Obama vs. Vin Diesel: The Meaning of "Who We Are"

One of the pleasures of having learned to drive at last is that my license also licenses other, vicarious pleasures. For the first time, for instance, I am really enjoying the “Fast and the Furious” cycle of films, to give them their cinéaste name, which I have now watched right through, one to six, inclusive. (“Furious 7” comes out in April.) They are exciting to the new driver, of course, as a sort of extended ode to bad driving—almost all of the characters are street racers—and what is particularly beautiful about them is the tension between the endless, furious action and the complete inactivity of the cast’s expressions. Vin Diesel, the hero, crosses new frontiers in impassive acting. Van Damme and the later Schwarzenegger were robotic by choice, and often by casting, but Vin sets the standard for performance as mechanism. It’s not just that his face never changes—he scarcely ever changes position, even in the fight scenes. He seems to have been dropped into the front seat of all the cars by crane. If you’ve seen the poster, you’ve seen the performance. All of the activity takes place in his voice, which could be used to gravel roads.

And yet pop movies have a strange capacity to breathe in the American unconscious. Throughout “F. & F,” the chases are interrupted, again and again, with reminders about how what may seem to be merely a crew of drivers of varying (but always searing) degrees of hotness is really a family. The recurring homily: “This is who we are.” It was heard most recently and touchingly when Gisele—the hard-driving, bikini-wearing character played by Gal Gadot, a former Miss Israel—says it to her lover, Han, shortly before jettisoning herself by a cable from (I think) a speeding car onto a speeding jet and giving up her own life by letting go of the cable as she is shooting someone who is about to shoot Han (I think). It’s quite a scene—but as she heads out of the car, despite Han’s anxiety, she says it: “This is who we are.” (Those of us who mourned her sacrifice can be comforted by the knowledge that Gal Gadot was jettisoning herself into the role of Wonder Woman in “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.” That’s who she is now—a member of the Justice League.) The phrase has become a curiously pervasive idiom in American speech. Byron Scott, the coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, used it just the other night to chide his team for excessive celebration, and there’s a rock lyric, by the Billboard No. 1 group this month, Imagine Dragons, that uses it as a refrain:

No
It’s who we are
Doesn’t matter if we’ve gone too far
Doesn’t matter if it’s all O.K.
Doesn’t matter if it’s not our day
Because it’s who we are.

It’s a favorite locution of President Obama’s, too, though usually with the gearshift, so to speak, in reverse: “It’s not who we are.” He has used it repeatedly to explain why Americans shouldn’t torture prisoners or go “rounding up” millions of undocumented immigrants or, as in his most recent State of the Union, why they should close the prison at Guantánamo Bay. It has become a kind of talisman of our time, a fast part of our furious conversation. One contrasts it immediately with older and similar-seeming mottoes: “It’s not what we believe in,” or “It’s what a man”—or woman—“has to do.” “A man ought to do what he thinks is best,” John Wayne said, in “Hondo,” and, sexism aside, that seems plausibly old-style American.

“It’s not who we are” is an appealing locution, and perhaps the President landed on it, with his usual intuitive feel for language, as the right set of words to negotiate a difficult pass—stronger, suppler, more human in resonance than the older ones, better than simply saying, “That’s against American principles,” much less, “That’s against international law.” When Obama says it, he means to appeal to something more than international law or those abstract legal principles that American exceptionalism supposedly minimizes. “It’s who we are” means “These aren’t just rules that we believe in but principles that we inhabit.” Betray them and we haven’t just done the wrong thing; we’ve annihilated our identity. Like Gisele, we say, “I’ll jump out of the car in order to go on being part of us—of who we are.” It has an existential vibe, almost beyond right or wrong. If we do the ugly thing, we become someone else and, simultaneously, betray more than just an idea. As “I gotta be me” once summed up a certain form of Las Vegas liberalism—individual autonomy with a microphone in hand—it is, in the quiet yet pervasive way that such phrases enter our vocabulary, defining and inspiring.

But it is also, on reflection, impotent counsel. It places collective identity, the clan that we belong to, over the principles that we can articulate, the rules that we follow. Obama’s rhetorical gamble, as always, is that if you say we’re all part of one clan, then we will be part of one clan. “A man ought to do what he thinks is best”—or what he thinks is right—demands at least some kind of argument back about what’s right. “It’s not who we are” is a nice but tribal try. It has a lovely emotional reach but a simple rejoinder: “No, it isn’t who I am. Include me out.” “We try and do the right thing around here as much as we can” rings less well when you are escaping from a car and about to hang from the end of a cable that is suspended from a moving plane. But it’s still a better motto.

A follower of action movies more expert (i.e., younger) than I, hearing me muse on this point, offered this arresting appendix: Batman, no less, takes up a variant of the phrase in one of the Christopher Nolan movies. Batman has always been the most sententious of American superheroes, for the simple reason that he is the only one without any superpower except his will and his capacity for rhetorical flourishes and his plausibility as a leader of people. Rather like the President, actually. (He inherited money, yes, and bought some neat gizmos, but that is far from the source of his authority.) “It’s not who I am underneath but what I do that defines me,” he says. What we’ve done as a nation is not who we are? Unfortunately, sometimes it is. Appeals to clan identity come up short when they stumble over the truth that the identity can’t articulate the principle. What we do does matter more than who we are, or were. Batman knows. He even has the right car to do it with.