celebrity gossip, academic style

The first time I saw Paul Walker, he was being incredibly hot in Varsity Blues. He had a bit of a vicious streak — something I recognized from certain football players at my own high school — but he was far more attractive than mopey-eyed James Van Der Beek. Then there he was in She’s All That, and his image was solidified: hot, cocky asshole.

Walker worked ceaselessly to undo that image: see, for example, Eight Below. But even in the Fast and Furious franchise, he’s just a hot, cocky asshole who drives cars instead of quarterbacking. He’s no great actor, but he never had to be: he had the swagger that comes with ridiculous handsomeness down. If his teen movies and the Fast and the Furious franchise were all “genre films” — films that hew perfectly to what we expect of them, are relatively cheap to make, and because of the way they do what we want them to do, always have dependable grosses — then Paul Walker was a genre star. You saw his face, and you knew exactly what kind of film you were stepping into. The parameters might change, and adversaries and sidekicks and love interests could as well. But his presence was much of guiding narrative force as any car or football game.

At first, I thought the similarities between Walker’s death and that of James Dean were just too uncanny: both were a particular brand of handsome, characterized by high cheekbones, piercing eyes, and something almost too beautiful about them. Both made their name in car racing films; both died in accidents — in Porsches — outside of the Los Angeles area. Both, of course, died young. But Dean died while speeding between 75 and a 100 MPH on the way to a drag race, and Walker died on after attending a car show to benefit the Philippines disaster effort. Dean was 24 and railing against the world, and Walker was 40 — a grown man — and even if his onscreen persona still raced cars, his image, onscreen and off, had matured past the petulance of his Varsity Blues persona.

Dean’s image represented anger and regret and unhinged emotionality, and his death simultaneously reified and amplified those characteristics — one of the many reasons he became a cult figure. On its surface, the means of Walker’s death fits his image: it could be the conclusion to the next film. But that’s a fundamental misreading of the genre and Walker’s place within it. The great thing about genre film, and the genre actors like Walker who populate it, is that it replays the same scenario over and over again, often time rifting on fundamental ideological problems to do with class, race, gender, politics, etc., but each and every time, we’re given some modicum of closure. The rift exists; the movie shows it and then closes it. Each and every time, Walker steps out of the car in one piece. What’s unsettling, then, and is his inability to do so here. And so his final genre performance shifts, uncontrollably, to one of tragedy.