why i love harold and kumar, by the l.a. times

A great article on the Harold and Kumar phenomenon by the L.A. Times. I take issue with the headline using the word "multiculturalism," since what the movie really pushes is American racialization and the social construction of racial identity, which has very little to do with "culture." I also just dislike the idea/term "multiculturalism."

Much, much praise to Mark Olsen for writing this article; I feel the need to quote at length because he really gets to why the writer/directors and actors have all done something great:

Both actors have always been particularly sensitive to the issues of racial representation. It goes back to even before they were doing the audition rounds earlier in their careers, to memories from childhood. Penn, 31 and from New Jersey, vividly recalled how the release of "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom," with a scene of an Indian feast, had an immediate effect.

"I remember going to school after the weekend that movie came out and no one wanted to sit next to me at lunch," said Penn. "They completely believed my peanut butter and jelly sandwich certainly had to contain monkey brains. Nobody would sit next to me for a week. Even though I was a kid, that was the first time I realized how seeing something in a film can really affect how you look at things."

It's a theme that Penn takes quite seriously. He's actually, believe it or not, currently a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, teaching courses in "Images of Asian Americans in the Media" and "Contemporary American Teen Films."

Cho, 35 and raised in Los Angeles, recalled his own disappointment at the Long Duk Dong character in "Sixteen Candles" and acknowledged that there can be concerns about the broader cultural meanings a specific role may have.

"It is a bit of a burden just thinking about it all the time," he said. "The point is to have fun in this job, and it makes it a little trickier sometimes. I do feel some amount of pressure, and with every job I've tried to steer clear of things that I feel would embarrass me as an Asian American.

"While I'm willing to make a fool of myself in a role, I certainly don't want to put on buckteeth and a cone-shaped hat and talk with an accent."

Hurwitz and Schlossberg initially created the characters of Harold and Kumar as friends/sidekicks for an earlier script. They decided to turn them into lead roles as a way to reflect the diverse group of friends they grew up with in New Jersey, many of whom were American-born to immigrant parents and as entrenched in American culture as were the writers.

"With both films, race is and isn't important," explained Schlossberg. "We were very aware that our protagonists were a Korean American and an Asian American, but on the other hand, it's totally random. Everybody always asks why did we do this, and the movies themselves don't always answer the question. We bring up race, and it's clearly there, but we try not to make it too much about it."

The seemingly throwaway attitude toward the characters' cultural background suits Penn just fine.

"The ethnicity flavors the role, but who they are goes way beyond ethnicity," said Penn. "And it seems to me we are moving away from just the ethnocentric side characters. I think that's evidenced in shows like 'Lost,' 'Grey's Anatomy,' 'House,' 'The Office.'

"It's probably too soon to say, but hopefully you're seeing a shift where the real America is actually being reflected in all its diversity. I find it really refreshing and more interesting to watch when things are more fleshed out."

This could have been exactly the type of comedy with throwaway ethnocentric side characters that Penn references (and that Penn played, to some degree, in National Lampoon's Van Wilder). In the first film, the two white Jewish neighbors of Harold and Kumar, Goldstein and Rosenberg (an homage to Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, Hamlet's comic relief?) were originally going to be the main characters, based loosely on writers/directors Hurwitz and Schlossberg's own youthful experiences in New Jersey. But the conscious decision to do something different, to "flip the script," in the parlance of African American and hip hop traditions, made a world of difference, and is the reason why I consider this to be one of the best movies out there redefining how Americans think about race.