I love movies. There’s something that happens when I really love a movie. It’s just this happy feeling that starts in my stomach and moves up when I can tell something is good. I just smile. I can be anywhere, with anyone, doing anything, but if I love what I’m seeing, I’ll just sit there and grin. It doesn’t happen very often.
Part of the trade off of loving movies as intensely as I do is that I’m disappointed in almost everything. I generally have three or four movies a year that I like, and I see roughly a hundred movies a year. Baby Driver had me smiling within the first five minutes.
I grew up with car people. My best friend and most of my friends in high school were obsessed. I never quite got it. Maybe it was just a little too hyper-masculine for me even then. Or the fact that if you were into cars, you were into cars. Maybe it was the closeted love of the Toyota Prius I’ve had since it's release.
Regardless of how I felt, through my friends, I was exposed to the Fast & Furious franchise. I’ve been dragged into far more of those movies than I’d like, enjoyed one, and slid between indifference and extreme dislike on the other seven. They’re just not for me. I’ve never seen anything that fetishizes American masculine identity quite like Fast & Furious. It’s the ultimate fulfillment of a very deep rooted and outdated view of what it means to be a man in America.
The ‘roided out muscles glisten with sweat. The engines roar. The beer, always Corona, is cold. The costume department looks like it raided the local Buckle. The theme of family is, obviously, the most predominant one. Family is presented as something to be guarded and protected, often violently. It’s a patriarchal, Western, Christian view that allows the men to express sentiments such as love without appearing too "sensitive."
The women, who are few and far between, either serve as love interests or as substitute men, robbed of all qualities not driven by lust or testosterone. And it was fine when it was a niche franchise. For the first four films, it wasn’t trying to appeal to anyone other than the musclebound and motor-headed. But the last two entries made well over a billion dollars worldwide. These are no longer niche. They are the model for modern action movies. And their particularly outdated, Fox News style of masculinity, intentionally or not, is being held up as the American standard.
Enter Baby Driver. Our hero, Baby, is a near-mute, awkward looking kid who dances through the streets of Atlanta to Simon & Garfunkel, Queen, and The Beach Boys. You couldn’t find someone more polar opposite to Vin Diesel. Similar to Fast & Furious, themes of masculinity and family play out in Baby Driver, but in vastly different ways.
The characters around Baby exhibit traits similar to those we see in Fast & Furious franchise, but it’s presented as a threat to the softer and more delicate sensibilities of our hero. He goes out of his way to avoid the violence that accompanies his profession of a getaway driver.
He’s learned sign language in order to communicate with his disabled caretaker. When he does meet his love interest, it’s presented as sweet and innocent. They dance in a laundromat and giggle at the sheer wonder of their love. His motives, which become clearer as the film progresses, are tied up with his personal desires and anxieties as opposed to the broad, patriarchal motivations behind the Fast & Furious leads. It’s an enormously cleansing breath of fresh air in a genre that’s become clogged with sweat and Axe body spray.
It served as a very personal antidote for me as well. My own masculinity is something I’ve struggled with almost as long as I can remember. I’ve never fit in with typical male roles and ideals, and all attempts to force myself into those confines resulted in a deep-seated depression and self-loathing that’s only begun to fade from my life.
It’s been almost a year since I divorced myself entirely from masculine identity and come out as non-binary. Some things have changed since then, I’ve learned to love and embrace all different parts of my personality, many of which I smothered and buried under the label of masculinity. Some things haven’t.
I still love movies. I still scour theater screens for protagonists I can identify with. It’s definitely hard, especially since I still love action movies, which are dominated by sweating, scowling, testosterone fueled MEN. And then there’s Baby Driver, and I’m smiling in my seat.
