On Fast and Furious

Zen literature loves to repeat that anything can be a vehicle for enlightenment. A sutra. A poem. A barking dog. The point isn’t information, but a perceptual shift. A trigger that snaps you out of your head into direct experience. If one fully gives itself to it, they might glimpse at what’s really there: nothing. Emptiness. The nonsense does the work.

By that definition, Fast & Furious qualifies. Insulting as it may be to taste and intelligence, the franchise is now long enough to contain most major archetypal storylines. Hero’s journey. Loyalty. Betrayal. Redemption. Family. Watching Vin Diesel’s best performance is to witness the unfurling of human storytelling. This is how we metabolize consciousness: concepts stacked on concepts. "Turtles all the way down", as Sapolsky puts it.

We are storytellers. Civilization itself is a story made of smaller ones: parables, myths, dogma, science. Somewhere along that spectrum sits the NOS injected street-racing soap opera.

I remember two other movies from my binge years, only marginally less lowbrow: Kingdom of Heaven (2005) and The Last Samurai (2003). At the time, I was convinced I’d glimpsed something essential about the human condition.

In Kingdom of Heaven, Saladin is asked what Jerusalem means to him: "Nothing... and everything."" The line landed clean. How humble and epic from a such a powerful dude.

In The Last Samurai, the closing narration suggests the hero may have "succumbed to his wounds, or found a small measure of peace many search for but few ever find." Pure romanticism. Heavy orientalism. I ate it whole.

In the same tradition of accidental wisdom, Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift delivers this from Han: “It’s who you choose to be around you that lets you know who you are.” That’s about as deep as it gets for a shy 18-year-old.

You get it.

Every decent story says something about the human condition. Zen doesn’t ask you to believe, just to notice. Sometimes it takes a while. In my case, Winnie the Pooh took longer than Fast & Furious. The chrome and bikinis rapidly broke the spell. It’s devastatingly empty, just like the lyrics of the great poet Ludacris suggests: "I live my life a quarter mile at a time." - How sincere, accidental, and devastatingly empty, like a koan for subwoofers.

Jokes aside, Fast & Furious is a colossal waste of life and resources. The movies are one thing. The industry that feeds on eye candy and brain numbing is another. From any Zen or Buddhist angle, it’s hard to defend. There is a tangible reality behind the images. One notably lacking compassion for the environment it burns through.