When We Mourn Paul Walker, We’re Really Mourning The Death Of Male Friendships

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Furious 7

Last month, Paul Walker won a Teen Choice Award.

If you’re thinking, “Wait a second, didn’t Paul Walker die almost two years ago in a car accident? How is he still winning awards voted on by teens?” the short answer – duh! – is Furious 7, which did over $1.5 billion in theaters across the globe earlier this year, good enough for the fifth spot on the list of the highest-grossing films of all-time. Furious 7 is available digitally now and hits DVD and Blu-ray September 15, three days after what would have been Walker’s 42nd birthday.

The slightly longer answer to “Why is Paul Walker still winning awards?” is, I’d argue, because we’re still mourning him. But that raises another question: Why are we still mourning Paul Walker?

In his 1997 book Brain Droppings, George Carlin writes, “I dread the deaths of certain super-celebrities. Not because I care about them, but because of all the shit I have to endure on television when one of them dies. All those tributes and retrospectives. And the bigger the personality, the worse it is.” Carlin, ever the curmudgeon, is complaining about TV here, but his beef applies to the Internet as well, particularly social media, where mourning recently deceased celebrities is a common – if at times cloying – practice. Think back, for instance, to the outpourings of grief on Twitter after Michael Jackson, Steve Jobs, Whitney Houston, and Robin Williams died. There was a massive collective lament on Twitter after Paul Walker died, too, and again when Furious 7 came out, and again briefly when he posthumously won a Teen Choice Award. I also sometimes see people tweeting about him when one of his movies is on TV.

But Paul Walker, as much as I love him, was not Michael Jackson, Steve Jobs, Whitney Houston, or Robin Williams. He may have been, in critic Armond White’s words, “the most expressive B-movie star of his era – more radiant than any A-lister,” but he was still a B-movie star. Indeed, a lot of people would probably be hard pressed to name a non-Fast and Furious movie he was in. Yet almost two years after his death, people are still regularly mourning Paul Walker online. Why?

Part of the answer here is that Furious 7, specifically its tender coda that subtly breaks the fourth wall, is purposefully a tribute to Walker that sanctions fans’ grieving. When the lights came up in the theater last April, I wasn’t the only one who had shed a tear or two or three. I vividly remember hearing girls weep during Titanic and seeing vets get choked up during Saving Private Ryan, but Furious 7 is the only time I have been in a movie theater full of young men fighting back tears, and in some cases losing. It was as if the film had tapped into feelings they didn’t even know they had and couldn’t control. Even more interesting was that when I searched Twitter after I got home, I discovered that my and my theater’s reaction wasn’t especially unusual.

Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth’s “See You Again” from the soundtrack – which broke the records for the most Spotify streams in a day and in a week when it came out last spring – also gives fans permission to grieve. The video for the song, replete with clips from the series and which I still can’t watch without becoming emotional, has almost 920 million views on YouTube as of this writing.

But Vin Diesel’s modeling of grief is perhaps the most interesting. For most of 2015, Diesel has been eulogizing Walker in every interview, at every promotional stop, and in every other Facebook and Instagram post, referring to Walker as his brother, using the term of endearment Pablo, talking candidly about how sad he was after Walker’s death, and posting pictures and videos of the two of them together. In March he announced that he had named his newborn daughter Pauline after his late friend.

All of this emotion can be explained by what I think we’re really mourning when we mourn Paul Walker: the end of a resonant example of a particular kind of male friendship absent from most of our own lives. That is, when we mourn Paul Walker, we are also mourning the end of Brian and Dom.

Male friendship in America, at present, is in a bad way. As sociologist Lisa Wade reports, “Of all people in America, adult, white, heterosexual men have the fewest friends. Moreover, the friendships they have, if they’re with other men, provide less emotional support and involve lower levels of self-disclosure and trust than other types of friendships.” However, these same men crave deeper, more intimate friendships. As Wade explains, “Men desire the same level and type of intimacy in their friendships as women, but they aren’t getting it.” How come? Misogyny, homophobia, and men’s long-standing anxieties about being “real men,” basically. Wade writes:

To be close friends, men need to be willing to confess their insecurities, be kind to others, have empathy and sometimes sacrifice their own self-interest. “Real men,” though, are not supposed to do these things. They are supposed to be self-interested, competitive, non-emotional, strong (with no insecurities at all), and able to deal with their emotional problems without help. Being a good friend, then, as well as needing a good friend, is the equivalent of being girly.

“When men do have especially close relationships,” notes Alana Massey, “we teasingly call them ‘bromances,’ as if there must be something amorous between two men who choose to spend time together one-on-one.”

In effect, what both Wade and Massey are saying is that somehow straight men in America have internalized the idea that intimate male friendships are gay.

In a weird way, queer theory also encourages this. It would be easy to read, for instance, the onscreen relationship between Brian and Dom as queer in some way, i.e., that the Fast and Furious movies are secretly a romantic love story between Paul Walker’s Brian and Vin Diesel’s Dom. Let me be clear: this is a legitimate – even fun! – reading. The deepest and most-sustained love relationship in the series is between Brian and Dom. Though they each have female partners – Mia (Jordana Brewster) and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), respectively – their primary emotional sustenance over the course of the franchise comes from each other. Slash fiction exploring this idea in greater depth isn’t hard to find online.

Significantly, the franchise doesn’t explicitly deny this sort of queer reading. There’s none of the anxious disavowal of homosexuality you find in movies such as I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry and I Love You, Man. Nor does Vin Diesel display any of the fear of emotion Wade talks about.

But I don’t think the reflexive queer reading – progressive though it may be – helps explain why Furious 7 can bring a theater full of young straight men to tears. No, I think there’s something else going on here. As Rachel Vorona Cote writes, “Friendship is not a pale imitation of sexual romance. It is a romance unto itself.”

In his book Spiritual Friendship, Wesley Hill argues that friendship today is “a form of love that’s in danger of being downgraded or dismissed in our imaginations.” One of the reasons for this, he contends, is our tendency to think “that the desire for sex is the secret truth of every relationship, so that any mutual liking or interest must be something more than chaste affection.” From this point of view, the intimate friendship between Brian and Dom in the Fast and Furious movies must really be a cover for a sexual relationship. But what might happen, Hill asks, if we take a friendship like Brian and Dom’s at face value? How might that challenge our views of what a friendship can be?

Hill argues “friendship can and should be understood along the lines of a vowed or committed relationship, much like a marriage or a kinship bond.” Hill asks us to imagine “friendship as more stable, permanent, and binding,” “friends more like the siblings we’re stuck with, like it or not, than like our acquaintances,” and “at least some of our friends as, in large measure, tantamount to family.”

You might think the writings of a gay celibate Christian writer like Hill and a multi-billion dollar street racing franchise would have different takes on friendships, but you’d be wrong. As a matter of fact, lines such as Dom’s “I don’t have friends, I’ve got family” and (to Brian/Paul at the end of the film) “You’ll always be my brother” wouldn’t look out of place in Hill’s book. Brian and Dom’s friendship in the movies and Paul and Vin’s friendship in real life are best understood, I would argue, as different versions of the same “spiritual friendship.” Theirs is a union that manages to be resolutely heterosexual but not homophobic, sincere but not self-serious, strong but sensitive.

In a world where straight men are often still worried about being perceived as feminine or gay and thus fail to form close bonds with other men, Brian and Dom’s bond is an important symbolic outlet for normalizing “spiritual friendship” between men. The Fast and Furious franchise offers a post-bromance model of male friendship and suggests a new call to seriousness about friendship’s role and importance. Thus, in mourning Paul Walker, we mourn not only the end of Brian and Dom’s relationship, but also the end of Paul and Vin’s, as well as the dearth of such relationships outside of the Fast and Furious franchise. We mourn our own inadequacy. That’s why it hurts so much. But that mourning is also a celebration, a celebration that something such as Paul Walker’s Teen Choice Award, while seemingly trivial, is one small part of.

Matt Thomas studies, teaches, and writes about popular culture and technology. He recently completed his PhD in American Studies at the University of Iowa. Follow him on Twitter: @mattthomas.