Hollywood gets political with its stoner movies
Pot, stalk and smoking pipe barrels. Devil weed. Mary Jane. Playing twister. Reefer. No matter what you call it, cannabis continues to spark debate in popular culture. More than 70 years into the drug’s prohibition at the hands of U.S. lawmakers, it seems Hollywood is ready to blow smoke in the face of current policy.The proof can be seen in a new crop of films that don’t just depict glassy-eyed potheads giggling at moronic gags in the tradition of Cheech and Chong, but go much further, suggesting pot as the symbolic cure for personal and cultural oppression.
Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke (1978) was the first film to show rampant pot use without exacting a moral price for all that fun, offering an emotional and cultural antidote to overt anti-drug films such as Reefer Madness.
Around the same time Cheech and Chong started their big screen puffing, the American government banned the word “hemp” from all school text books, insisting any mention of the once powerful hemp industry (predicted to be the No. 1 crop in the U.S. by Popular Mechanics in 1938) would only confuse youngsters who didn’t understand the difference between useful hemp fibre and the combustible of choice among teens.
Yet with Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay’s North American release, it’s clear the pot movie has shifted away from its stoner base to become more than blissfully empty nonsense. Now, it’s political, man.
The first example of this brand of pot movie is Sam Mendes’s 1999 classic American Beauty, in which Kevin Spacey plays ganja-smoking suburban dad named Lester Burnham.
Lester is your average white-collar Everyman. He’s white, affluent and married to a gorgeous real estate agent. He should be happy, but Lester lusts after his youthful neighbour, resents his employers and dislikes his wife almost as much as she hates him.
The only happiness Lester finds comes in the form of a $3,000-an-ounce bag of bud he buys from the boy next door. When Lester tokes, he feels free. Moreover, he feels good about himself and his increasingly meaningless life. In American Beauty, it’s the cannabis that helps Lester wake up from the American Dream and discover his inner truth.
Subversion has always been the thematic heart of the stoner movie, which explains why the genre was born when trust in government was at its nadir in the wake of Richard Nixon’s presidency.
Pot and politics had entered into an indirect but equal relationship that continues today.
The more American lawmakers try to ring the moral alarm, the more adamantly the creative community rallies around the latest social villain. This not only explains the recent rise in pot-friendly films, it also sheds light on the birth of the relatively recent sub-genre of pot movie, the hip-hop stoner film.
Where Cheech and Chong exposed devil weed to the world of white people on screen, the likes of Dave Chapelle and Chris Tucker brought Mary Jane home to the ‘hood 30 years later.
It seems wherever there’s oppression, there’s a good pot movie waiting to happen.
Whether this rising tide of marijuana-friendly movies results in a revision of current drug laws remains to be seen, but if it does, we don’t have to look far for the smoking gun.
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