Dude, Where’s My Reference Point?

Apparently “Jerseyana”, the pop culture sprung from the loins of the New Jersey Turnpike has translated enough well enough to enter the American national lexicon. South Asians have known about New Jersey well enough, particularly the Edison area, and a generation of middle class twenty to forty something Asian Americans continue to make Queens and Brooklyn the Next Move Out of New Jersey. What got left behind on exit 9, or the detritus of our experiences shows up in films like Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle.

Marketed as the definitive indie celluloid proof that Asians and South Asians have arrived in North America, Harold and Kumar is a frat boy flick about two guys who get the munchies after getting stoned. The film gleefully presents us with the dutiful, conscientious and submissive Harold (John Cho), a Korean American financial analyst shouldering more than his share of grunt work at the office. Harold’s the Asian nerd composite of all the Hollywood campus movies of the past ten years; brainy and fumbling. He exemplifies this prototype by being unable to assert himself at work, carry a conversation with a woman whom he is clearly romantically interested in, or pull a punch let alone a Bruce Lee move. Constantly baited by the white male figures that punctuate his and Kumar’s night on the Turnpike, Harold metaphorically and literally isn’t even thinking of raising his dukes. The edge to Harold is that he affirms to us, the viewing audience, the mainstream perception of the Asian Ivy League quota buster. Its almost as if the filmmakers are rubbing our noses in the very stereotype of the Asian takeover-a tyranny based on the work ethics America has forgotten.

Kumar’s territory is slightly more exoticised, but familiar to viewers acquainted with Zadie Smith’s White Teeth or even that Masterpiece Theater miniseries “The Jewel in the Crown”. According to this movie’s dialogue, Kumar (Kal Penn) is a well-endowed hustler, genetically predisposed towards performances of medical and surgical genius, a playa and a weed hound. Arguably, Kumar’s the Black Owen Wilson to Harold’s uptight and anglicized Ben Stiller. Kumar’s also trying to evade the mantle of professional affluence his father insists he get used to by sabotaging med school interviews. As Kumar’s unsympathetic, older and medical doctor brother scolds him, “You’re twenty two and its time to grow up!” I assume we are meant to feel the pain of the children of the desi professional class-born in the USA, but no long term benefits of slack. As with Harold, the filmmaker’s give Kumar a corresponding twist-not the bad Buddha habit (which, of course, is meant as a weedspeak for hippie-suburban-boho-urban cool). Kumar’s not just oriented towards science-he is monstrously gifted. What we are embraced in is a reiteration of the Asian myth-Asian viewers be proud, and Americans-look out, here comes Indian know-how…

Boys will be boys, the movie writers seem to wink at us, and so Our Heroes have something to learn and some scores to settle. And so the Turnpike delivers a bounty of raccoons, Jesus freaks, nubile wives, runny British college babes, deeply bigoted state troopers, a washed up Anglo American actor who played a wunderkind doc on TV. Jewish college friends and a gang of white hooligans loosely based on the Dot Buster thugs of the late eighties. There are a few people of color including, in a stroke lifted straight out of the novel Born Confused, a college Asian American organization that on the surface seem traditionally Asian, but come party time, throw down like MTV India. Or is that the weed talking?

As Harold and Kumar was pitched as a movie with a message about racism, where the moral high ground actually is eludes the viewer. The movie cuts broad strokes and is actually mean spirited at best, especially when it comes to gender and class. “This ain’t no Joy Luck Club” one of our Heroes dishes, and while the line itself scores, you get the feeling the filmmakers took that statement personally. Because Harold’s white and ethically challenged supervisor was dumped by an Asian American woman, the boss is understood as more of a worm for exploiting Asian American’s Harold’s low self esteem and punctured masculinity. Yet when Kumar tips their Jewish friends about the Asian campus party they left behind at Princeton, are we supposed to share their professed excitement about the objectification of Asian women’s bodies? An interesting dichotomy occurs: Asian women are hot objects of mainstream desire, while Asian men are not. If you are looking for desi or Black American sisters, don’t hold your breath-apparently the filmmakers are preserving a few shibboleths for the sequel.

Meanwhile, the young woman with whom Harold is enamored is a quiet, Bollywoodish Latina American. We know she’s a good girl when she confesses that her Friday nights consist of watching the eighties movie Sixteen Candles and eating Haagen Daz. Harold groans to Kumar that he wants to date this particular woman but will probably be forced, by parental expectation, to marry the Asian American geeky college student. This may be the one slightly genuine move in the film-even if it does play into retread clichés. But Harold will reclaim his masculinity by upsetting the Asian nerd stereotype and winning the Latina American stereotyped hottie.

Until then, there are many white women throwing themselves at Our Heroes, which must be more of that racial stereotyping that Harold and Kumar is said to subvert. Admittedly, one defining criterion of the American frat movie is the pursuit and conquest of beer and young women. One’s masculinity (and heterosexuality) is proven in what frat culture a decade ago insisted were rites of passage. Why should Harold and Kumar deviate from this aspect of the American Dream? Only in this version, the feminized Other, the Asian male as an American reclaims what was robbed him in American pop cultural Orientalism. So as the white male figures jockey for power-at work, on the turnpike, in the strip malls, it’s because they already sense their positions of definitive masculinity eroding as the Model Minority finds its bearings. The white women become indistinguishable objects of desire, one more experience to be had, like White Castle burgers. A little unsettling in its acceptance of American identity and disconnected to what this “consumable” identity means for any American.

Considering where Harold and Kumar seem to positions itself on race (they are constantly running from threatening white men), the three mentions of Black America are desultory. An accidental detour forces them into Newark where one of Our Heroes hopes aloud that they wont get shot. When the two see their pair of East and South Asian American guys getting seriously beaten up by men of indeterminate race, Kumar floors the gas. Later, in the indie movie clichéd device of the 7-11 (attention all writers: NO MORE 7-11 scenes), they find yes, a South Asian convenience store worker being harassed by the same white group of guys whom ig Our Heroes. After bonding with the worker in Hindi, Kumar feints a few moves to fake the white guys out, but then leaves the store. The hooligans continue to destroy the 7-11 and because this is a frat movie, we are supposed to laugh. Let the working poor desi schlub bear his cross, Kumar and Harold are under no compulsion to intercede.

So when Kumar and Harold continue to run afoul of the racist and incompetent law, its gets a little difficult to work up the outrage expected by the filmmakers. In a local police station, two African American men, good natured and as gentle as possible take the rap for Harold and Kumar’s actions. On one hand, this is the binary that we all seem to accept unquestioningly-Asians are traditionally law abiding and good capitalists unlike those formerly enslaved and complaining Black folks-which is why Harold’s arrest is so “wrong”. The other joke embedded in this scene is that Black American men are blamed for everything, regardless of their innocence. In fact, Harold’s cellmate is a Black American professor who is passing his night in the pokey reading Civil Disobedience. (That’s your cue to laugh, as any Gandhian reference is only grist for the mill for Our Heroes in search of Theirs). If you listen closely, as the Professor regales Harold with his encounter and racist arrest with the same cop that ran in Harold, listen closely for a thin whiny saw playing-the Bollywood equivalent of violins cued during a scene of sentimental overdrive.

There are so many scenes like this, you begin to suspect that Harold and Kumar is less a film about racism and more about regenerating our own Asian American prejudices. We could consider this entry as one more response of the Empire Strikes Back, but on whose behalf? In the context of Vincent Chin? The backlash against Muslim South Asians post 9/11? The Asian American working class? Arguably, in the real world, the Asian American working class has more in common with workers of all ethnicities in their struggles to raise and support families, have access to higher education, union rights and political, cultural and economic self representation. Hence we are left with less than noble choices: is Harold and Kumar standing up for all affluent Asians? Not quite-if you are Muslim, an Asian woman or progressive, you’ve been left out of Brotherhood Nexus of Kindly Weed. And as pointed out, this movie is about Asian men regaining a kind of mackhood inexplicably denied them, due to, yes, you guessed it, white racism. So, while this movie might amuse the boys and their parents, my hope is that the South Asian and Asian viewership remain less sanguine. Sure, Harold and Kumar are twenty two, but the race card falls a little insularly, a bit too flat when you ignore the trumps American history has dealt the rest of the country.