Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay

AMERICAN political cinema of the George W. Bush era has come to assume a few familiar forms: the documentary indictment (“Fahrenheit 9/11,” “No End in Sight”), the sober memorial (“World Trade Center,”“United 93”), the angry or earnest Iraq drama (“Redacted,”“Stop-Loss”). In this cheerless landscape “Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantánamo Bay,” the sequel to the 2004 cult favorite “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle,” creates its own category: the stoner protest film.
The writer-directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, who also wrote the first “Harold and Kumar” movie, are reluctant to think of “Guantánamo Bay,” title notwithstanding, in strictly political terms. This is perhaps understandable, since their film features a “bottomless party” (where guests disrobe from the waist down), a brothel visit and a threesome involving a giant anthropomorphic Ziploc bag of marijuana.
“Our top priority was to make people laugh,” Mr. Schlossberg said in a recent telephone interview. “But the secondary priority is that there’s something a little smarter below the surface. I guess in a certain way it’s our reaction to post-9/11 paranoia.”
The new film, which opens Friday, picks up where the first left off, with the two pot-loving roommates — a Korean-American corporate desk jockey Harold Lee (John Cho) and an Indian-American ex-pre-med slacker Kumar Patel (Kal Penn) — en route to Amsterdam having satisfied a killer case of the munchies. Kumar, despite being harassed by airport security, manages to smuggle a stash of weed onto the plane. A bungled attempt to light up in the lavatory — not helped by the fact that “bong” sounds like “bomb” — lands the guys in Gitmo on terrorism charges. The homeland security official overseeing the case, a paragon of belligerent idiocy played by Rob Corddry, takes one look at our heroes and concludes that Al Qaeda and North Korea are in cahoots.
In devising the plot the filmmakers borrowed from Mr. Penn’s own travel experiences since the Sept. 11 attacks. “That’s probably one of the only parallels between Kumar and me,” Mr. Penn said. “We both get pulled out of line at airports.”
This became a routine occurrence when he and Mr. Cho were flying around the country to promote the first film. “Once we were with a friend of mine — he’s the same age, same height as me, except he’s white,” Mr. Penn recalled. “I was stopped at security, but he went through even though he had a hunting knife that he forgot to take out of his backpack. They were so focused on pulling out the brown guy, they didn’t even notice.”
The detention camp is just one brief, if indelible, pit stop in “Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantánamo Bay.” “It’s not that Guantánamo Bay itself is funny,” Mr. Schlossberg said. “But it’s utterly ridiculous for Harold and Kumar to be thrown in there.” As for what happens to them inside the prison, the movie imagines a ritual punishment that draws from both the squeamish homophobia of frat-boy comedy and the sexual humiliations now associated with Abu Ghraib.
After an improbable escape Harold and Kumar make it back to the States. What follows is a gentler version of the “Borat” odyssey, a road trip through the American subconscious as much as anything else. Race is at once central and beside the point in the Harold and Kumar movies. Casually integrating nonwhite heroes into a genre that has always been a white male preserve, the films seize on smutty, gross-out humor as the great equalizer. Even in its title “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle” signified a comedy of assimilation.
“It wasn’t intentional,” Mr. Hurwitz said. “We came up with White Castle because it has a history of being a place where intoxicated people go at the end of the night. But then we did see it as a sort of metaphor. It’s about the burgers, but it’s more than just the burgers.”
Mr. Hurwitz and Mr. Schlossberg, who grew up in Randolph, N.J., have known each other since high school, where the idea of Harold and Kumar took root. “We always had a very multicultural group of friends,” Mr. Hurwitz said. “One thing that struck us was that no matter our ethnic background, we were very much alike. But whenever we saw Asian or Indian characters on screen, they were nothing like our friends, so we thought we would write characters like them.” (Mr. Cho’s character is based on an actual Harold Lee. Mr. Hurwitz and Mr. Schlossberg are Jewish, as are Harold and Kumar’s best buddies.)
The signal achievement of both Harold and Kumar films is that they make race incidental without taking racism lightly; they presuppose an enlightened audience. “When we start to write, we’re under the assumption that everyone knows racism is bad,” Mr. Schlossberg said. “If you don’t know that, you’re a moron. Harold and Kumar’s attitude toward racism is more frustration at having to deal with idiocy than moral outrage. We try to create a world where racism is stupid.”
As tends to be the case with ethnic humor, the filmmakers rely on the exaggeration or subversion of prejudices. Mr. Cho, having witnessed uproarious laughter at screenings, suggested that there might be a cathartic element in play. “It’s not an exact science, making laughs out of this kind of stuff, but I think there’s a desire on the part of the audience to, if not discuss race, at least laugh about it,” he said.
The over-the-top crudeness of the films makes it easy to forget their subtly radical impulses, not to mention the sheer unlikeliness of “Harold and Kumar” as a studio franchise. (The first film did not do especially well in theaters but was a hit on DVD.) By the standards of the regressive buddy comedy, Mr. Schlossberg and Mr. Hurwitz’s deft aggregation of stereotypes and counterstereotypes amounts to something like complexity. Harold and Kumar are intelligent stoners, overachieving slackers and — in defiance of the model-minority myth — Asian American party boys looking for sex, drugs and a good time.
Mr. Penn, who is now teaching a class on images of Asian-Americans in the media at the University of Pennsylvania, said that discussions of context and subtext entered into even the crudest scenes. There is a notably vulgar gag in the opening montage featuring Kumar and a pornographic magazine. “I still can’t believe I participated in that,” Mr. Penn said. He eventually decided that “if we’re going to introduce or deconstruct a sexualized image, the kind of image that has been reserved for white males in teen movies since James Dean, we have to go all the way.” (Suffice to say he does.)
That Harold and Kumar are typical pothead heroes ironically makes them more lifelike than the protagonists of most melting-pot movies, who tend to be saddled with representational burdens and identity-politics placards. Mr. Cho recounted an encounter with a fan, a young Asian-American woman, after the release of “White Castle”: “She was starting to thank me and I’d expected her to say something along the lines of ‘Thank you for representing Asian-Americans,’ but she said, ‘Thank you for representing stoners so well.’ ”
One concern of the filmmakers is that “Guantánamo Bay” not be perceived as politically polarizing. “Some people might think we have a liberal bias because we’re poking fun at the government, or we’re not being patriotic,” Mr. Hurwitz said. “But it’s quite the opposite. We love this country and we’re speaking out about how we feel about it.”
President Bush (played by the professional Bush impersonator James Adomian) shows up in a deus ex machina role, and while not exactly respectful, it is arguably the most sympathetic movie portrayal of him to date.
“It was important that we not vilify George W. Bush,” Mr. Schlossberg said, while Mr. Hurwitz added that “In our minds he isn’t that much different than Kumar in terms of motivation and certain life issues. Both characters have a family trade they’re pushed toward and have a certain attitude of resistance.”
Off screen Mr. Penn has been stumping for Senator Barack Obama, though he declined to discuss his political involvement in an article about “Harold and Kumar.” But Mr. Hurwitz and Mr. Schlossberg, who said they’ve heard that Mr. Obama has seen (and liked) the first film, were willing to draw a connection. “He is a symbol of moving beyond race,” Mr. Schlossberg said. “Obama is a sign of the times, just like Harold and Kumar.”
Which is not to say that Harold and Kumar exist in a postracial society. The larger point, as Mr. Hurwitz put it, is that “race matters to the other characters but not to Harold and Kumar,” a misalignment that is by turns funny, poignant and maddening.
“They’re beyond racism but live in a world that isn’t,” Mr. Schlossberg said. “In many ways Harold and Kumar represent what we want the future to be.”
Da The New York Times, 20 Aprile 2008