Movie Review:

Sex Jokes and Race in Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle

by Shanti Wesley
originally published in RaceWire

I normally stay away from teen stoner gross-out flicks, but I was interested in Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle because the lead characters in this otherwise mainstream movie are played by Asian American actors. This is practically unheard of in Hollywood, so I thought it was especially important for me, as a South Asian American woman, to support this movie. Well, that's the last time I see a movie to support a cause.

The title pretty much sums up the plot of the movie: friends Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn), stoned and hungry, set out in search of the "perfect food"- you guessed it - at White Castle. Along the way, they make a detour to Princeton to buy more weed, get attacked by a rabid raccoon, get arrested by racist cops, and have their car stolen by Neil Patrick Harris (in a hilarious cameo). The plot is basically a thin excuse for a series of jokes about bodily functions, pot, and sex. And some of the humor actually works: I did laugh at the capitalistic hippie dealer and the weirdo who walks up to Kumar in the woods and starts peeing next to him. So far, it's your typical comedy.

But I had heard a lot about how the title characters are not written specifically as Asian American characters, but as two stoner friends who happen to be Korean American and Indian American respectively. I was looking forward to seeing Harold and Kumar just living their daily lives, without their ethnicity necessarily being the focus of the film. But Harold and Kumar have to engage in boobs and sex jokes, insulting gays, and even racist humor in order to be normalized. And it wasn't funny.

I understand that gay jokes and gratuitous cleavage shots are fairly standard for movies that focus on adolescent male fantasies. Harold and Kumar is certainly no worse than Dude, Where's My Car? by the same director, or American Pie.

But I was particularly disturbed by a dream sequence in which Kumar romances, marries, receive oral sex from, and, finally, batters a bag of weed. Sure, it's funny to see Kumar running through a field of flowers with and getting married to a giant bag of pot (complete with a veil), but I stopped laughing when he hits it and calls it a stupid whore." I know, I know, it's just a bag of pot, but it's clearly meant to be a stand-in for a woman. Kumar's weed/woman fantasy presents verbal and physical abuse as a normal or inevitable part of a relationship.

In addition to humor based on degrading women, Harold and Kumar also has its fair share of gay bashing. The film seems to have a deep anxiety that Harold and Kumar's friendship may be perceived as a romantic or sexual relationship and, through the barrage of homophobic comments, attempts to deny that possibility. Being gay is not a valid identity in the world of the film, but merely a punchline to a joke, a dehumanizing insult.

In their first scene together, Kumar ridicules Harold's praise of 80's teen romance, Sixteen Candles, calling it the "least heterosexual statement ever made." The rest of the film is littered with homophobic insults from other characters, who call Harold and Kumar "ladies," "gay for each other," "the Brothers Mcfay," and ask them which one of the two is the "catcher." At one point, thugs ask Harold and Kumar if they're going to "share a curry slurpy," simultaneously questioning their sexuality and making fun of their ethnicity.

While Harold and Kumar themselves may not conform to the clichés of nerdy, overachieving Asian men or "Apu," the "quickie mart" owner, the film uses the lead characters to introduce other stereotypical characters for laughs. I felt like every person of color other than Harold or Kumar is a caricature: the South Asian gas station attendant; Kumar's doctor dad with the standard faux Indian accent; Harold's overly earnest friend Cindy Kim and the members of the Princeton East Asian Students Association, who are ridiculed for engaging with their Asian American identity.

The unexpected and supposedly subversive sight of the geeky East Asian students smoking pot and partying hard (hey look, they're cool after all!) doesn't quite make up for the numerous laughs the movie generates at the expense of their ethnicity. To be fair, I must admit that almost every white character in the film is stupid, disgusting, racist, or just plain weird. But I don't think it balances out the stereotypical representations of people of color.

The film may be trying to critique ethnic stereotypes but its success depends on whether the audience understands the fact that the movie is making fun of the characters' prejudice and racism. My fear is the viewers just don't get it, so that the film ends up giving them more fodder for their biases.

Ultimately, when the audience members are laughing at the overachieving East Asian kid or at the "thank you, come again" South Asian gas station attendant, they're not laughing at the stupidity of these insulting characterizations; they are just laughing at the dorky Asian kid and the brown man with the funny accent.