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5 The (Asian) American Dream Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle and the Pan-Ethnic Buddy Film This [journey to White Castle burgers] is about achieving what our parents set out for. This is about the pursuit of happiness. This night is about the American Dream. Kumar, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004) The comedic pairing of the characters Harold Lee and Kumar Patel in the Harold and Kumar films places Asian American and, specifically, Indian accents at the center of American culture. While the previous chapters discuss brownface and brown-voice racial performances as the means to exoticize South Asians as cultural objects or assimilate South Asians as deracialized model minorities, the next two chapters delve into how American national and cultural identity is transformed when Asian Americans are the center of the narrative comedy. In the Harold and Kumar films, an Indian accent becomes associated with the larger racial landscape of the United States and responds to the changing nature of racial discourse in a post–9/11 America. The Harold and Kumar films make the performance of Indian accents (and Korean American accents) the center of an American Hollywood production. Harold and Kumar are the proactive subjects who frame the language and questions of the film, and everyone else stands in for the exotic other. As a result, these films reflect the changing representation of South Asian Americans in the United States, who are not only seen as foreign immigrants but also cultural Americans who define contemporary American life. Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, directed by Danny Leiner, was a sleeper hit of the summer of 2004 that drew the coveted seventeen-toDave_Indian text.indd 111 1/8/13 10:36 AM twenty-four-year-old, white, male demographic but also was popular with a wider audience, including Asian Americans. The film earned over $18 million in U.S. box office and was even more successful on DVD.1 The sequel Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, written and directed by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, premiered four years later and made over $38 million.2 The final film in the trilogy, A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas (2011), directed by Todd Strauss-Schulson, grossed $35 million in three months. The financial success and widespread popularity of the Harold and Kumar films demonstrate that creating narratives that feature Asian American and Indian American actors in multiple roles and situations is a popular move. All three films use parody to create a fresh vision of American buddy films and satire to challenge popular representations of Asian American and American identity. Asian Americans and South Asian Americans no longer have a foreign accent and, instead, speak with American accents that are normalized in relation to the people around them. However, as the focus of the narrative, their racial position is not erased (as with Gandhi in Clone High) but is emphasized as part of their everyday life. South Asian accents in the film are not just vocal or color caricatures but, instead, become brownface performances that are complex images of cultural racialization that includes accent (or no accent), class position, and cultural behavior. The quotation in the epigraph occurs at the end of the first film and marks how the protagonists of the film honor (in truth and with parody) the history of their immigrant parents’ journey to the United States. For the children of immigrants (the second generation), the process of achieving the American Dream is not just a physical feat of traversing adverse geography but is also a psychological journey of risk taking to make dreams come true. And yet, these words, combined with the image of a White Castle burger franchise as the goal of their quest, also parody the conventions of the American Dream because at journey’s end, the ultimate source of happiness is the consumption of American fast food. In Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, the cultural and national identity of Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) is tied to their quest for the quintessential expression of American male consumption, the White Castle burger. In his review, film critic Roger Ebert says, “Many comedies have the same starting place: A hero who must obtain his dream, which should if possible be difficult, impractical, eccentric or immoral. As he marches toward his goal, scattering conventional citizens behind him, we laugh because of his selfishness, and because secretly that’s how we’d like to...

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