Harold and Kumar: Escape from Guantanemo Bay - Analysis

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Harold and Kumar 2: Escape from Guantanamo Bay ‘Harold and Kumar 2: Escape from Guantanamo Bay’ was released in 2008 and is the second film in a popular comedy series that follows the misadventures of two cannabis-loving friends, Asian-American Harold (John Cho) and American born Indian, Kumar (Kal Penn). Harold decides to follow his love interest ‘Maria’ over to Amsterdam while Kumar comes along because he loves Cannabis and as he explains “You know what’s legal in Amsterdam? Don’t you?”. Unfortunately though, the pair are mistaken for terrorists and sent to Guantanamo Bay prison where their miraculous escape leads them on a comical journey across the United States of America to prove their innocence (www.imdb.com, retrieved 2012). While this film is a comedy, it reveals several different kinds of social and multicultural differences and outlines how these actions affect society, while using carnival meaning to convey ideas about society in a humours way. Furthermore, using ‘Harold and Kumar 2’ as an example, the culture industry theory of Theodore Adorno will be challenge in terms of the passive audience and how meaning is transferred through film. There are also several scenes that display the idea Symbolic interactionism, a theory considering people as the creation of their own interactions and this in turn determining their interpretation and perception of society. Using these sociological theories and applying it to ‘Harold and Kumar 2’ can help better critique a text and create ideas and thought-provoking conclusions that can help us better understand popular culture. Comparing the activity of a carnival to that of popular culture Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin formulated the term, Carnivalesque, referring to the use of humour and jocosity to a style of text that rebel the dominant views (Bakhtin, Mikhail, 1941). The use of laughter is embedded in a
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