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In print | May 1, 2008

I remember going to see “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.” It was right after I finished high school. I alternated between feeling vaguely queasy and laughing so hard I would have shot Jujubees out my nose, if only I’d had the money to buy them.

Now I’m about to graduate from college, and many things have changed. I still can’t afford Jujubees, but I have read Laura Mulvey’s seminal work on the male gaze in narrative cinema. (Whether you think this is an improvement depends on your tolerance for film theory or, alternatively, on the strength of your feeling for Jujubees.) I have also participated in academic discussions of homosocial male-bonding through homophobic misogyny and, perhaps most saliently, I have descended into the throes of an honors-exams-meets-graduation-apocalypse meltdown, all the while cultivating the kind of finely-tuned sense of bathroom humor that only mixed housing can bestow.

What all this means is, I suppose it’s fitting that, in my 52nd and final article for The Phoenix (that’s right, Dalva, 52), I am forced to declare that Swarthmore has ruined a movie for me.

Come on, New Line! I am the target demographic for “Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay.” I am young. I am immature. I have a crush on Kal Penn. I am in such a state of pre-exam, pre-graduation panic that I might not have noticed if you just reran “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.” In fact, you could have run a different, entirely unrelated movie, called it “Harold and Kumar” and I still would have liked it. You could have just repeated that part with Neil Patrick Harris and the unicorn for 90 minutes and that would have been cool. But you had to go and ruin it all with your stupid, effing Male Gaze.

At its core, “Harold and Kumar” the sequel is a buddy movie. I’m sure that the original was at least somewhat homophobic, but in my teenaged innocence, I was too busy laughing with Jujubee-propelling power to notice. “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle” also had a great gimmick: this is what the token minority characters from other teen movies are doing in their off time — adventures that are smarter, funnier and hipper than Freddie Prinz Jr.’s bland hijinks. Wouldn’t you rather be their friends?

Alas, no. In “Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay,” homophobia is the gimmick. The movie is designed to reassure its intended male audience that neither Harold (John Cho) nor Kumar (Kal Penn) are gay and hey, you there, yes you, straight boy in the theatre, you’re not gay either!

How else to explain intense homosocial moments (Kumar interrupts Harold in the bathroom multiple times) followed by gratuitous female exposure? Harold and Kumar go to a “bottom-less” party populated by their one male friend and a crowd of women wearing skimpy tops, high heels and no bottoms. When their male friend exposes himself, his genitalia are disgusting; Harold and Kumar drop their pants but are shot only from the back, presumably lest some poor straight boy in the theater have an untoward reaction. Because I have scrupulously avoided the Women’s Studies department, I have no problem with sexual objectification. But I have a problem when a film depicts women as sex objects and, despite an express invitation to do so, declines to go there with men.

As its militant heterosexuality shows, this film is extremely anxious. Trying so hard to surpass its prequel (amusing aside: the Canadian-French title of the original is “Harold et Kumar chassent le burger,” once again confirming the theory that everything is more sublime in French), it falls so short. When I was 17, Harold and Kumar were somehow totally relatable. They only wanted this one, tiny thing — and as one who has also chassented le burger, I could sympathize. But now they’re on the run from Guantanamo, and the cleverness of the first film has vanished along with its trivial object. Writer/directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg have lost their knack for penetrating, Gen-Y humor and the perfect turn of phrase — even their fart jokes seemed off. I wanted to identify with Harold and Kumar. I want their post-collegiate malaise to be my post-collegiate malaise. But it seems our paths have diverged.

And yet I still sat through “Harold and Kumar” with a big smile on my face. Neil Patrick Harris enters, rides a unicorn, dies. The technical term for that is “quality.” For the rest, I can only conclude that deep in my heart, I have an abiding affection for these lads that will take at least one more bad sequel to displace. But my faith has been shaken.

In the end, I think I should thank Swarthmore, if for nothing else than for teaching me that I am not a 14-year-old boy. Though the extreme unicorn dearth on campus has been regrettable, this has otherwise been a mind-expanding experience. But now I think the time has come for me to make my escape.

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