Toking minorities

>>John Cho on stoners, stereotypes and the smoked-up sequel Harold and Kumar
Escape From Guantanamo Bay

HIGH CONCEPT: Kal Penn and John Cho

by MALCOLM FRASER

If you need any evidence that the backlash against the War on Terror has gone mainstream, look no further than Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay. We’re not talking revolutionary agitprop cinema with this sequel to Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Besides being stationed firmly within the gross-out comedy genre, the film’s politics are as muddled as the baked-out minds that will appreciate it best.

But the very existence of a new film focusing on the U.S. government’s racist persecution of innocent people—and not a grim documentary or an earnest drama, but a mainstream Hollywood, unapologetically lowbrow comedy—should give the Republicans more fright than Obamamania. And it’s really funny, too—no doubt even more so if you’re high, but even without medicinal aid.

To say that Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle was not only the best stoner comedy at least since Dave Chappelle’s Half Baked would be to damn it with faint praise. It was also a refreshing breath of fresh air in a much deeper socio-political sense. Starring, as its previews declared, “that Indian guy from Van Wilder” (Kal Penn) and “that Asian guy from American Pie” (John Cho), it represented a break from tradition in the portrayal of minorities in Hollywood film.

Up to that point, minority communities had seen themselves portrayed either as stereotypes, running the spectrum from goofy to sinister, or as ciphers for piously PC messages from well-meaning Hollywood liberals. Harold and Kumar mercilessly lampooned white racism—and humorously addressed the characters’ difficulties with their own traditional families—but also gave them an individual identity beyond their ethnicity.

Pot and progress

“Even though there’ve been some notable Asian-American actors, I feel like the progress isn’t nearly where it should be,” says Cho, on the phone from an interview marathon in L.A. “With the first movie, I’m not sure that Asian-Americans knew what to make of us, whether this was something they should get behind or not,” he continues with a laugh. “But I think there’s a sense that they like this portrayal of Asians as transgressors, as stoners, as goofs—that it’s very unlike the stereotype.”

With the one-two punch of lowest-common-denominator laughs and post-racial politics, the original Harold and Kumar gained a cult following. “They ended the first one with the intention of making a sequel; they always wanted to do it à la Rocky and Back to the Future,” recalls Cho. But, as he explains, “the first movie wasn’t a hit at the box office, so it was a few years of steady DVD sales that eventually green-lit the sequel.”

The story begins immediately after the end of the original, finding Cho and Penn about to fly out to Amsterdam to chase down Cho’s dream girl (and get really high). During the opening credits, the two characters pack their bags, and I was uncomfortably reminded of the similar opening to Revenge of the Nerds II, the archetypal inferior sequel, in which the baggage-packing foreshadows the movie’s simplistic approach, the contents of each suitcase spelling out the source of every character’s humour.

Happily, the film rises above this ignominious beginning, ratcheting up both the humour and the political content of the original. Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, who wrote the first film, return this time as both writers and directors. “They work in concert so well,” says Cho of the unusual co-directing effort. “In fact, I think there were a couple of days where they had to split duties—there was one guy working with the A unit and another with the B unit—and frankly, I think it didn’t work as well. It’s truly a co-directed project.”

Southern slapstick

When our heroes are busted after Penn brings pot on an airplane, a racist and clueless government agent (Rob Corddry), convinced that he’s uncovered a terrorist plot between North Korea and al-Qaeda, has them sent to everyone’s favourite extraordinary rendition site. “I thought it was really brilliant,” says Cho of this political angle. “For one, just on a mechanical level, it was such a great way to intensify the stakes, thereby creating bigger laughs. But having said that, it’s one of the aspects of the film that people really seemed to like from the first one—the racial jokes and the social commentary. So I was pleased that we were running with that.”

The title is actually somewhat misleading, as the Guantanamo Bay sequence is very brief. After escaping during a botched prison break by their fellow inmates, the duo hitch a boat ride with some Cuban migrants and end up back in the U.S. With Corrdry hot on their trail, they take a road trip through the American South, heading to Texas, where Penn’s ex-girlfriend Vanessa (Danneel Harris) is about to marry Colton (Eric Winter), an alpha male with high-level government connections. Cho hopes that Winter can get them out of their jam, whereas Penn has a not-so-hidden agenda to win back his lady.

As they travel through the Dirty South, Penn and Cho dodge the KKK and once again meet up with Neil Patrick Harris, returning as a bizarro-world version of himself who munches handfuls of ‘shrooms and gets thrown out of a whorehouse (run, in a nod to past goofball glory, by Beverly D’Angelo of the Vacation series). The film also turns its incisive racial politics on the protagonists, as the Southern trip forces them to confront their own prejudices toward ghetto blacks and redneck whites.

Focus on the funny

Corddry is on fire as the villainous agent, delivering ignorant rants and racist diatribes with gusto. Cho describes Corrdry’s character as “every obstacle that a person of colour goes through in life rolled into one ridiculous ball. Someone was saying the other day he’s sort of like the extreme skateboard punks from the first movie, grown up, with power.”

The character could also be read as an analogy to the Bush administration; he pushes ahead with his plan at all odds, refusing to listen to the more reasoned advice of the people around him. At one point, in the ultimate synthesis of the movie’s political stance and its level of humour, he literally wipes his ass with the U.S. Bill of Rights.

Cho is cautious when asked about the Bush analogy. “It could be on-base, although we certainly weren’t underlining these types of things. On set and in our discussions, we were really just talking about how to make things work and how to make things funny.”

The film certainly stops short of any kind of real national self-questioning; the screenplay takes great pains to have the characters talk about their patriotism and love of America, if not its current government or self-inflicted reputation. When Cho and Penn meet “real” terrorists at Guantanamo, they’re not given the subversive treatment that the other characters enjoy, but instead portrayed in a disappointingly stereotypical way.

In this and a couple of other key scenes, it’s as though the filmmakers wanted to play it politically safe by throwing a few bones to the Fox News crowd. Or perhaps the film’s politics merely reflect the USA’s national delusion that the Bush cabal’s misadventures are, as Donald Rumsfeld famously said about the Abu Ghraib torture sessions, the work of “a few bad apples.”

But no doubt it’s unfair to expect a stoner comedy to carry the whole weight of mainstream subversion and national self-reflection. Ultimately, the political angle exists to serve the comedy, and the film definitely delivers on that front—if a screening room full of jaded film critics is full of raucous laughter, that can’t be a bad sign. “We didn’t want to get into a diatribe; that’s just not what we’re doing,” Cho says. “We’re real opportunists. We’re just using Guantanamo Bay to make poo-poo and pee-pee jokes, really.”

Harold and Kumar Escape From
Guantanamo Bay opens
this Friday, April 25

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