Harold and Kumar is the most important movie for Asian-Americans in the history of American pop culture. Miss me with movies like “Memoirs of a Geisha” where everything’s depressing and the characters were Asian because shit it was set in Asia, what else were they going to be. But Harold and fucking Kumar set the stage to normalize Asian-Americans as something more than just a vague bundle of stereotypes that people can joke about because of the whole “model minority” thing. This stoner comedy took those stereotypes and rolled with them, but in phenomenal fashion, intertwining them in between character depictions that showed heart and dimensions outside of the typical norms of those who might not be familiar with Asian people.
Harold is an accountant. Kumar is applying to medical school. To insiders and outsiders alike, you can go ahead and nod “yeah that seems about right.” The character introductions are damn fun. Kumar’s sitting in a haughty office, full of polished mahogany with the dean interviewing him as a potential medical student. Cut to Kumar and he’s slouched over, wearing cargo pants, a t-shirt and a hoodie. He could not give less of a shit, in direct defiance to the ethnic stereotypes that Indian men crave to be doctors. Those who do have to be strait-laced, polite and boring. Kumar is smart, since he even got to the stage of getting an interview with a medical school dean, but him actively tanking the interview is him not conforming to the constructed path that his family made for him.
Harold is what most Americans think of Asians, especially Koreans: quiet, clean, and pushovers. Cleaning his area before he leaves work, giving up a prime parking spot without putting up a fuss, and parallel parking until he gets it just right, he validates just about every thought white people have on East Asians. That feeling can’t be synthesized more than the two exaggerated assholes who push their work on Harold so they can party, even quipping that he would probably love to do it since Asians love math.
But my god after these two intro scenes, Harold and Kumar meet back at their apartment, get high and all they can think about are White Castle sliders. For the remainder of the movie, their ethnic backgrounds are never used as a throwaway joke, instead they’re leveraged in ways to continue the story and keeps in-line with the character’s internal logic.
Harold and Kumar run out of weed, so what do they do? They go to the hospital where his brother and father work and it’s apparent why he has this desire to fight going into the family lineage. He doesn’t want to be lame like his brother even though he loves and respects his dad. His brother’s a tightwad, and this isn’t about Kumar fighting his Indian heritage, it’s about not being a hodgepodge who walks a straight line. Everyone can relate.
Throughout the film, Asian stereotypes are never really used to put the main characters down as the butt of the joke, but they instead re-interpret the stereotype to break the mold and insert their own humor outside of the predisposed notions of race.
When Harold and Kumar goes to a hospital to try to re-up on their weed supply, Kumar is met in the lobby by his brother and father, dressed in scrubs and a white lab coat respectively while Kumar is in a t-shirt and hoodie. He lies through his teeth and performs a misdirection to not only his family but the audience by pretending to come to his senses and take his medical career path in a more serious direction, just to get close and nab his brother’s ID card. Later, when Harold and Kumar are dressed in masks and scrubs, Kumar is pulled into an operating room in a hurry as doctors and nurses mistake him for his brother. A man’s been shot and Kumar moves quickly without a moment of hesitation, spewing off orders in confident fashion and works in a steady flurry to extract the numerous bullet wounds. He can be a doctor, he has the skills, but it took a very unorthodox method of practicing medicine that got him to push himself as a future board-certified doctor.
As the night moves along, Kumar is the one who makes a lot of the choices and steers them all in the wrong direction, causing more and more misfortunes along their supposedly simple path to get a couple of fast-food sliders. At the end of the movie, Harold takes charge and steals a paraglider from the same douche who stole his parking space in the beginning of the movie. He takes advantage of a situation and implores his will to get what he wants at the end, without fear.
And when they finally, finally get their burgers at the end of the movie and lay back in satisfaction of their gluttony, Harold’s bosses walk in, drunk and living in excess. Harold walks right up to them, demands they cut the shit, and speaks to them with authority, even threatening them with blackmail if they don’t do the work they pushed on him. He doesn’t give a shit what anyone else thinks about him, and now he’s a free man, living independent of the situation thrust upon him in the beginning of the movie.
Harold and Kumar break open the conventions and introduce an underrepresented group of people to break away from the stereotypes and enter into a real realm of personality. They show that stereotypes are explicitly general and people are more than welcome to come to realizations of their identity without their ethnicity painting them in a disadvantaged corner. Thanks Harold and Kumar.
Sloppy Critic 