The Reasonably Paced and The Tender-Hearted

Or, if you prefer: 2 Reasonably Paced, 2 Tender Hearted

Listen, every Fast and the Furious fan loves to talk about the scene in Fast Five where they tow the bank vault through Rio De Janeiro. And I get it. It is an elephantine dose of adrenaline straight into your eyeballs. Watching it is like seeing your life flash before your eyes, except it isn’t your life— filled as it is with work and laundry and “just circling back” emails— it’s Vin Diesel’s significantly tighter t-shirt wearing life. You finish viewing the Rio bank vault scene and suddenly you have lost all of your adult language skills. It’s just “VROOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMM” and “AHHHHHHHHH” for the rest of your days and, frankly, thank God. What business did you have using all of those unnecessary adverbs and direct articles anyway?

That’s not my favorite scene in Fast Five, though. The scene I’ve rewatched dozens of times comes immediately after the vault has been dragged around by those two somehow-bulletproof Dodge Chargers, after roughly five million police cars and one Brazilian bank have been reduced to near-Biblical piles of rubble, and after multiple overly knotty plot lines have been hastily tied up with a cute bit of narrative yadda yadda yadda-ing.

In my favorite scene, nothing explodes and no muscles are flexed.

Here’s the set-up. Our heroes are back at their spacious Brazilian hideout/indoor racetrack/warehouse. The vault has been successfully procured. There is a quick moment of faux tension as Ludacris (playing a Miami-based-auto mechanic-turned-world-class-computer hacker named Tej Parker) engages in some fussy safecracking business involving electronic handprints, but there’s zero doubt as to what’s about to go down. In a single transcendent instant, the heavens part, the vault opens and (most importantly) the air is filled with the single hardest accordion riff in the history of popular music.

Oh dammit, we need to slow down and talk about “Danza Kuduro” for a second, don’t we?

You all, I am a middle-aged White dad in Milwaukee. I never had the privilege of attending a Puerto Rican or Dominican wedding in the 2010s; I’m told that if I had, I would understand the magnetic power of this song more fully. More importantly, I never strode into a dance hall in 1980s Angola— the one place in the world where I could have witnessed “Danza’s” titular musical style in its embryonic form. Have you heard this back story? Kuduro was a musical response to Angola’s late 20th century civil war (that conflict being both a tragic aftershock from Portuguese colonization as well as one of many cursed tentacles of the Cold War). It was developed as a celebration of perseverance and resistance that nodded explicitly to collective trauma (its herky jerky dance moves are said to reference battlefield injuries) while also, quite pointedly, sounding good as hell. It spread alongside the Angolan diaspora, first to Portugal and then across the world. As far as back stories for Latin pop bangers go, that’s a pretty good one.

I’m not equipped to tell you whether Don Omar and Lucenzo’s 2010 reggaeton tribute does the genre of Kurduro justice. Neither artist is Angolan, and their hit song is definitely more San Juan than Luanda, but there is something about that exclamatory “Plop! Plop! Plop! Plop! Plop!” at the beginning that feels powerful enough to single-handedly build a post-colonial bridge across the Atlantic. Or it does to my imperfect ears, at least.

What I can tell you is that I am currently writing this essay from one the least “CARIBBEAN DANCE HALL AIR HORN SIREN!” venues imaginable (a hip but extremely White coffee shop/brewery on the west side of Milwaukee— nothing but blond wood, geometric pastels and seasonal sours in tulip glasses), and yet, because I am currently mainlining “Danza Kuduro” through my headphones, I am 100% prepared to flip over every West Elm table in this joint and single-handedly trigger a visit from the fire marshall. Just a few minutes ago, no lie, the guy who makes those “Manitowoc Minute” comedy videos walked in to get a coffee, and I was *this close* to running up to him and yelling “Oi! Oi! Oi, ya, Oi! Oi! Oi!” Had I offered him an earbud, I think he would have understood.

But back to the Brazilian warehouse. Your man Ludacris successfully opens the safe, because of course he does. Fast Five is a celebration of many things, but foremost among them is professional competence. As “Danza Kuduro” bumps in the background and a Scrooge McDuck-quantity of money falls out of the vault, the camera jumps to reveal each character’s reactions. Tyrese (well, the character played by Tyrese, but you get the point) flashes a huge smile and launches himself forward ecstatically. Gal Gadot laughs. Sung Kang looks both nonplussed and frustratingly cool, which is his whole deal. Tego Calderon and Don Omar (the same Don Omar from the song!) make a mess of a deck of cards. Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster embrace. Vin Diesel directs his perma-brood heavenward. And I, on my couch at home, smile a big dumb ear-to-ear grin because I’m getting to witness one of the most delightful human sights imaginable: A group of buddies who have [long sigh] *been through something* receiving a bountiful payoff and reacting in a manner befitting their core humanity. As either Don Omar or Lucenzo might say: “Plop! Plop! Plop! Plop! Plop!”

There is a new Fast and the Furious movie coming out this week. I’m amped for it, but you already knew that. I love this overstuffed mess of a franchise so much. I don’t love it because it makes me a better person or because it charts a course towards collective liberation. There is a version of this essay where I try to sell you on why Fast and The Furious matters (Its populist depiction of a functional multicultural micro-community? The way it evolves from first embracing and then subverting toxic masculinity tropes? Its skepticism toward the carceral state and its soft-hearted belief in redemption, forgiveness and [ahem]… family?). I think I could stick at least a couple of those landings. To do so would be to miss the point of the films, though.

For one thing, for everything I love about the Fast series’ epistemology and general vibes, there are fifteen more things that are just profoundly not my speed (pointedly, I’m not a car guy, in fact I’m very much an anti-car guy; I could also do without each film’s perfunctory scene of bikini-clad women gyrating in parking lots, to say nothing of all the punching and blowing stuff up). I probably should have disclosed this earlier, but I am neither all that fast nor all that furious. Oh, and I think The Rock is corny.

But more than any of that, it’s pretty insulting to assume these movies need a Vox-style apologia in the first place. This is one of the most popular film series in history! I can guarantee that Vin Diesel isn’t sitting around hoping that some weak-kneed, hot-dog-fingered newsletter writer in Milwaukee might finally pitch his life’s work to a nation of Fresh Air listeners. He’s doing fine. He already has his family.

The appeal of big dumb movies like Fast and the Furious are often explained away as mere escapism. Living a human life is too often full of dread and drudgery, so we enjoy sitting in a dark theater and turning off our brains for a couple of hours. That’s not actually why I love these films, though. When Ludacris opens the bank vault and Don Omar and Lucenzo’s voices start bouncing off of the walls of that cavernous Rio warehouse, the emotion I’m feeling isn’t escape, it’s joy. I’m just absolutely delighted that these characters— who I definitely don’t understand and who would likely have very little patience with me in real-life— are having a great time.

I love the "opening the bank vault” scene, because I get to see all of those silly cinematic faces share a pure moment of triumph, and I am immediately reminded of all of the most unselfconscious, stupid-happy moments of my own life: the first time I kissed my wife after a night out at the Chili’s in Richmond, Indiana; the moment I returned from a year in Sweden, threw my bag on the ground of the Houston airport, and smothered my two best friends in an absolute mess of a bear hug; the time (just yesterday!) when my wife and I were sitting in the silence of Quaker meeting and suddenly we were interrupted by our kids’ extremely distinctive, decidedly non-contemplative laughs from down in the basement.

More importantly, I look at those faces and I notice, for a split second, all the things I’m suddenly not thinking about: my own ego and ambition, my thirsty quest for others’ validation, my pettier wounds and resentments. None of this is about escape. I am not running away from the world’s ills. It’s much more profound than that— for thirty big dumb seconds, I get a break from the emotions and distractions that prevent me from delighting in (and therefore actually being present for) other human beings.

This past Friday, I DJ’ed a karaoke birthday party for our good friends’ nine-year-old daughter. It was such a mess, in the absolute best way. At one point my six-year-old and another of the younger attendees cloistered themselves in a bedroom before reappearing with a perfectly realized, partially choreographed performance of Shakira’s one-time World Cup anthem “Waka Waka (This Time For Africa).” A few minutes later, the birthday girl asked that the living room sofa be vacated so she could perform an extremely emotive interpretive dance to Taylor Swift’s “Gold Rush.” Stellar moments all around.

Now, at one point, did I make the ill-advised decision to play a group’s “special request for the birthday girl,” which turned out to be a Katy Perry song that begins with the line “There’s a stranger in my bed” and somehow goes downhill from there? Yes, mistakes were made. But the event was still perfect, because all the adults in attendance got to bear witness to the exact moment when a crew of elementary-aged girls discovered one of the most basic truths of human existence— namely that closing your eyes and scream-singing a song you adore alongside your best friends rules so hard.

This is not an essay about how you should love The Fast and The Furious franchise. These are films that come fully drenched in Axe Body Spray. They care less about plot continuity than Katy Perry’s “Last Friday Night” does about propriety. They are unceasingly loud and explode-y. If you have the sense that they are not for you, you’re probably right.

I definitely don’t need you to share my precise cinematic affectations. What I do hope for you, though, is that your life is both full of acutely perfect moments of un-self-conscious delight and that you actually notice them when they are occurring. Perhaps those moments come when a beat drops, when a baby coos, or when a wildflower reveals itself on the forest floor. Perhaps you find them in a line of poetry or a particularly life-changing fudge brownie or in the manufactured chaos of a Real Housewives episode.

I don’t care what those moments are for you. I just hope that whenever you experience them, you realize that they aren’t drawing you away from the rest of us. If there is a version of all of us that is worth loving and fighting for, it is the version that knows how it feels when a big stupid smile involuntarily takes over our face and, at least for a second, we have nothing to prove.

End notes:

Song of the week:

I mean, come on, you know what it was going to be. If you want to be able to hear the song with no distractions, I’ve linked to it in the collected “song of the week” playlist on Apple Music or Spotify].

If, however, you want to see “Danza Kuduro’s” actual cameo in Fast Five, that clip is below. As you can see, it soundtracks not only the scene that I love so much but also the movie’s bonkers epilogue. Stick with it and you’ll witness our heroes make either very excellent or very poor decisions with their money [also, full disclosure: there’s some unnecessary objectification of women, big dumb car fetishization and extremely unsafe Autobahn driving in the latter half of the clip; like I say, if your assumption is “these movies aren’t for me,” trust that gut!]

As for the White Pages subscriber discussion tomorrow: I mean, all this talk about lovely moments of acute beauty demands a counter-point, right? That’s right, we’re doing an all time favorite, the “complain about a tiny annoyance that [cue Upper Midwestern voice] ‘you know, isn’t really a big deal’ but that totally grinds our gears.” That goes down tomorrow, in paid subscribers’ inboxes. PLOP! PLOP! PLOP! PLOP! PLOP! PLOP!