Refusing Narrative Time as Grief Practice

After Paul Walker died in a car accident, Brian O'Conner got to live.

Universal shut down production of Furious 7 with the film half-shot, before conferring with his family, deciding that Walker's own brothers would be 3D-scanned to recreate his likeness through the use of CGI. Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth wrote an original (and award-winning) tribute to Walker, which plays against the final shot of the film, breaking the fourth wall as both Dominic Toretto and Vin Diesel say goodbye to not a friend, but a brother. The relationship between Diesel and Walker was not just an on-screen camaraderie, but a real-life friendship deeper than some men can claim to be comfortable displaying in public: Diesel had no qualms whatsoever about grieving openly for Walker.1 Diesel named his daughter Pauline, and Toretto named his son Brian. 

It's easy to write off The Fast Saga as explosion-riddled, brain-numbing blockbuster fodder, but it wasn't always that way. Once, these films purported to offer niche insights into the world of street racing and the connections between the people involved. Not that audiences have minded the series' transformation into a special effects powerhouse: the franchise is in the top-ten all-time highest grossing list, competing against Marvel and Star Wars.2

As the franchise has changed, though, the films' most enduring sentiment remains the same: family is everything. And death does nothing to disturb that — even while the body count increases exponentially from Fast Five onward, as the studio sought to widen the audience by shifting the films' focus away from street racing culture, and the stakes went from uncovering the culprit pawning stolen DVD players to stopping international criminal teams building doomsday devices. The films and their stories continue to serve as a blueprint for how to deal with grief in a way that honors people by refusing to let them go, to let them pass, to let their memories fade.

The Fast family's ability to transcend death is not just Walker's continued life through Brian O'Conner but also Han Lue's continued presence through the series. After Han (Sung Kang) died in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, every other film in the franchise directed by Justin Lin refused to move forward in narrative time. The storyworld all takes place prior to Han's supposed end, despite the fact that his 2011 Lexus LFA from Fast Five now exists before his coveted "Mona Lisa" of the drifting world, a 2001 Nissan Silvia. The films' in-universe chronological order runs: The Fast and the Furious (2001), 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003), Fast & Furious (2009), Fast Five (2011), Fast & Furious 6 (2013), The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006), Furious 7 (2015), The Fate of the Furious (2017), F9 (2021) — with Fast X coming in 2023. That's not even counting the short films, animated show, and spin-offs. A series spanning two decades suspends linear time progression in favor of a consistent internal storyworld, disregarding many errors of continuity.

Mikhail Bakhtin (in)famously critiqued the narratological focus on time as linear consistency by proposing the concept of chronotope (essentially space-time) to describe the way temporality blends and blurs the relationship to spatial understandings in a story.3 In the terms of the Russian formalists, the fabula refers to the events within the narrative, but how events are organized is essentially the sjuzhet. Any difference between the two within the storyworld results in a difference in diegesis, with the audience experiencing the "discourse time" rather than the "narrative time" of the storyworld: a dissonance between how long it takes to consume the media and how much time actually passes in the text itself. This dissonance, in The Fast Saga, is rendered irrelevant, because the self-aware films are concerned with their own internal narrative — in other words, it doesn't matter when something happened in the plot (or in the audience's memory of viewing the films), but rather what effect it has on the storyworld, chronology irrelevant.

To start at the beginning, Brian owes Dom a car. In return for Brian's allegiance, Dom invites him to his barbecue. In this world, an invite to have a Corona and say grace is akin to adoption. Not even betrayal is enough to get voted off the island; Brian's undercover status pushes him out but his love for Dom and Mia always pulls him back in. Once ingratiated into "the family," Brian gets the shovel talk before taking Mia out — and vulnerability from Dom, who reveals the gruesome death of his father, Jack. In the last stock car race of the season, Jack's car had its bumper clipped by another racer, sending Toretto Sr. into the wall at top speed. Dom tells Brian he heard the screaming as his father burned, only to find out shortly after that Jack died on impact — and it was Dom who had been screaming. When he ran into the other racer the next week, Dom hit him with a wrench. Just once — until he realized he couldn't stop hitting him, and only stopped after he couldn't lift his arm anymore. Brian's supervisors warn him that Dom is capable of great violence, showing the pictures from the arrest report: Dom permanently disfigured the racer. This moment is the warning that precedes Dom at every introduction. Though other characters may find it understandable that Dom's response to father's death was violence, to injure a man so grievously, whatever the reason, is perhaps not simple to forgive, and Dom can do nothing to remove it from his reputation.

This act of revenge serves as the series' first — and enduring — dealing with grief. Dom now sees time as a threat, and hedges his bets against any possible future, living his life, as he says, "a quarter mile at a time." From the beginning of The Fast Saga, grief represents a limitation of time, and a precursor to the later films' desire to return to when those they loved were still alive.

Dana Luciano argues that grief has long "constituted one of the body's ways of acknowledging the objective status of linear time."4 It is grief's pain, she writes, that becomes "tolerable" when a new order of time, a "slow time of deep feeling," is made personal and intimate. Grief is not just a function of memory but a physical response. The Fast Saga translates this response into increasing levels of fatality as the series progresses. Perhaps it is because the characters, like many of us, cannot confront the reiterative and invasive memories of the pain caused by loss. Instead, they hunt and kill the reasons for grieving, and we watch as the narrative slows and returns to each moment again and again. But the pull towards revenge never fizzles out. The Fast and the Furious ends in chasing down Johnny Tran after he killed Jesse in a drive-by, just as Fast & Furious is revenge for Letty, and Furious 7 is revenge for Han.

These entanglements of (re)united friends (and/or family)from all over the character's histories makes clear that time distances revenge from grief. In 2 Fast 2 Furious, as Brian is attempting to reingratiate himself into law enforcement, he recruits childhood friend Roman (Tyrese Gibson) as his accomplice. At first, tension: "Pig," Roman spits at him. The two are long estranged — it is only after working together again that Roman can forgive Brian for what he sees as a betrayal. Had Brian known about Roman's arrest and imprisonment, he would have done anything to get him out of it, just as he did with Dom. If he could, he would change the past. By the time we finally reach Tokyo Drift in the chronology of The Fast Saga's timeline, Han's perspective of finding trust within cycles of grieving makes more sense:

There is nothing worth more to him than people, and the realization that time moves forward. His words reveal his actions. Pursued through Tokyo by villain Takashi, Han slows down his getaway to allow Sean's 2006 Mitsubishi Evo IX a chance to escape. But Han is T-boned in traffic, causing his 1997 Mazda RX-7 to crash and burst into flames, seemingly killing him.

In the final moments of Tokyo Drift, sidekick Twinkie approaches Sean, the new Drift King, with an offer for a race against some newcomer. "Said he knew Han," Twinkie says. "Said Han was family." For Han's memory, Sean can't refuse, and agrees to a race with none other than Dominic Toretto, driving a 1970 Plymouth Road Runner he had won from Han years before.

We don't see the conversation between Sean and Dom until F7, where it picks up as if a decade hasn't passed, as if the actors haven't aged, as if "Six Days" never stopped playing, as if Han always had a picture of Giselle, as if he always had Letty's cross necklace. And it isn't until F9 that we learn that Han survived and that he, in fact, does look back — saving Elle after her parents were killed.

Emily Friedman has written about the necessary analysis of narrative time when it comes to lengthy bodies of interconnected works, like soap operas and Twitch-streamed gameplays.5 Friedman elaborates on how fans (as audience) for these types of media construct, essentially, their own metanarratives that are "outside" the text, in the conversations among viewing communities in our actual world, the result of which is that "the more that the audience is aware of this metadiegetic level, and the more that it matters, the more emotionally resonant [the] moment is." The Fast Saga plays fast and loose with this. While each movie can be viewed on its own, out of narrative time, Paul Walker's echo in the later movies creates tension between what viewers know and what the narrative shows. Understanding this reality further disrupts the discourse time; the audience can rewatch the first films and know Walker and his character were both alive, but they are stuck with the emotional burden of knowing this will not stay true.

Beyond that, as Friedman argues, the way audiences can interpret, record, and respond to in-progress narratives means they hold some power in the way the story is understood and told, but only to the exten thatt "the fandom perceives itself as being watched, which seems to have an effect on the nature of the creative output [of fan response]."6 Of the Twitter hashtag #JusticeForHan, Lin said upon his return to direct F9, "I give the fans 100 percent credit . . . If none of that happened, and there was no movement, Han would actually stay gone."7 Rising from the grave is not the sole province of one character. Michelle Rodriguez's return as Letty following her supposed murder (but actual amnesiac double-crossing) in Fast & Furious meant that Han's return was not unprecedented. As movies are slowly moving concepts of alternative universes and cyclical/nonlinear time into the mainstream, perhaps audiences are more willing to accept this. But The Fast Saga doesn't even try to explain it. We miss Han, we miss Letty, so they're back. We miss the real Paul Walker, so Brian's alive. After all, why not?

The series' structure is, on the whole, not one of flashback and flashforward, though it contains plenty of both. There are many such scenes within the later films in the series, such as the one in which we witness the death of Dom's father in F9, two decades after its first mention. Narrative theory father-in-law Gerard Genette would call this a question of narrative order, with a "distance" caused by anachrony, a discordance between story sequence and narrative telling.8 But we could also read this as if the movies following Tokyo Drift are essentially all flashback — what Genette would call analepsis, where events take place before their normal order in the chronology. There are many meditations and reflections in the films, replaying events that have already happened through inserting past footage (or retroactively filming dialogue that never originally existed), what Genette describes as questions of frequency, how often an event occurs in discourse and how often it appears diegetically. How many times can we rewatch the death of Han, the death of Letty? We see them over and over, different angles, different imaginings. Did Letty die burning alive? Was she shot in her final breaths of agony? Did Han die from blunt trauma? Was he alive and then ripped apart in an explosion? And what do we make of the fact that everyone in Dom's life burns in a car crash just as his father did?

The characters relive and retell these moments of grief to themselves, to others, each iteration fueling their own stories of revenge and their own paths to finality. The pain doesn't move forward because the films keep cycling back on themselves; Brian indirectly causes Letty to "die," Han trying to kill Owen indirectly leads to Giselle dying, Dom killing Owen indirectly leads to Deckard killing Han, Deckard killing Han indirectly leads to an escalation of events that kill Elena. Family is always family, and so anyone who harms them must always pay. The harm they cause each other is, on some level, immune to retribution — on one hand, because movies of this scope have bits of intertwined lore that must be pulled together somehow, but on the other, because being part of the family has its privileges.

Real-life public mourning for Paul Walker is mirrored in the quest to avenge Han's death in Furious 7. And yet, fans were outraged when Han's assassin, Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), had somehow been embraced as part of "the family" in The Fate of the Furious.9 Even within the film, Dom must grapple with his own conflicted feelings about his core value: villain Cipher tells him it's not family he values most, but instead those few seconds of the quarter mile when his mind is blank and all he does is race. While the crew grapples with Dom's double-dealing, unable to comprehend how he — the rock for them all — could have turned against them and joined the enemy, we, the audience, know that he cannot turn his back on Elena and their son, held captive.

Cipher wants the old Dom, the Dom before he found his family, for her plan. She tugs at his pain to get him to revert to the way he was, to turn back time, forsake the family and become once again a selfish street racer. "I don't want you to beg," Cipher says. "I want you to learn." Rather, she wants him to unlearn his redemption, to become vengeful, to be her pawn. But there is nothing to learn, because Dom already has. Family means everything, even to the Shaws — mother and children — who come together to save Dom's son. If Dom can be forgiven, then why can't Deckard? By valuing family, you can be redeemed. "You know, nothing's more powerful than the love of family," Magdalene Shaw tells Dom. "But you turn that into anger and resentment? Nothing's more dangerous."

In the world of The Fast Saga, Dom must be forgiven. To alleviate the grief, and the suffering caused by it, time must revert again. Deckard is redeemed because Han is alive again, because Han has a family of his own, in protecting Elle. And Dom's long-lost brother Jakob is redeemed because family means everything to Dom; because he understands what it is to be a father, no amount of violence is worth further revenge. And Brian? He's home, with the kids, the safest place they can be, with the fiercest protector (Paul Walker just out of frame).

By F9, everyone in the crew's orbit returns. Dom sees the past for what it was, but only now that he's been able to return so many times, always able to start over. A new home in the Dominican Republic, in Rio, in Havana. Near the end of the film, Dom sees a flashback, himself and his brother as children in the garage with their father.

In the end, Dom takes Little Brian to the racetrack his father drove on.

"Everything I needed to know about life, I learned on this track," Dom tells him.

An endless loop, just as the narrative literally stops and waits, rearranges, retcons, and evaporates linearity, to return to the fans their beloved characters — and to allow memory of one to linger, in a happy life of quiet retirement the actor never got to have.

On Twitter earlier this year, the humorist Ben Flores suggested that "nothing about the fast and furious franchise can be funnier than the fact that they didn't kill paul walker's character off after he died and instead just keep mentioning that he's busy before having his car pull up late to a family barbecue right as the cameras stop rolling."10 But one respondent, admitting he was "a sucker" for this narrative strategy, countered perceptively: "Vin Diesel had the opportunity to create this alternate universe where his best friend was still alive and he decided he was just gonna lean in."11 

For all its explosions, The Fast Saga is a testament to the power of refusing conventional narrative in order to allow emotion to drive its story, to allow grieving to control time.

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Mackenzie Streissguth (@graphitecurator) is an adjunct professor of English at Clark College. Her research ranges from genre theory in rhetoric/composition to fan studies and speculative fiction. She is also a public historian working on reconstructing narratives of print and writing in the rural Pacific Northwest.

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