The age of the movie stars is over. These days, actors we haven’t heard of open big Disney animations or superhero pictures, based on intellectual property owned by corporations. Meanwhile, not even the most beloved and time-tested actors can save a movie—consider the recent flop that was Robert Downey Jr.’s blockbuster Dolittle. 

But one man stands against this tide: Vin Diesel, gruff, angry, aloof, like a dinosaur that’s survived ancient cataclysms.

He’s famous for the Fast & Furious franchise (the ninth installment, F9, was delayed until April 2021 due to the coronavirus). The Fast and the Furious, the series’ first back in 2001, was an action movie with gangs, cars, babes, and studs, which later turned into a cultural phenomenon that went beyond memes. It’s since become a countercultural statement on the importance of family and loyalty, as opposed to upper-class ambitions. Indeed, the government and corporations are mostly the villains in these movies.

This commitment to stories about honor has been surprisingly successful. Fast & Furious films now routinely gross a billion dollars, and Diesel has another franchise about extreme sports turned into populist heroism—xXx—the third of which debuted in 2017. Both series suggest that risking your life is a red-blooded American thing to do, not the least because elites now despise manliness. They promote the revolt of the forgotten American, who chooses loyalty, not conformity.

Diesel even has a sci-fi thriller franchise, Riddick, that started with Pitch Black in 2000. Only modestly profitable, it’s cultivated a niche audience interested in the darker side of heroism and is still going 20 years later. Diesel not only makes all the action movies he can, other stars have flocked to his franchise, notably Jason Statham and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in Fast & Furious.

This makes him an exception in a Hollywood that’s turned to cute animations and sarcastic comic book superheroes for box office bread and butter. Whatever you see Diesel in, you know what you’re getting. Diesel is faithful to the old John Wayne ideal, not the modern tendency of actors to change their bodies and looks depending on the role. You always recognize him and that’s reassuring, perhaps because these days it’s hard to find strong iconic men in Hollywood that are not wearing costumes and airbrushed by layers of CGI.

This is obviously a political statement: like Duke in the Westerns, Diesel is primarily an idealized version of the everyman. Bruce Willis has also played this role from Die Hard onward, although he did romantic comedies before that. Diesel often comes across as a brawnier version of that streetwise guy, bald before his time, inclined to mockery rather than fear, immensely enduring, and somewhat worse for wear—a rough working-class man from an unenvied part of town, an American who’s faced up to life. He’s an idol because he’s a survivor.

Nowadays, Baby Boomer Bruce Willis does several cheap movies a year, one assumes for the money. As noted, there are no more stars in the classic sense, so no studio will offer him work worth his legend. Diesel has survived the changes in Hollywood because he’s Gen. X, all about extreme sports, computer games, hip-hop. In embracing characters marginalized by our culture, he’s avoided being marginalized like Willis.

Vin Diesel is the latest incarnation of the Hollywood hero. From John Wayne to Willis, heroism has been democratized and pushed further and further away from respectability and down the class ladder, with the view from the bottom skeptical of American optimism and morality altogether.

In his first xXx movie, Diesel says: if you’re gonna send someone off to save the world, make sure they like it the way it is. This is the problem action movies face. We live peaceful lives, but crave action. Men habituated to violence and danger, however, are usually criminals unlikely to serve the common good. We do not honor them. Only in the movies can this be reconciled by turning them into heroes.

Further, we expect much of our systems of administration—we expect everything to work and we count every death a tragedy—so we cannot tolerate our own desire for heroes who will endanger civil tranquility, kill villains extralegally, or save us from our complacency. We’re functional, safe and healthy, and find it hard to see any evil among that. Heroes would only be plausible, indeed necessary, in the dysfunctional communities the movies ignore.

Diesel has filled this role. But let’s face it, the very status of manliness is itself in doubt. Men watch these violent and reckless movies, they play violent computer games, but manliness is tolerable only as fantasy. A vast industry caters to our desire for manliness (video games are bigger than Hollywood and music put together), but it’s not respectable and it’s not talked about. It’s the largest part of our culture that we’re silent about, so to speak.

In our times, public rhetoric about men is amazingly denunciatory—hysteria about toxic masculinity, male privilege, to say nothing of mansplaining and manspreading. This is exactly what Diesel is against. It isn’t an accident that his very popular movies reveal the deep corruption behind the facades of our moralistic elites.

In 2017, new Fast & Furious and xXx movies were released at about the same time, and both featured sophisticated icy blondes working for the deep state who turn out to be corrupt elitists whom our populist heroes need to destroy. Not to make this all about Trump, but it’s no coincidence that Hillary Clinton was the embodiment of everything action movie plots are against, and why they flirt with lawlessness, anarchy, and savage freedom from social conformism.

I don’t see any possibility for nobility, the coming together of manliness and justice, in our movies nowadays, or video games for that matter. I’m not sure we can even persuade first-rate talent to tell stories about manliness. But if there were a John Ford among us today, he’d be hard-pressed to find a better John Wayne than Vin Diesel.

Titus Techera is the executive director of the American Cinema Foundation and a contributor to National Review, The Federalist, Law & Liberty, and Modern Age.