Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen I I THE MELTED POT AN ADOLESCENT HIGH A T THE HEART of Up in Smoke lies a dream of consumer goods made out of pot. In a little factory down in Tijuana, as Sgt. Stedenko (Stacy...
...And it is there that they find each other...
...Next, they get caught in the middle of a drug bust, but manage by pure obliviousness to miss both "Stedenko and a Viet vet who's prowling the house with his M- 1 having a flashback...
...Pulled into the auditorium by the ventilating system, the fumes from the, burning truck outside freak the audience and earn Cheech and Chong first prize...
...Though Cheech and Chong haven't th~ foggiest idea at first what they're riding around in, this panel truck made out of pure grass tops offtheir Horatio-Alger adventures by catching fire while they're com- peting in a punk-rock contest...
...Up in Smoke is yet another of these adolescent fantasies...
...Together, the two new friends proceed down the road of life i'n a fog...
...Fed up with his obnoxious father (Strother Martin), a man whose personality is, by no coincidence, a lot like Stedenko's, Chong gives the finger to the family millions and heads for the door himself...
...He realizes it too, and heads out the front door toward his car to go somewhere else...
...Meanwhile, at the other end of the social spectrum, Chong is also cutting out...
...The minute he stumbles into the john and mistakes the hamper for the toilet, we realize that this guy is too spaced-out for this world...
...Cheech and Chong both start out, then, by going on the road...
...But of course neither one cares by then, either...
...Better than that, it not only keeps them from crashing, but helps them to score...
...In the American Dream, one achieves success in order to get possessions...
...This ain't the American Dream, exactly, but more like a flip-side version of it...
...Pot has the opposite effect...
...Their attention always wanders off somewhere else before they can get their act, or their shit, together...
...The only name by which Cheech knows Chong is "Man," as in "Hey, man," which constantly re- minds us of the vagueness of their companionship...
...Commonweal: 724...
...We would get to consume our consumer g o~xls more fully than ever before, and they would at last give us the happiness and peace of mind which they have always promised, but never before been able to deliver...
...Ever since Easy Rider set out from California on his motorcycle to come back east, as if he thought he could reverse our manifest destiny, movies that get the American Dream backwards have been phenomenally popular, especially with teenffgers...
...First, the car lands up on the median with no harm done...
...But when he U-turns to investigate, what he finds is Chong hitch- hiking with his bongo drums stuffed into his shirt in order to stop traffic and attract a ride...
...Narc squad discovers, television sets, Tourister luggage, cars and trucks and everything else in the consumer society are being manufactured from pressed and processed pot...
...Up in Smoke is also a very funny movie, as long as you keep its adolescence in mind...
...In reality, pot is less likely to transform the consumer society than to be transformed by it, and end up just another consumer product for which one is billed through a rotating-credit account...
...Each character enters the film with an act of liberation, a cutting loose from the hassles of everyday life...
...This is a very funny idea which has possibilities never dreamt of in Stedenko's philosophy...
...The' trouble is that that's hard to do in a "society where there are no equally strong and fresh adult fantasies...
...For once the built-in obsolescence of the product would be an advantage...
...But the truth is that they're too spaced out to do anything about either ambition...
...In Cheech's opening scene, he pisses on the laundry, literally, and in so doing pisses figuratively on all the domestic responsibilities for which a hamper full of dirty clothes stands...
...They simply do what they do throughout the film--trust in their high to keep them from crashing (in both senses of the term...
...The U-Drive they pick up happens to come from that little factory Stedenko has staked out in Tijuana...
...In lieu of tlie old-fashioned sort of relationship that's based on sex, Cheech gets something more contemporary when he picks up Chong...
...Throughout the film Cheech and Chong have talked vaguely about forming a rock group or getting wired into a few lids of really good stuff...
...While trying to pick up two girls on the side of the highway, Cheech notices in his rear-view mirror the biggest pair of breasts he's ever seen...
...It's the one about being able to have your pot and smoke it too...
...Chong instantly becomes Cheech's best friend, for.whom, he would do anything, though there is always the underlying anonymity of the drug culture in their relationship...
...The desire to own things which the consumer society creates makes its members repressed, graspy, over-ambitious and hemorrhoidal...
...In Up in Smoke, the possessions (or rather, "Possession," as Sgt...
...Then they get caught in an Immigra- tion Service roundup, but turn that to their advantage as well by deciding to return from their deportation in a U-Drive...
...This is just a dream, of course...
...Chong produces a joint the size of an exploding cigar which soon has the car so ,full of smoke that neither of them can see out the windshield...
...One of them is that the deleterious effect such goods now have on our psyches would be reversed...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...The incredible thing is that this works...
...Stedenko (Stacy Keach) of the L.A...
...So if the consumer goods themselves were constructed out of pot, owning them would leave us spaced out rather than up tight...
...Actually, it's not so much a fog as a cloud of smoke, though the effect is the same...
...Nevertheless, the two heroes of Up in Smoke, comedians Cheech Matin and Tommy Chong, live as if the dream could come true--as if a'preference for pot over other consumer goods somehow sets you free...
...Stedenko would put it) come first in the form of the panel truck, and then the consuming of that possession, in flames, brings Cheech and Chong success afterwards...
...He gets the kind of free, easy, immediate, unhassled and sexless intimacy which being high produces among people...
...Yet their hazy dream of scoring both drugs and music comes true...
...It is the perfec t antidote for the anxieties of consumerism...
...Screen I I THE MELTED POT AN ADOLESCENT HIGH A T THE HEART of Up in Smoke lies a dream of consumer goods made out of pot...
Vol. 105 • November 1978 • No. 22
