This year’s contribution to stoner culture arrives in the form of American Ultra, starring John Leguizamo and Jesse Eisenberg.Alan Markfield
In 1995, Clueless's Cher Horowitz summed up pop culture's relationship with stoner movies perfectly. "It is one thing to spark up a doobie and get laced at parties," she says sternly. "But it is quite another to be fried all day."
Which is true. According to our relationship with stoner films and their characters, there's a fine line between the movies that endear themselves to us and the ones that paint stoner culture as bleak, embarrassing or even sad. I mean, to get high with the Dazed and Confused crew at the Moon Tower is a one-night deal, but to put your bong before your baby mama à la Seth Rogen in Knocked Up is simply shameful.
But Cher isn't totally right. While it is indeed one thing to be fried all day, the characters who are high seem a little more fun than the ones who end up shamed or even reformed. That's because the best stoner movies do what so many other films do not: They are so over-the-top and unrealistic that we have no choice but to suspend our disbelief or risk missing out on the jokes. They force us to get on their level.
This weekend, 2015's contribution to stoner culture arrives in the form of American Ultra, a film about a small-town burnout who learns he's a CIA-trained assassin who must save himself and his girlfriend before they're both killed by rogue government forces. And while reviews are lukewarm at best, the plot's absurdity seems like a much-needed reprieve from a summer in which action has been bogged down by grim drama and unrelenting darkness. (The Avengers was straight-up heartbreaking, and Fantastic Four was literally so dark that nobody could see it, even if they wanted to.) So now, we can sit back and laugh with a couple of stoners – "with," and not "at," being the operative word.
To laugh at pop culture's stoners seems as mean as it is pointless. In Dazed and Confused, everybody's just looking to have a good time. In Pineapple Express, fancy weed leads to two guys trying to outrun a murderer. And sixties counterculture comics Cheech and Chong just want to make everybody laugh (after they get high). Which is why, years after first encountering them, we still like all these characters. Not only are they living their lives in a way that makes them genuinely happy, they're also not afraid to make mistakes or be human (usually to a fault). The stoner movies that tend to endear themselves to us most (Harold and Kumar, Half Baked, Dazed and Confused) often populate themselves with characters who have the guts to embrace their flaws. Or, at the very least, the characters are so unconcerned with what other people think that they drop any/all social filters or pretenses. (How else would we get a movie based tightly around White Castle's low-tier hamburgers?)
However, these movies also open the door for more serious conversations about drug culture, thanks to films such as Smiley Face (about a young actress played by Anna Faris whose habit leads to an adventure in Los Angeles), or Knocked Up, in which a surprise pregnancy leads to a man-child (Rogen) growing up and smoking less.
These movies can also slip into pedantry, though: In the real world, most people can't smoke pot every day and sustain a productive life. (Relax, I said "most.") But because stoner movies hinge so much on our investment in chaos, it's easy for a realistic representation of cutting back or straightening up to evolve into what feels like a lecture. It's as if the filmmakers knew we'd bought into their story, so now they were free to tell us anything. In Trainwreck, Amy realizes that she needs to pull her life together, so she removes all pot paraphernalia from her home. In Ted 2, John and Ted's more-than-habitual pot use leads to relationship problems. And in Spring Breakers, casual partying leads to a crime spree as director Harmony Korine darkly brings many parents' worst fears to light.
Granted, movies like Trainwreck are important. Not only is the Judd Apatow film funny and smart, it shows the necessity of personal change. On the flip side, Spring Breakers succeeds in justifying the paranoia that defines the spring-break landscape, and Apatow's own Knocked Up needed its lead to move out on his own and light up less often to avoid becoming an all-too-real case of a father unwilling to take care of his child.
But that all-too-common theme doesn't mean stoner classics are a less important genre. Life lessons matter, but there's something to be said for pure laughs. Frankly, it's easy to champion stoner characters who are so wonderfully human. And it's also easier to laugh with them because while most of us may not be fried all day, the characters who are deserve to have their stories told, too.