GWSS 3390: Feminist Media Making

Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay

I liked this movie, but not nearly as much as I liked Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. What I liked especially about the first one was how sociopolitically enlightened it was. Usually when comedies are this broad, raunchy, and joke-packed, they fall back on tired jokes—hackneyed types that have become stereotypes. But the Harold and Kumar movies are only nominally stoner movies; they’re also satires about race.

I only wish this movie were as refreshingly modern in its attitudes toward gays and women as it is towards people of color. The whole joke of Harold and Kumar’s time in Guantanamo Bay (which is thankfully brief) is that they’ll be forced to perform oral sex on a guy. Seriously? Is that still comedy?
Another disappointing scene is when they visit their friend, who’s having a bottomless (rather than topless) pool party. Of course, the vast majority of the party attendees above jacuzzi water level are female extras. The scene is a sea of women for eye candy, and then there’s a dick shot at the end, for comic relief.

In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,� Laura Mulvey describes how women movie viewers counter-identify through the male protagonists; to paraphrase, the camera is (still) almost always framing things from a hetero-male (not to mention white, upper-class, American, etc.) point of view. In order to go along with a movie—to enjoy the funny parts, to be scared at the scary parts, and so on—women have to accept the parameters of the movie. To use the Harold and Kumar scene as an example, the comedy of the scene hinges on our acceptance of the scene’s hetero-male parameters: women’s bodies are hot; men’s bodies are funny. I don’t have a problem with this idea—of course straight guys find vaginas hot and penises funny—but I do have a problem with the fact that this is part of the logic behind most movies. In order to enjoy one of our most populist forms of entertainment, most people—by which I mean all women, gay men, non-whites, the poor—have to agree to align themselves politically/socially/sexually with the straight, white guys who are making them.