the training consists of un-learning an American style of racing and replacing it with the style of the Tokyo underworld. As he learns the hard way, zipping fast through cramped spaces and sharp turns is ridiculous. To win, he needs to learn to drift, a fundamentally different form of driving that relies on momentum and feeling rather than sheer speed. However, unlike say, The Karate Kid, which equates martial arts training with tapping into ancient Eastern wisdom, Tokyo Drift equates drifting with becoming oneself rather than becoming Japanese. It’s significant that it’s the Sung Kang and Bow Wow characters that cheer him on in these training sequences. "It’s not ‘wax on, wax off,’" advises Han, citing Mister Miyagi’s famous mantra. Instead, drifting is about the driver’s ability to feel the road in a new way.

The Girl

There’s gotta be a girl, and she has to love cars. Here, it’s the Aussie Neela, played by newcomer Nathalie Kelley. She’s also an outsider, and in many ways, she, like Han, advises Sean on how to adjust to the Tokyo underground. And like so many of the characters, she’s a drifter in both senses of the word. In the film’s surprisingly effective romantic interlude, she takes Sean on a balletic mountain ride, drifting down the mountain like an elegant skier. Neela displays complete control over drifting, but without the coarse and dangerous displays of machismo. For Sean, the ride down the mountain is the ultimate car porn seduction: the feminized vehicle takes the man for a ride rather than vice versa.

Not surprisingly, the logic of the races still positions women as observers rather than participants (unlike 2 Fast 2 Furious which featured Devon Aoki and her pink rice rocket). Off the track, women -- Japanese and non-Japanese alike -- are trophies for the men ("the winner of the race gets me" says a woman in one of the film’s stupidest moments). But what is surprising is who gets the trophies. I feared that Sean’s reward for his Tokyo victories would be a nice Japanese girl, but that’s never the case. ("Why don’t you get yourself a Japanese girl like all the other white guys here?" asks Han, in a self-conscious play on America’s culture of Asian fetishism.) It’s also empowering to see the Asian American Han as a sexual aggressor, tonguing random models in a hip backroom dance club and using his drifting skills to woo the digits from some unsuspecting passerbys. It’s unfortunate that Asian American male sexuality has to come at the expense of female dignity, but I’ll take what progress I can get provided we acknowledge that there’s still plenty of territory in the genre’s template that needs reworking.

It’s also unfortunate that Neela needs to be saved by Sean from an evil Yakuza whose poor English makes even an American viewer yearn for subtitles. At best, we can interpret her preference for Sean to be a cultural drifter’s attraction to another "in-between" person, but at worst, this is simply another case of yellow peril paranoia.

The Showdown

As the training comes to a close, there needs to be a transition into the final showdown between the hero and the villain. The hero needs to confront certain personal demons and dilemmas (frequently involving the girl) and learn to make the necessary adjustments before suiting up for the big race, which he inevitably wins. (In a Hollywood racing film, that’s no spoiler.)

In Tokyo Drift, Sean finds his formula for success in the car he chooses to ride against his Japanese nemesis. With the help of his friends, Sean fixes up a beat-up Ford Mustang and equips it with a Nissan engine. With an American style and a Japanese heart, Sean exemplifies the second definition of drifting. Culturally, he’s in-between two cultures and he wins because he takes the best of both worlds to the track, turning his hybridity from a liability into a strategy.

The race itself is not a showdown of East and West, where Sean wins because of his American inclination for speed. In a great article by Jeff Yang, Justin Lin is quoted as saying, "In the original script for this film, Sean, the movie’s hero, wins the big race by kicking in a hidden nitrous tank and blowing past the bad guy. Anyone who knows anything about drifting would have just laughed his ass off at that. It just makes no sense: You can’t win that way. Drifting is not about power." In other words, Sean wins because he’s absorbed the culture of drifting and learns how to make it work for him.

The Comic Outro

After the showdown is the obligatory comic outro. Tonally, the film lightens up a bit, the humorous sidekicks make their reappearance, the music switches into party mode, the girl winks at the hero, and there’s a comic punchline that sends the audience out with a sense of closure but also prepared for another sequel.

I can’t divulge what happens in these closing moments. (In a Hollywood racing film, this would be the spoiler.) Let’s just say one of the guys Han used to kick it with makes a cameo in an American muscle car, and he cockily thinks he’s ready for the Tokyo racing scene. Now Sean’s the mentor.

Drifting’s about crossing boundaries, defying categorization, and unlearning prescribed traditions to find one's own self. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift is about a community of drifters that prove it’s more exciting to be in-between cultures than simply either "Japanese" or "American." Though there isn’t an Asian American in sight, the film’s comic outro unexpectedly makes it cool to drift the line between outsider and insider.

Date Posted: 6/15/2006