Thread by @PartyPrat

watch the entire series of fast & the furious

never saw it tokyo drift so i'm immediately struck by how the opening race scene takes place in a vast abandoned residential construction site

considering the move came out in 2006, its an ominous landscape

Considering the series follows the y2k dream of super charged japanese sport coupes owned/driven by young adults, I contrast that with how that exact type of car was dead by the mid 00s as millennials entered into their own lost generation as japanese genxers had a decade earlier

The first films are set around these street races in this economic twilight, the car as the American symbol of upward and literal mobility

fast forward to the 2020s, its absolutely unrealistic to imagine this... so instead they drive exotics in the UAE

This tone just contrasts so much w/ the attitude of the first films: used sports coupes & cars, tuned over years that beat millionaires and their exotics - literally as seen in this clip:

ironically, this gen supra today resells higher than this ferrari

The conditions of and legacy of that Supra is a fascinating one

In 1986 it was known as the Supra Celica, which broke apart into two distinctly different types of cars (RWD sports car Supra, FWD sports coupe celica) this era marks the height of the Japanese economic miracle.

In the early 1990s, you have the height of these two twin models

But by this time, it was already the lost decade, Japan was in economic stagnation/decline and so too was the nation's consumer base that originally produced these sporty cars

im stretching the dates but whats important is you can mark the height & demise of the tunable sport coupe with the nikkei

the T230, the cheaper & lower performing of supras & celicas, is the final death rattle of this legacy. It haunts the Fast & Furious in its peripheries

The last t230 rolls out of the factory & into the grave in 2006

That same year, Fast & Furious Tokyo Drift releases

An american muscle car and a Dodge Viper race in a vast, abandoned mcmansion construction site

They violently crash

30% of all mortgages in 2006 were sub-prime

What's really stuck with me about the 00s is how much influence japanese pop culture had in American pop culture, albeit in a very appropriative, voguey way. IE: Fast and Furious.



Like a psychedelic tracer image of the futuricity forecast in Blade Runner

It's like the USA lurched thru the ultimate singularity event of Y2K, popculture of PURE futurity & was left grasping for the new the Japanese economic miracle forecast the 21st century to be.. except the Japanese Future production machine imploded in 1992

Japan & the US have this sort of symbiotic relationship across the occulted ends of the world map that plants europe at the centre. America built up post-war Japan in its image, its explosive growth in the 20th cent. was seen as a sort of vindication of America's model of capital

So when Japan just enters into this yawning 30 year long period of decline, it prefaces this sort of melancholia for The New America put faith on Japan for. What is cyberpunk if not for garish tokyoesque vertical sprawl & token neon katakana. So too, 30 yrs later w/ techwear

I mentioned y2k before but yeah

it segues into this

This thread kind of jabs at why I feel there's a hauntographic, inarticulate longing or melancholia for iconography and design around y2k

anyway heres my meandering thread brought on by watching the fast & the furious

what im trying to say here is 2fast2furious is tangentially cyberpunk

Once i get caught up i think i may expound more on the f&f

It's particularly interesting because it is an ongoing series spanning two decades of pop culture and the car as object or trophy represents a sort of tasseographic divination of the state of american consumerism &desire

watched 2009's 4th in the series (fast and furious) and it was a slog more or less representing this awkward shift from stand alone films as yester the prior standard of trilogies and toward episodic universes as seen with Marvel (2008) but particularly Transformers (2007)...

Now im onto Fast Five (2011), or rather episode 2 as it picks up right where F&F left off. This would in a way complete this transition as its now a cartoon show w/ cars that in this film, has gone full Butch Cassidy & the Sundance kid but they flee to Brazil instead of Argentina

Here is where The Rock joins the series as a sort of US Marshal seeking to capture the nitrous injected neo Wild Bunch outlaws in this yellow filtered favela landscape, making this the series' Western

The US Marshal, strides into the lawless frontier town to lay down the law.

As the old west was tamed, first American outlaws fled to the yet colonized Pampas, but soon after American lawmakers also. South of the US border has in the contemporary American mindset become the new untamed, autonomous American frontier, routinely kept in check by the CIA/FBI

Brazil is an interdasting choice for F5, not only b/c of the above but that in 2009, BRICS the word in town: these were the new contenders to fill the void Japan (1991) & the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis left

Fareed Zakaria coined it the Rise of the Rest

fareedzakaria.com/columns/2008/0…

This article dropped in 2008, the same year the Beijing Olympics formally introduced this speculation to liberal western consciousness. H/e,with Russia &China being rivals, there was particular interest being put into India & Brazil. Ergo; Fast Five, Slumdog Millionaire, Rio, etc