* One thing that occurred to me this weekend while I was watching “Furious 7″ was how these films essentially present the multiracial utopia our elites keep promising us. These movies take place not in the world as we know it, but in the alternate-universe multi-hued America that a lot of people were expecting Obama to usher in. Here there is no racism or white privilege, and no tawdry black misbehavior. Michael Brown and George Zimmerman do not exist here. All men here are truly brothers, and all races relate to each other with an egalitarian familiarity that’s actually quite moving. It’s a world where a black guy is a brilliant computer hacker, a blond, blue-eyed white guy has authentic street cred, and a vaguely multiracial guy serves as the charismatic figure who unites everyone.
The thing about this alternate-timeline America is that it doesn’t look like a kind of world the Left would love. Oh, don’t get me wrong, it looks like it would be a nightmare for the sort of culturally conservative, traditionalist whites that the Left hates. It’s full of rap music and tattoos and exotic-looking brown people, many whom project an ambiguous sexuality. But it looks like it would be an equal nightmare for much of the intellectual Left. It’s still a world of loud music and and fast, obnoxious cars where the good-looking alpha males call all the shots and have all the fun and the women exist mainly for sexual gratification. This is still a world where nerdy beta-male Vox editors would spend their high school years getting wedgies from the jocks, and bookish, unattractive women would still fear ending up as childless spinsters with five cats.
A telling detail: A Tesla Model S does not feature anywhere among the cars glorified by the film. Car nuts will know that a Model S is capable of laying down respectable numbers that would easily put it in the same league with the gasoline-powered monsters on display here. But love it or hate it, the Model S is still perceived as a supercar for nerdy white beta males. It doesn’t scream Alpha Male like a rumbling V8.
This is also a world that seems perfectly happy with American global hegemony. One of the central MacGuffins of the film is a super-surveillance device that allows the government to spy on everybody in the world at all times. At no point that I can recall does anybody in the film express ambivalence or concerns about the US government having access to this kind of device; the chief problem everybody has is that the Wrong People are using it. There is no Chomsky-type Leftist handwringing about the immorality of American power.
Oh, and law enforcement in this world is administered by another vaguely multiracial guy according to the principles laid down by noted legal theorist Dirty Harry. Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin would have fared poorly under his constabulary policies.
As Steve has been fond of saying recently, this does not look like a world that would be Good for the Jews. Guys who are still steamed because their grandpa couldn’t get into that WASP country club aren’t going to enjoy a world where Abu Dhabi is the party capital of the globe.
But judging from its fan base, this is a world that the vast majority of the multicultural Obama coalition finds wildly appealing. I saw “Furious 7″ in the same theater where I saw “American Sniper,” and though both showings were packed, there was not a great deal of demographic overlap. (Many of the folks I saw at “American Sniper” were older people who had clearly not been in a movie theater in years; they kept looking around and whispering stuff about how big the seats were.)
America’s elites keep telling us that the teeming brown hordes are our unavoidable destiny. If this is the world those masses want, white males aren’t the ones who ought to be worried. If Paul Walker is any indication, competent, cool-headed white guys (*cough*billclinton*cough*) will continue to do just fine in that world. It’s the staff of the New Republic or the New York Times who will find it a scary place to live.
