"The streets we know best"

Living in L.A. comes with the expected celebrity sightings—which are relatively infrequent unless you can afford to live in one of the areas celebrities do—and the relatively frequent location sighting—a recognition of one of your places captured on camera, sometimes transformed into something else. Restaurants, malls, theme parks, and the beaches are easy to identify. The Fast and the Furious certainly has its share of locations amenable to a “movie sights” tour—Dom’s house, Dodger Stadium, Toretto’s market, Little Saigon—but it is also full of the kind of footage that those of us who drive here a lot recognize just as readily: roads.

In addition to the double-decker bus tour, there are DIY-sights tours and websites to support them, where fans crowdsource suspected and confirmed filming locations. Here, I've mapped the locations documented for The Fast and the Furious by the website  The Movie District , ¹  which had a high number of locations with good-quality location data. ²  You can scroll through or click on each scene to look at it in closer detail.

Dom's house is at 722 East Kensington Road, Los Angeles 90026. The address's Block Group Diversity Index indicates that there's an 86% chance that two people from the area, chosen at random, belong to different race or ethnic groups. ³  It's a predominantly Hispanic/Latino area (48.3% in the 2022 census), with only 2.7% of respondents choosing to identify as mixed-race, non-Hispanic. Dom is ambiguously brown, and Vin Diesel, the actor who plays him, is mixed-race.

I like fast cars and I’m mixed-race. I love The Fast Saga. The franchise’s deep belief in the power of chosen family and scrappy, build-a-better car ethos are an American dreamworld of utopian race-doesn’t-matter and meritocracy. In the later movies, that chosen family is a multi-ethnic and multi-national globe-trotting crew capable of pulling off heists that save the world by leveraging their various, incredibly technical, specialties. In the first movie, that chosen family is a bunch of light skinned brown-ish folks with some white guys thrown in who are all good drivers (only one has special tech skills) and who are united by the fact that most of them do crime together and eat at the same table. 722 East Kensington Road is, demographically, a perfect location for Dom's mixed chosen family. It's also symbolically appropriate: right in the middle of L.A.

Dom’s table, home, and family are at the symbolic center of the entire Fast Saga. In The Fast and the Furious, they're also the geographic center.

That center, Dom’s utopian, multicultural table, is surrounded by racialized boundaries. The illegal heists, danger, and actual conflict between differently-raced bodies is always pushed to the very edges of the city, with one notable and unacceptable exception that proves the rule.

The Fast and the Furious was based on  Kenneth Li’s 1998 VIBE magazine feature  titled “Racer X,” which focused on the New York street racing scene, acknowledging its Asian-American and Californian roots in only a single sentence before describing the East Coast scene as an “urban polyglot of Puerto Rican, Dominican, Chinese, Filipino, Jamaican, Italian and other ethnicities who have one thing in common: They love hurtling metal, meat and rubber through the concrete jungle at dangerous velocities.” ⁴ 

The decision to set the film in L.A. was not only (at least, as is described in retrospect) a practical and financial one. In  a retrospective interview , location manager Bob Craft said L.A.’s particular distributed geography was judged to be better suited for telling a multi-ethnic story:

“Different groups live in different areas. It’s more contained. You can see where they are,” says Craft. “Rob wanted to show that L.A. is made up of all these different communities. … It affects the story and how you tell it—the communities working with each other.” ⁵ 

Working together to do crime is not the usual feel-good interracial solidarity plot.

Johnny Tran and Dom are technically working with each other, but not well and not for long. Instead, Johnny’s community presents an obvious racialized danger on the outskirts of town. Not even in L.A. proper, Johnny’s crew works out of an ethnoburb in Orange County, Little Saigon—territory Dom is not supposed to enter.

Brian and Dom end up in Little Saigon through some movie magic: the condensing of time and space. Brian picks up Dom to keep him from getting picked up by the cops after they break up an illegal street race, which looks like it takes place in downtown L.A., and the two of them have a little get-to-know-you conversation about jail time. After only a few sentences of conversational time, they’re many miles away in Little Saigon, on a wide, Orange County street with pagoda roofs behind them and a motorcycle gang around them. They’re on Bolsa, pulled into T&K Food, and then they drive into the now-demolished statue garden known as Cultural Court near Asian Garden Mall.

The scene that follows quickly establishes that in the world of the movie there are, if not gangs, racial groups who expect the boundaries of the ethnic enclaves to be respected and who will use violence to preserve those boundaries. While Dom’s crew/family is chosen and racially ambiguous, Tran’s crew is biologically-family-based. Lance is the only other Vietnamese character who gets a name, and he is introduced as Johnny’s cousin. If not necessarily portrayed by only Vietnamese actors (Rick Yune, who plays Johnny, is an American actor of Korean descent), the group surrounding Dom and Brian is obviously intended to appear homogenous and without any “halfies” in the mix. The scene ends with an exploding car and a long walk/cab ride back for Dom and Brian. A comment about the length of the walk makes clear that there is a distance — it's just a distance that vanishes inside a car.

Another scene of violence between differently raced bodies (filmed in Culver City) is also staged in Little Saigon shortly after, when Brian, Dom, and Vince sneak into Tran’s garage and watch Tran and Lance waterboard a white guy with oil.

When Tran and affiliates are arrested, Little Saigon is brought into L.A. with some more movie magic, as it’s L.A.P.D. doing the arresting. Those arrests are made as members of Johnny’s crew sit at two different tables: one in a food court, and the other in Johnny Tran’s house.

The contrast between these tables and Dom’s table is notable. Dom’s all-American outdoor BBQ and Corona is replaced by chopsticks and Sriracha in a homogeneously Asian food court, with the camera helpfully framing the back of a jacket embroidered with “Vietnam.” Johnny sits at the head of a formal dining table, indoors, with phenotypically homogenous family members sitting around the table, on top of a hill in a suburb of same-same houses. Dom's table solidifies the chosen family bonds by being open to those who would walk up: Vince, who initially drives off in a huff upon seeing Brian at the BBQ, can just stroll up to the table and rejoin the family by doing so. In the closed-off space of Tran's dining room, rather than a prodigal son returning to his chosen family, a violent, all-white SWAT team breaks in and takes the son away.

Tran’s house is very far from the center of L.A. Whether Tran is intended to live in Simi Valley or merely one of the wealthy, hilly, suburban communities on the edges of the L.A. sprawl doesn’t really matter. The sequence opens and ends with shots that reveal just how far away from the city the house is: the first, showing suburbs of the kind that do not exist in the center of the city; the second, a shot looking out of Tran’s front door over a hazy valley, without a skyscraper in sight.

After the verbal standoff by T&K Food but before returning to shoot up the car, Tran tells Dom, “I’ll see you in the desert next month,” referring to the too-literal-to-be-a-pun Race Wars. The deferral of the pending racial violence prevents the confrontation from escalating beyond the warning shots at the car.   

The Race Wars are drag races out in the high desert, and they’re also a convenient site to work out tensions between the various ethnic groups. Not only is everyone together on neutral territory, but there’s security, a fence, and the drag race closely resembles a duel. The one-on-one nature of the race makes it an ideal way to settle scores, and to do so without anyone having an advantage. Dom reminds Tran of this when Tran seems to escalate the issue of Jesse fleeing after losing a race a little too quickly: “We’re not on your block anymore,” Dom says, with security conspicuously in the background.

Jesse’s flight with the car he no longer owns, having lost it to Tran, out of the sanctioned space of Race Wars and back into the heart of L.A. is the catalytic event that disrupts the utopian center of the film. Tran and Lance follow Jesse back to Dom’s house and kill him in a drive-by shooting — an unacceptable incursion of racial violence into Dom’s carefully maintained multiethnic utopia. It is so obviously unacceptable that Dom and Brian, who are mid-fight about Brian being a cop, immediately stop fighting to chase Tran and Lance down. Interracial fighting cannot be permitted to threaten the multiethnic space at the heart of L.A., and so the perpetrators are forced out, one fatally so.

Some of us have driven in an L.A. with no traffic, either at two in the morning or three at night. It feels like getting away with something. The at-nightness of The Fast and the Furious is what enables the fantasy of an interconnected Los Angeles: the pragmatic absence of traffic means that it really is possible to drive to Little Saigon quickly enough that you might not notice. El Gato isn’t that far away from Dom’s house at night. During daily life for those with upper-middle class jobs, L.A. is disconnected from its ethnic enclaves by the traffic connecting other neighborhoods to places of work. Time, governed by traffic, rather than miles, measures distance. Only at night are the ethnic enclaves easily connected to the heart of the city. 

The film's use of Little Saigon and Race Wars are on-the-nose obvious about the way they interact with racial boundaries. Less obvious are the scenes filmed next to refineries.

The opening heist and the final race were both filmed in Wilmington and Terminal Island; El Gato, where the less ethnically-ambiguous brown people (Hector’s Latino crew) hang out across the street from Hector’s garage, is just south of LAX. As you can see on the map, both areas, marked by blue squares, are oil sacrifice zones for a neighboring rich area.

Craft maintains that the harbor was chosen for filming because it was available and cheap, and that the oil refineries were merely a visual bonus. ⁶ 

What this elides is that the harbor was available and cheap because of the oil refineries.

The harbor and the refineries surrounding it were not always a part of Los Angeles. In the early 1900s, L.A. decided it wanted control of the port, and embarked on a long saga of attempting to annex territory of its neighboring municipalities to make that happen. The “shoestring annexation” of 1906 extended a long L.A. tendril southward, making it possible in turn to annex land in Wilmington and San Pedro. After various consolidation votes we ended up with the harbor situation we have today: sister ports with complicated split jurisdictions (Long Beach and Los Angeles), several names, and a small rivalry, but at least some of the money flowing back to L.A. ⁷ 

Wilmington, where I live, is also the richest oil field in California. ⁸  By annexing this incredibly resource-rich area, Los Angeles hoped to establish its dominance as an all-in-one infrastructure and transportation hub. A road—now a freeway—was built to contest the financial dominance of rail, and short-haul trucking began between the port and the city in earnest.

The SNL skit "The Californians" may have opened the state to ridicule on the grounds of our obsession with freeways, but the saturation of freeways, and our intimate knowledge of them, is what makes the L.A. sprawl possible. Whatever metaphor you use for them—veins, arteries, wires, parking lots (just kidding on the last one)—they promise connection, even at incredible distance, although that promise is only truly made good in the rare traffic-free hours.

The freeway is what enables the film—and the city—to have it both ways. There’s enough room for a utopian center and an extractive, imperial edge. There’s enough room for celebrities to drink green juice in the fresh air of Silverlake while we breath benzene, diesel, and smog in the harbor. The distance between them allows L.A. to make money off both. If the freeway was originally 1900s L.A.’s way of contesting rail power by bringing “Los Angeles to the sea,” it now consolidates its grip on its empire by keeping the unpleasant parts next to the sea at sufficient distance even while tethered financially. ⁹ 

The last race of the film takes place on Terminal Island. Brian, driving a Toyota Supra, faces off against Dom, driving his iconic Charger.

The import/domestic rivalry that marks the friendship between Dom and Brian will, in subsequent movies, become merely banter, but here, it is a duel on the outmost edge of town: a brown man driving an American car races a white man driving a Japanese car at the very limit of L.A.

Terminal Island used to house a small Japanese ethnic enclave known as Fish Harbor. Construction started in 1915, and soon, more than 300 company houses were full of cannery workers, fishermen, and their families, almost all of whom were Japanese. The island had its own schools, celebrated Japanese holidays, and spoke its own pidgin. Connected to the mainland by a single road and a ferry, the community was an even more extreme example of shoestring connections to the heart of the city, economically useful but stinking of fish. In other words, connected but not close.

After Pearl Harbor, Fish Harbor was raided repeatedly; after Executive Order 9066, it was closed to all residents, regardless of ethnicity or nationality, who were given 48 hours to leave and nowhere to go. Many ended up in Manzanar. Today, there’s a memorial and a few buildings, and the wealth that comes from the sea is not fish but oil.

 That oil is killing us.  ¹⁰ 

In the first heist, which takes place at night, the semi truck speeds past the Valero refinery. That road, one of the main connections between the harbor and the larger freeway system, is usually empty at night, and it’s a great place to drive fast. Even when heist-free, it’s a dangerous place to drive in darkness: semi trucks often run red lights on this road at night, and, at the onset of the recent supply-chain crisis, empty trailers began parking haphazardly on the curved ramp connecting Alameda to the Pacific Coast Highway, creating an obstacle course of blind corners and metal protrusions.

It's also a dangerous place to breathe as the various refineries along Alameda flare, vent, spew, and otherwise pollute. And while they insist (and formally report) that they operate within “safe” levels, the compounding effect of exposure to multiple refineries in the same area has been shown to easily exceed whatever “safe” level lobbyists have decided are appropriate for the local community. (See ProPublica’s excellent visualization of the effect  here ). ¹¹  The  settlement of a recent lawsuit  will require Phillips 66 to plant some trees and fix leaks at its Wilmington and Carson refineries, which have been spewing benzene and other VOCs at levels 200 times higher than they officially reported. ¹²  Residents get pamphlets in the mail reassuring us that the water vapor we can see rising from the stacks is just water vapor, while invisible VOCs go completely unaddressed. I’d call it gaslighting, but the pun is too close to deadly to be funny. The California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment has designated Wilmington as  one of the most pollution-burdened communities in the state . ¹³ 

Petrochemical aesthetics are dangerous, literally toxic masculinity of the live-fast die-young strain. When romanticized, it’s to cope with the fact that we live somewhere unironically called a sacrifice zone. If you die in a car crash at a tragically young age, the cancer won’t have time to catch up to you.

In the fast, blurred background of the heist scene, the streaky glow of the refinery lights makes the scene look impressive and dangerous, making everything look fast. At night, when I take off my glasses and let the lights blur, the refineries are beautiful. Fairy-lit castles in the air, wreathed in fog, with a warm glow to them that promises magic. But if you open your windows, and sometimes even if you don’t, the smells remind you otherwise. My great-grandpa used to work at one of these refineries. Now, I live in their shadow. I use an inhaler, run two air filters constantly, and worry about the midnight spikes on the VOC sensor.

The Fast and the Furious was released in 2001, but over 20 years later, the communities in which it was filmed face the same, if magnified, problems. There’s one scene in the film explicitly putting Latinos in the harbor next to oil; Latinos make up most of the sacrifice zones in Wilmington and other CA refinery communities.

The crew steals one shipping container from a semi truck? Package thefts have increased although they now target rail, shipping containers can now be stacked more than three high, trailers are abandoned on our streets,  semi trucks clog our roads  and  pulverize our sidewalks , and all of this destroys our lungs. ¹⁴ 

Dom and Brian narrowly escape death by train? The port switched to 24-hour operation because of the "supply chain crisis,” which means none of us have slept well in a long time and driving in the harbor has gotten much scarier. Street takeovers are deadly, so much so that communities are protesting the plans to film the upcoming Fast X in their neighborhood. ¹⁵ 

With the supply chain crisis fresh in our minds and renewed attention to the environmental and legal racism that underwrites the existence of our harbor communities as they exist today, The Fast and the Furious shows us the costs that underwrite Dom’s utopian table and the dream at the center of Los Angeles. If Rob Cohen really thinks The Fast and the Furious is a story about “communities working with each other,” it is telling that the way that story is expressed on film is a story about boundaries between the utopian city center and the rest of us. 

 ^{Nichole Nomura is a PhD candidate in the Stanford University Department of English and a graduate of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education (M.A). She studies how science fiction teaches and is taught, using methods from the digital humanities, literary criticism, and education. A member of Stanford's Literary Lab, she specializes in cultural analytics and text-mining, and is currently collaborating on the Young Readers Database of Literature.} 

Notes

1.  “ The Fast and the Furious (2001) Filming Locations ,” The Movie District, accessed October 15, 2022.
2.  While various film location websites agree on the location of Dom's house (and it's so well-known that it's blurred out on Google Maps), conventions for recording the many driving scenes vary. The Movie District chooses to identify single points using Google Maps, which means that races and hijacking scenes are abstracted to a single point representing a general area.
3. Esri, U.S. Census Bureau. 2022 USA Diversity Index. Map Image Layer. Last modified July 27, 2022. Accessed November 16, 2022. https://demographics5.arcgis.com/arcgis/rest/services/USA_Demographics_and_Boundaries_2022/MapServer.
4.  Kenneth Li, “ From The VIBE Vault: ‘Racer X’ (The ‘Fast & Furious’ Inspiration) ,” VIBE.Com, March 26, 2015.
5. Gwynedd Stuart, “ ‘The Fast and the Furious’ Turns 20: A Look at Its Locations Then and Now ,” Los Angeles Magazine, June 22, 2021.
6. Stuart, “‘The Fast and the Furious’ Turns 20.”
7. Don A. Shotliff, “ San Pedro Harbor, or Los Angeles Harbor? Senator W. H. Savage and The Home Rule Advocates Fail to Stem The Tide of Consolidationism, 1906-1909 ,” Southern California Quarterly 54, no. 2 (July 1, 1972): 127–54.
8. “ Great Oil Fields in Los Angeles County, California ,” accessed October 15, 2022.
9. Shotliff, “San Pedro Harbor, or Los Angeles Harbor?,” 143.
10. Adam Mahoney, “ Deaths Have Spiked in This Polluted Port Community. COVID Is Only Part of the Story ,” Center for Health Journalism, accessed October 15, 2022.
11.  “ The Most Detailed Map of Cancer-Causing Industrial Air Pollution in the U.S. ,” ProPublica, November 2, 2021.
12.  Nick K. Green, “ Phillips 66 Settles Lawsuit with Environmental Group, Agrees to Find and Fix Leaks to Prevent Gases from Escaping ,” February 20, 2021.
13.  “ Maps & Data ,” OEHHA, January 26, 2015.
14. “ US’s Supply-Chain Recovery Leaves LA Port Community in Its Dust ,” Bloomberg, July 28, 2022; Heather Navarro and Angie Crouch, “ LA Neighborhoods Fed Up With Trucks Pass Emergency Law Banning Truck Traffic in Residential Areas ,” NBC Los Angeles, accessed October 15, 2022.
15. Steve Lopez, “ Column: Speeding, Racing, Street Takeovers and the Deadly Toll on L.A. Streets ,” Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2022.