Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay || by Media Sheep

This month's special guest spot is scored to the giddy galloping of andro-hooves. Please welcome our prolific pal and expert on all things ovine, Media Sheep, who's here to help launch Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay on opening day. So shed your winter coats, and spring into the summer movie season with eXTREEEEME reflections on race, terror, drugs, stoners and sliders...

In a series of public service announcements which aired between 2002 and 2003, U.S. television audiences were told that “Drug Money Supports Terror. If you buy drugs you might too.” Capitalizing on the fears of an American public recently rocked by the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, the U.S. War on Terror offered a window of opportunity to reinvigorate its War on Drugs. These ads, created by the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, employ images of children as the victims of a terrorism funded by recreational drug use that both kills them and turns them into killers. In one ad, a child tells us:



Apart from the rather obvious use of a child to forward the organization’s political message via an appeal to worried and paranoid parents everywhere, the ad works to exclude drug users from national belonging as it conflates drug user with the terrorist who, in the contemporary War on Terror, is always already foreign. And it is the subtextual foreign-ness of the drug user/terrorist proposed by this particular ad that, in some cases, makes the PSA so effective. The effectiveness of a message linking recreational drug use to terrorism can be found in the reactionary and defensive denials of this message, as one YouTube user comments: “I buy directly from growers in my neighborhood. I'm not funding shit from any fucking foreign country.” Patriotism, it seems, knows no bounds, as such (what I would like to call) narco-nationalist reactions can be found in a variety of comments for similar PSAs.

The idea of foreign-ness that becomes associated with the drug user and terrorist and the drug user as terrorist, might help us to really think about the ways in which the U.S. War on Terror has come to influence various foreign and domestic policy decisions by our current government. It is no coincidence that this new War on Terror/Drugs has sparked heated debates about what we might call the current “immigrant crisis” in the U.S., a crisis whose primary concern is with the preservation of a pure national body, untainted by foreign invaders.

It is perhaps odd, or all too obvious, that a confrontation with the conflation of the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the “immigrant crisis,” and the racist nature of the U.S.’s current fear-based foreign and domestic policy decisions rests on the shoulders of two unlikely stoner heroes: Harold and Kumar. In Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004), two Asian stoners (Harold, a Korean-American; Kumar, an Indian-American) embark on a drug induced adventure, motivated entirely by the munchies, to eat at White Castle, setting them on a journey that by the end of the film is explained as a narrative of immigration and the Asian diaspora. Moments away from being arrested, Kumar makes a motivational speech in which he states:

"So you think this is just about the burgers, huh? Let me tell you, it’s about far more than that. Our parents came to this country, escaping persecution, poverty, and hunger. Hunger, Harold. They were very, very hungry. And they wanted to live in a land that treated them as equals. A land filled with hamburger stands. And not just one type of hamburger, hundreds of types. With different sizes, toppings, and condiments. That land was America. America, Harold. America. Now this is about achieving what our parents set out for. This is about the pursuit of happiness. This night is about the American dream."

That White Castle even addressed immigration during a time when the U.S. “War on Terror” reinvigorated notions of an “immigrant crisis” on the domestic front is interesting. Though the speech itself suggests that Harold and Kumar’s pursuit of happiness and the American dream are tangled up with neoliberal notions of consumption and national inclusion, the film itself portrays them as perpetually excluded from the national body by virtue of their Asian-American-ness, echoing Asian American exclusion narratives and practices as it simultaneously confronts issues of assimilation and incorporation.

The immigrant narrative that plays out to the end of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle seems to be further problematized and overtly placed into the context of the “War on Terror” in the upcoming Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, in which the conflation of South Asian and Arab or Muslim identities becomes the means by which Harold and Kumar are plunged into the world of anti-terrorism and U.S. military hegemony.




In one scene, a woman imagines Kumar in “terrorist drag,” which in light of the War on Terror has taken on a different, racialized and Orientalist form since the days of domestic terrorist attacks such as the Oklahoma City bombing. This becomes quite apparent when Kumar is imagined in Osama bin Laden drag, childishly mimicking the fall and eventual destruction of the plane. The garb of Muslim clerics and their association with Osama bin Laden fashion, functions for the older, white woman on the plane, as an always already Orientalist and essentialized understanding of race. This imagined “terrorist drag” also points to the ways in which South Asian and Muslim or Arab subjects have problematically come to stand in for the terrorist “other” as a function of U.S. nationalism, which must identify the other in order to prevent even the possibility of future harm. During a time when fear seems to be the most influential force in American politics, suspicion becomes the primary means of controlling, disciplining, or even castrating particular people. As the various trailers for Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay suggest, Kumar becomes the target of terrorist suspicion for being brown.

That this is also the result of Kumar's impatience and need to get high aboard a plane allows us to suspend our disbelief. As Kumar takes a drag from his bong (not “bomb”), the “logics” of reality are suspended and replaced by the (il)logics of being stoned (illogics, I should add, that seem more and more reflective of our lived reality). It would be easy to say that getting high is a form of escapism, but getting stoned in a Harold & Kumar film typically shifts daily happenings away from escapism and into an exaggerated form of persecution, marginalization, and shenanigans. The film’s promised conflation of Harold’s (South) Korean-ness with the “threat” of North Korea (a country identified as one part of George Bush’s “axis of evil”) and his relationship to Kumar (suspected of being an Al Qaeda terrorist operative) speaks to both the problem of racist conflations of ethnic identities, but also the paranoia that allows the characters in the film (and people in the real world) to imagine terrorist alliances between East Asia and the Middle East. Furthermore, escape from persecution, marginalization, and imprisonment are actually initiated by marijuana, as seen in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, in which Harold and Kumar are able to escape and evade re-capture by the police.

The "terrorist alliance" imagined by the Homeland Security operative in the Escape from Guantanamo Bay trailer is interesting to consider via a moment of "affective alliance" from Go to White Castle.

After stealing the "eXtreme" SUV from a group of "eXtreme," homophobic, racist white dudes, Harold and Kumar realize that the eXtreme dudes aren't nearly as eXtreme as they would like people to think. Listening to a mix CD of what might stereotypically be seen as "gay" music (an assumption that is dependent upon a variety of factors, one of which includes the rigidity of thinking about homosexuality via a gender inversion model), Harold and Kumar initially have the last laugh at the expense of the eXtreme white dudes, who become labelled as "gay" as a direct result of their taste in music. But Harold and Kumar also get swept up into the affective attraction inherent in this "gay" music as, while listening to Wilson Phillips' "Hold On," they begin to sing along, at first with some apprehension but finally with feeling.



This moment of "queeraoke" is interesting to note, particularly in relation to the "Do you boys like to spoon" (or in the restricted trailer, "You boys ready for your cock-meat sandwich?") moment in the ...Escape from Guantanamo Bay trailer which positions Harold and Kumar as potential victims of sexual torture, and places them in a negative affective relationship (fear, terror) with both each other and the prison guard that is distinct from the affective alliance forged with the help of Wilson Phillips. And the lyrics to that song take on a new dimension of meaning when read together with the "cockmeat sandwich" scene of sexual torture/terror:

Some day somebody's gonna make you want to
Turn around and say goodbye
Until then baby are you going to let them
Hold you down and make you cry
Don't you know?
Don't you know things can change
Things'll go your way
If you hold on for one more day...

Interesting how such hopeful lyrics can also become so disturbing: "Hold you down and make you cry" *shiver*. But it also points to the kind of hopefulness that may not be available to those imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, where holding on for one more day means little and does little to create the change necessary for "terrorism suspects" to "turn around and say goodbye" to the very regime that holds them down.

-Media Sheep