SMOKE SCREENS

Does a Surge of Stoner Movies Mean America Is Going to Pot?

I don't much like getting stoned - it makes me stupid and paranoid
(some may say not much different from my usual frame of mind). But I
do like watching other people get stoned in the movies. Vicariously
enjoying the pleasure of others onscreen, that's the definition of a
movie critic. Though the chances of my wanting to get high after
watching, say, The Wackness, are slight, I just might crave seeing
more films in which the protagonists inhale. And, as stoner movies
might be gateway films, perhaps I'd then want to see movies about
harder drugs, such as peyote, LSD, heroin, and crack. I might down a
couple of bags of Cheetos and a box of Yodels while I'm at it.

But I'm a professional: what about the rest of the country? What does
it say about America that marijuana movies are a hot genre right now,
perhaps hotter even than in the heyday of Cheech Marin and Tommy
Chong's 1978 Up in Smoke? Knocked Up, Harold & Kumar (both Go to
White Castle and Escape from Guantanamo Bay), and Superbad have made
piles of green at the box office. Just this past week, Pineapple
Express topped the box office at $12.5 million, a record for a
Wednesday opening in August. And those are just the obvious
offenders; nowadays any film rated above PG-13 flaunts casual toking.
This month alone, the list includes Hell Ride, Bottle Shock, In
Search of a Midnight Kiss, Tropic Thunder (I think that's a Thai
stick the boy drug lord is smoking), Hamlet 2, College, and The Rocker.

It's spread from the big screen to the tube, too: Weeds, a series
about a suburban widow who pays the bills by dealing (a premise
stolen from the 2000 British comedy Saving Grace), is in its fourth
season on Showtime. Seth Rogen and James Franco of Pineapple Express
also stirred controversy (and hyped publicity for their film) this
past June by "pretending" to light up while presenting on the
broadcast of the MTV Movie Awards. But for the most part, you're
safer from the FCC and the MPAA these days smoking a joint than
smoking a cigarette. (For more info on the recent push to ban
cigarettes, see "Outlawing Cigarettes: Beginning Another Hopeless
Drug War?" at thePhoenix.com/blogs/freeforall.)

Meanwhile, as usual, real life tries to keep up with Hollywood. In
Congress recently, Massachusetts's own Democratic representative
Barney Frank and Texas Republican representative Ron Paul proposed
House Bill 5843, which if passed would end federal penalties for
Americans carrying fewer than 100 grams of marijuana. The executive
branch, though, is way ahead of them. Our past two presidents (and
maybe the next one, too), have admitted (sort of) to lighting up - if
not inhaling - the chronic. (We'll get more details on herb habits of
the current holder of the highest office in the land when Oliver
Stone's W. opens October 17.)

So, isn't this long-overdue tolerance for, and possible legalization
of, marijuana a good thing? I'd like to think so. Still - and it
could be the second-hand smoke from all these marijuana movies
talking - I feel like there's something funny going on. I'm sure of
it - I'm just not sure what it is. (Er, can you pass the Twizzlers?)

Reefer Badness

No such ambiguities wafted about the drug seven decades ago. When
Prohibition ended in 1933, an entire federal bureaucracy was sitting
around doing nothing, waiting for the axe to fall. So Harry J.
Anslinger, assistant prohibition commissioner in the then Bureau of
Prohibition, pushed to make dope the new scourge of the nation. Aided
by a propaganda campaign of films and newspaper articles (William
Randolph Hearst also had it in for hemp, because it was an
alternative source of paper and he had invested heavily in wood
pulp), Anslinger effectively demonized the drug. As a result, the
"Marihuana Tax Act" was passed by Congress without much resistance in
1937, outlawing marijuana (and hemp) to the present day.

Thus was the stoner-movie genre born, a step-child of Anslinger's
efforts. One of the first of its kind, Reefer Madness (1936;
originally titled Tell Your Children), actually started life as an
earnest if utterly fraudulent harangue against the dangers of pot. A
church group had produced it, but an exploitation studio bought it,
spiced it up with some lurid footage, and passed it off as an
educational film in order to do an end-run around the puritanical
standards of the Hollywood Production Code of 1934.

The opening admonitory title-card prologue promises a good time:

Marihuana is a violent narcotic - the Real Public Enemy Number One! .
. . Its first effect is sudden, violent, uncontrollable laughter;
then come violent hallucinations . . . the loss of all power to
resist physical emotions . . . leading finally to acts of shocking
violence ending . . . in insanity . . .

Hey - I'll have what she's having. But other than the uncontrollable
laughter, the rest of Reefer Madness fails to measure up to the hype.
True, it offers crazy piano playing, hot jitterbugging, an off-screen
drug-addled tryst, an attempted rape, an accidental shooting, and a
trip to the loony bin, but when I saw it decades after it opened, it
was about as exciting and funny as my first (or was it my
thousandth?) hit of hashish while listening to "Stairway to Heaven."
Audiences of the 1930s agreed, and along with other such films as
Assassin of Youth (1937), it failed to catch on.

Until, that is, 1971, when Keith Stroup of the National Organization
for the Reform of Marijuana Laws bought the print and turned it into
a popular midnight movie. Laugh at the cornball melodrama all you
want, latter-day stoners, but maybe it worked after all. Hardly any
more marijuana movies were made for decades, and apparently nobody
smoked the stuff except for jazz musicians, beatniks, and Norman Mailer.

Where There's Smoke, There's Fire: The '60s

What was I talking about again? Oh, yeah. Even before the '60s
instituted pot as a cultural phenomenon, a few movies showed the way.
As early as 1955, High School Confidential depicted "weedheads" as
representatives of teenaged rebellion - and perdition. In 1958, Orson
Welles's masterpiece Touch of Evil presented a preview of the War on
Drugs to come. Welles plays crapulous Hank Quinlan, head of a
border-town police department, who works covertly with the local
Mexican drug dealer to maintain the status quo. They ally to counter
such threats as Charlton Heston's crusading anti-drug DA. The dealer
kidnaps the DA's Anglo wife (Janet Leigh) to frame her for drug use
and murder, getting her stoned and locking her up nude in a motel
room with a bunch of leather-clad dope heads, led by, of all people,
Mercedes McCambridge.

(Here is where the sudden, violent, uncontrollable laughter kicks in.)

More to the point, these two films established the two functions
marijuana would soon come to serve - both in movies and society as a
whole: subversion and repression. Dropouts and revolutionaries would
seek to overthrow the establishment by smoking pot; the establishment
would oblige them by tossing their asses in jail on drug charges.
Eventually, the establishment would realize that it didn't even need
to arrest them - the drug itself renders the populace indifferent to
political change or incapable of achieving it.

As it turned out, most of the pot smoking in the '60s took place in
the real world, not in the movies. In the few films in which pot
figured, the narrative usually worked thusly: a dilettantish fugitive
from the "straight" world is initiated into the counterculture,
smokes a few joints, has his (and it is almost always a he) heart
broken by a hippie girl, and returns to bourgeois comfort sadder but
wiser. In Paul Mazursky's charming but innocuous I Love You, Alice B.
Toklas (1968), Peter Sellers plays a prim lawyer who falls for a
flower child, smokes some herb, and learns his lesson. A few years
later, Milos Forman's first (and seldom seen) American film Taking
Off (1971) offered a darker take on a similar theme, as middle-class
parents pursue their dropout teenage daughter and get a taste of what
she's been up to in a hilarious scene in which they join other
parents in a seminar on how to smoke a joint.

For the most part, though, the '60s movies skipped the intermediary
drug and went straight for the hard stuff - usually psychedelics,
such as LSD, mescaline, and magic mushrooms. In Psych Out (1968),
Jack Nicholson plays a character called "Stoney" who helps a deaf
teenage runaway look for her brother in Haight-Ashbury. She finds
instead bad trips and the Strawberry Alarm Clock. In Roger Corman's
The Trip (1967), which Jack Nicholson wrote, Peter Fonda plays a
square ad executive who drops acid and contemplates . . . an orange.
Groovy! But bummer ending. Then Nicholson and Fonda join up with the
inevitable Dennis Hopper to smoke dope, drop acid, and sell skag as
they ride their choppers in search of America in Easy Rider (1969).
Good luck, guys.

By the end of the decade, dope seems a detour en route to saving the
world. Or a highway to hell. The smoke-filled Eden of Woodstock
(1970) gives way to the infernal violence of Gimme Shelter (1970) and
the even-more-terrifying insanity of that ultimate drug movie,
Performance (1970).

Maybe the Reefer Madness people weren't that crazy after all.

Why Do You Think They Call Them Dopes?

Prior to the mid '70s, one of the key effects of "marihuana's"
effects (as listed in the prologue to Reefer Madness, anyway) had
been missing: sudden, violent, and uncontrollable laughter. Hence the
success of Cheech & Chong's Up in Smoke, the first of four
increasingly inane but classic stoner movies they would roll out over
the next five years. Not only did they mellow out the earnestness of
previous drug movies with dumbass buffoonery, but they drew up the
template for most stoner movies to come. To wit, the Stoner Movie Template:

1) Two (sometimes more) dumb, latently homosexual stoner buddies as
protagonists

2) A dumb, arrogant, entitled, and uptight cop or authority figure as
an antagonist

3) A silly quest (for weed, usually) or a paranoid flight (from the
cops, the heebie-jeebies), or both

4) A concluding conflagration or confrontation, in which everyone
usually gets high

Other, optional elements include:

1) A noisy and malodorous bowel movement as a plot device

2) A roach (or other lit object) falling into the lap of someone driving a car

3) Women ranking behind dope and food - but ahead of beer - as
objects of desire

4) A new and/or bizarre cannabis-delivery system

5) A maddening, unending circularity, not unlike my own bad
experiences with pot

Okay, that last one is a little subjective. But the other categories
are pretty consistent.

Of course, there's a bridge between the idealistic stoners of the
'60s and the idiotic stoners of today. To find it, first it's
necessary to ponder the great smoke-out that began with the Reagan
years, the era of "Just Say No." No more funny druggies with big
joints and innocent, hedonistic buffoonery. Instead, dopers were
demonized or doomed. Like the suburban kids in Tim Hunter's chilling
River's Edge (1986). They're freaky sociopaths zombified by Dennis
Hopper's killer weed. They can be summarized in two words: Crispin Glover.

As in the '60s, grass gave way to meaner drugs like smack, crack,
coke, and crystal meth, served up in moralizing melodramas like Gus
Van Sant's hip but preachy ("You never fuck me and I always drive")
Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and My Own Private Idaho (1991). Or
Generation X burnouts like Less than Zero (1987) and Bright Lights,
Big City (1988). And don't forget Brian De Palma's Scarface (1983),
which no doubt has scared straight a generation of gangstas wearing
Tony Montana T-shirts.

Despite the crackdown, however, a spark of the Up in Smoke legacy
still glowed. Like Sean Penn's Spicoli in Amy Heckerling's Fast Times
at Ridgemont High (1982), this unsavory element was marginalized in
society (and was only intended to be a smaller part of the film), but
was embraced by audiences nonetheless. It went underground in Bill &
Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989), a doper comedy without dope. But
when the real deal finally returned, the generation that had
engendered it had come of age, ushering in a variation on the stoner
comedy, a subgenre I'll call . . .

Flashbacks

As the '60s and '70s potheads grew into middle-class respectability,
they still pined for the good old days. This stoned-age nostalgia not
only sparked a new kind of stoner movie, but also started making the
genre, if not the practice, respectable. An early example is Bill
Murray as Hunter S. Thompson in the widely despised Where the Buffalo
Roam (1980) - Thompson would be resurrected by Johnny Depp in 1998 in
Terry Gilliam's far superior but equally scorned Fear and Loathing in
Las Vegas. Other examples include Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986),
which features a scene in which Willem Dafoe literally takes a
shotgun and blows ganja smoke into Charlie Sheen's mouth in 'Nam in
the '60s; Richard Linklater's latter-day American Graffiti, Dazed and
Confused (1993); and Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous (2000), his memoir
of covering rock and roll as a teenage journalist for Rolling Stone
in the 1970s.

These films are period pieces looking back at weed's salad days. What
about the aging potheads themselves? People like Bill Clinton, our
chief executive from 1992 to 2000, or George W. Bush, his successor,
who both tried to dispel the traces of their former indulgences like
a teenager spraying air freshener? Or more poignantly, what about
those who had the courage to stick to their (potential drug)
convictions? Like the legendary Tommy Chong himself, who, as seen in
Josh Gilbert's 2005 documentary a/k/a Tommy Chong, tried to make ends
meet in his post-Smoke-sequel, pre Cheech & Chong reunion days by
selling bongs and other paraphernalia online? That is, until a
multi-million-dollar sting operation conducted by eager-beavers in
John Ashcroft's Department of Justice nailed his ass and sent him to
prison. You can run but you can't hide, evildoer!

Chong's fictional counterparts don't make out much better. Jeff
Bridges's "the Dude" in the Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski (1998)
vaguely recalls smoking dope and occupying university buildings once
upon a time, but all he cares about now (it's 1991, during the
buildup to the first Gulf War) is smoking dope, drinking
"Caucasians," and maybe bowling (does he in fact roll a single ball
in the entire movie?). That changes when a case of mistaken identity
ends with his rug getting peed on, compounded by a case of mistaken
machismo. Egged on by his pal Walter (John Goodman), whose Vietnam
past has been stirred up by the senior Bush's anti-Iraq rhetoric, the
Dude decides that this outrage against his carpet "will not stand."

For his troubles, he ends up in a dopey noir-ish nightmare involving
nihilists, a pornographer, and a Busby Berkeley like production
number starring Julianne Moore and Saddam Hussein set in a bowling alley.

The Dude, nonetheless, abides. So, too, does Lester (Kevin Spacey),
in Sam Mendes's Oscar-winning American Beauty (1999). Lester
ineffectually protests his suburban domesticity by lusting after a
minor and buying dope from a disturbed teenaged neighbor. Barely
abiding also is Grady Tripp, Michael Douglas's academic/novelist in
Curtis Hanson's adaptation of Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys (2000).
Tripp tries to break out of his funk by going on a silly quest with a
gay protege (Tobey Maguire) and a flirtatious co-ed (Katie Holmes).
Neither of these countercultural relics accomplishes much, other than
idling away the time getting stoned. And, sadly for them, that
practice no longer even had the cachet of being subversive.

Smart Bongs

While the codgers puffed their pipes and reminisced, a new generation
of stoners was taking shape. True, there were throwbacks to the
morons of the past in films like Road Trip (2000) and Dude, Where's
My Car (2000). But with Kevin Smith's Clerks (1994), a wise-ass
savviness complemented the typical stoner sloth and puerility. Maybe
the turning point in the genre came with Bob ("Everybody must get
stoned") Dylan's son Jesse's debut feature How High (2001). The plot
follows the above mentioned Stoner Film Template pretty closely. Two
bud smokers (played by rappers Method Man and Redman) engage in a
silly quest (they try to get into, and then try to graduate from,
Harvard), opposed by an uptight authority figure (the
African-American dean), all ending in a conflagration in which
everyone gets stoned.

But there are differences, also. First, the heroes aren't dolts or
slackers. They're both ambitious, and one is a brilliant botanist.
And the dope actually makes them smarter. Adding the ashes of a dead
friend (hey, it's still a stoner movie; later they smoke the corpse
of John Quincy Adams), the botanist has developed a strain of weed
that allows the user to get all the right answers to any exam.

If that sounds more like cheating than recreation, then maybe the
wildly successful Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004) makes a
better case for my argument, whatever it is. Again, the Template is
followed (including the optional components of a pivotal bowel
movement, a dropped joint, and a maddening circularity). As in How
High, the heroes are not dummies, but in fact have already graduated
from Ivy League institutions. Harold works in a tony investment firm
and Kumar has the know-how to get into any medical school he wants to
- - if only he could bother himself to do so. Bored with this version
of the American Dream, they head off on the silly quest of the title,
and, after many repetitious and bizarre adventures, return to their
bourgeois existence, newly motivated and realizing that there's no
place like home.

As often happens under the influence of marijuana, time can play
tricks with you, so the sequel Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo
Bay, released four years later, actually takes place moments after
the first one ends. [Note: Harold & Kumar spoiler alert!] The silly
quest this time is a flight to Amsterdam, so Harold can pursue his
true love (and because pot there is, you know, legal). Here, the plot
option of a novel, bizarre cannabis-delivery system (see number 4 on
the Template's "Optional" list) plays a major role, in this case a
smokeless bong Kumar has cooked up to elude the on-flight smoke
detectors. Caught by flight marshals ("It's a bong!"), they get set
up with orange jump suits and one-way tickets to Cuba. There they
manage to escape the "cock-meat sandwiches" and elude the uptight,
idiotic authority of the acting head of Homeland Security to somehow
end up, in a maddeningly circuitous way, in George W. Bush's den in
Crawford, Texas.

The commander in chief rolls up a joint of prime Alabama herb and
shares it with our two heroes. Kumar objects to the inconsistency of
the president putting people in jail for the same habit he engages in
himself. Noting that Kumar enjoys getting hand jobs (if not cock-meat
sandwiches), but not so much giving them, the president concludes,
"Yeah, well, that makes you a fuckin' hypocriticizer too, so shut the
fuck up! Now smoke my weed."

With that, he pardons the two of all charges of terrorizing. And, in
effect, absolves, at least onscreen, all those who succumb to the
temptation of the evil weed. As Oliver Stone's upcoming W. should
demonstrate, the White House, not the nut house, is where the real
reefer madness can be found.

To read the Outside the Frame blog, go to thePhoenix.com/blogs/outsidetheframe.