Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle: Representation Matters

Yet another trip down memory lane

I am grateful for the fact that, as I’ve gotten older, more and more movies have reflected the experiences of people like me and whom I know. The stories that we receive teach us things about the world and ourselves. When these stories exclude various people or reduce people to stereotypes, we audience members limit our ideas about what’s possible for us in the world. I am almost ashamed to admit this (even though I shouldn’t be, because I was so young), but I internalized Islamophobia for a time in my adolescence even though I’m Muslim because of the media around me. Being a child during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I was surrounded by depictions of Muslims as backwards nut jobs at best, terrorists at worst.

This is why, as flawed as it is, I grew up loving the Disney film Aladdin. I still have a soft spot in my heart for it. It was one of the few times in my childhood where I saw Muslims as heroic characters in a movie. The leads were people who looked like me, like people I grew up with. As an adult looking back, I realize how meaningful that kind of representation is.

One day, I’ll discuss Aladdin. Today, I’ll focus on a film I watched much later, during my teenage years. It was a film that captured aspects of my life in a way no other film I had seen until then had been able to do. The film is twenty years old this year: Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, directed by Danny Leiner, written by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, and starring the amazing John Cho and Kal Penn as the title characters.

Yes, I did just slide from Aladdin to Harold & Kumar. My brain works in funny ways sometimes.

I first stumbled upon this film with my brother. We were up late one summer night (during summers between years of elementary school and middle school, we’d be up until the early morning hours) and caught the second half of the film on Comedy Central. We found it funny, and when we saw a DVD of it at our local library, we asked our mom to let us borrow it. She kindly let us do so. I’m so grateful that our mom allowed us to watch so many great movies at a young age, as I’ve described in my discussion about public libraries. I’m also grateful that she has a soft spot for comedies.

One Friday evening, my brother and I popped in the disc, thinking we might just watch the first few minutes and then do something else, like play video games. We fully intended to watch the movie, just not that very moment. However, once we started, we couldn’t stop. We finished the movie then and there. The film was relatable in such a deep way, we felt as if the writers must have grown up with us. 

My siblings and I grew up in Edison, New Jersey, and most of the dear friends we made in school, many of whom we’re still close with, were people of East Asian and South Asian heritage. Many of us were second generation immigrants. And, here was a movie centered on two young ride-or-die friends, both second-generation immigrants, one of Korean heritage and one of Indian heritage, traveling around their home state of New Jersey and getting into all sorts of hijinks. Places that I’d driven through or visited all my life served as settings for various sequences, from Princeton to New Brunswick. I promise you, the fact that these towns were featured in a movie was mind-blowing to teenage me.

Harold and Kumar looked like us and our friends, they had similar backgrounds as us and our friends, and they dealt with similar problems as many of us faced. I remembered Harold and Kumar dealing with racist cops and bullies. The bullies echoed the words I’d heard in elementary school from students who weren’t of Asian heritage. When the film protagonists overcame the jerks in their path, their success was cathartic.

I decided to revisit the movie this week. I wondered if my nostalgia had warped my memories, and I wasn’t sure if the film held up.

Some of the jokes haven’t aged well. Overall, though, it’s still a blast of a movie. It’s a film about defying expectations, and it’s also a joint hit to celebrate being a second generation immigrant.

The film opens with our leads jostling against expectations that are placed on them. For Harold, these come from his selfish co-workers, who dump work they’re meant to do on his desk and pressure him to finish everything by Saturday morning. These same co-workers walk out of the office and reduce him to a horrible stereotype, saying that Harold is happy with the extra work because he’s a quiet Asian guy and people like him love doing work.

Kumar is resisting expectations put on him by his father, who wants him to become a doctor. In his introductory scene, Kumar is answering questions for a medical school interview thoughtfully and carefully. He might be a medical genius, a possibility that is all but confirmed in a later scene. Yet, he deliberately sabotages the interview when he picks up a phone call from Harold and talks about their plans to get high later that night.

Not only do the leads resist the pressures that are pushed on them within the film, but they also defy expectations that years of Hollywood films have built up against them. Too often, people of East Asian heritage and South Asian heritage are depicted as one-note side characters, if not complete tropes and caricatures. Apu from The Simpsons is one such side character who comes to mind; he most often stays on the side, he embodies stereotypes, and rarely does he have a plotline centered on him. Harold and Kumar defy that upsetting history of representation because they are interesting characters with a great dynamic. Their attitudes and ways of navigating the world balance each other out sometimes, and at times conflict. 

Harold is the more thoughtful and careful of the two who is rightfully averse to unnecessary risk, but (in a way that is not too different from younger me) has let the negative ideas from his environment get to him. As an example, he is too afraid to talk to his neighbor Maria (Paula Garcés) whom he has a crush on, rationalizing himself out of it and giving up before he even tries. He says something along the lines of, people like him don’t get to date people like her. 

Kumar does what he wants, when he wants, to hell with everyone and everything else. He follows his impulses wherever they take him. This allows the duo to actually make progress towards their goal of getting White Castle burgers after getting baked out of their minds. Yet, Kumar’s impulsiveness gets him and his friend into a lot of difficult situations.

On that note of expectations, one of the primary ways jokes operate in this film is by subverting expectations. A situation is set up, a clichéd possibility for what might happen is presented, and that possibility is squashed through a surprising turn of events. 

Here are a few examples. Early in the film, Harold refuses to go to an East Asian students’ get-together at Princeton University, dismissing it as boring. When he first arrives, things are indeed low energy. He bails, but later stumbles upon the get-together, which has become a full on party of pleasant debauchery (aside: there are good and bad kinds) in which the seemingly soft-spoken student from an earlier scene is the most rambunctious one. Kumar tells Harold he should kick himself for missing the party.

Another excellent sequence occurs when their car breaks down. A stranger who calls himself Freakshow appears and offers to tow their car and fix it. Harold and Kumar are worried Freakshow might kill them. If the situation were to play out formulaically, he would be a villain. However, that’s not what happens. What transpires is unexpected, ridiculous, and very risqué. On the whole, one can say Freakshow is a well-meaning Good Samaritan.  

Also, when I looked up the actor who plays Freakshow in this movie, my jaw dropped. I could not believe it.

On that note, there are so many fun appearances in this movie from performers who excel in comedy. Anthony Anderson is a chaotic employee at a fast food restaurant that has replaced a White Castle location. Ryan Reynolds is a nurse at a hospital during a ridiculous surgery scene. And of course, Neil Patrick Harris appears as a version of himself, who in the film is a relentless horndog. In my headcanon, the character he plays here is the prototype for the beloved character of Barney Stinson he would go on to play in How I Met Your Mother.

Also, not typical of a stoner comedy but present as a feature of this film is an attempt to deal with weighty issues. As I’ve mentioned, the film does explore experiences of second-generation immigrants to the United States. There’s also a lengthy sequence involving disgustingly racist police officers who harass Harold and Kumar. The sequence clumsily tries to deal with important matters, and as imperfect as it is, I appreciate its attempt. Harold is arrested for jaywalking, and in his cell, he meets Tarik Jackson (Gary Anthony Williams), an innocent man who has been arrested for being Black. He explains how the police specifically target Black people. He also gives Harold solace and advice. I think this sequence is meant to draw attention to the specific historical reality and brutality of anti-Black racism in the United States. I also think the scene highlights how, thanks to the struggles and triumphs of Black Americans in the continuing fight for human rights, conditions for people who have immigrated from countries in Asia to the U.S. have been significantly better than they would have been otherwise. I do think this scene is imperfect, mainly because it doesn’t dive deep enough, it contains some dumb jokes, and its crisis resolves in a mid-credits scene. Yet, I appreciate the scene’s attempt to draw attention to serious matters.

On the topic of America, Kumar gives a speech about the country near the film’s conclusion, when all hope seems lost. He says that his and Harold’s parents struggled to come to this country so that their children could be free. He asserts that their quest to get food from White Castle is their way to enact this freedom. 

The false promise of American freedom has attracted many people to immigrate here. The work of establishing true freedom for all in the United States is still ongoing. Yet, I am touched when I watch Harold and Kumar claiming this freedom for themselves. It is indeed their right. 

Despite all the expectations on them, despite all the obstacles in their way, Harold and Kumar just want to chill on a Friday evening, get high, and eat junk food, and they let nothing and no one stop them. As a young teenager, seeing people like me doing this in a movie felt like a minor revelation. 

I know this film is a cult classic, but I believe it should achieve actual classic status. By that I mean, more people should watch it! Check it out if you haven’t seen it already. Plus, its twentieth anniversary is a good time to (re)visit it.