‘Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle’ Returns To Netflix, Remains A Surprisingly Progressive Tale Of Male Friendship

“You think this is just about the burgers, huh?”

The 2004 comedy film Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle is predictable in many ways. Part of a long tradition of stoner comedies stretching from Up In Smoke to Half Baked to Dude, Where’s My Car?, it features a pair of protagonists whose primary motivation in life is getting high. It’s got a lot of crass sexual and scatological humor, and a broadly drawn quest with a number of slapstick misadventures along the way. Where the film, which returned to Netflix at the beginning of the year, separates from this pack is through its modern and progressive portrayal of male friendship.

But first, there are the burgers.

The film’s central plot is right there in the name — a title so outlandish that, when it first hit theaters, I had to offer a friend a bargain in order to convince him to see it with me. I would buy his ticket, but if he enjoyed the movie, he had to eat the ticket stub afterwards. (As a kind and magnanimous friend, much like the film’s protagonists, I did not make him follow through on it.) Stoner buddies Harold, a beleaguered junior financial analyst, and Kumar, a promising but unmotivated medical student, cap a relaxed Friday night of smoking weed and watching television by setting out on an Odyssey-worthy adventure through New Jersey in search of White Castle’s famous sliders.

Along their journey, they’re waylaid in numerous ways — by a band of racist, Mountain Dew-guzzling extreme sports punks, by a cheetah escaped from the local zoo, and by a pre-How I Met Your Mother-comeback Neil Patrick Harris, playing a drug-addled, sex-crazed caricature of himself (perhaps presaging elements of his long character run as Barney Stinson). The White Castle location they were planning to go to turns out to have closed. They get lost in a dangerous neighborhood. Their car is stolen. They even end up getting thrown in jail — all the sorts of things you might expect from a traditional stoner comedy, or from any road-trip buddy-comedy.

To be perfectly honest, there are portions of the film’s humor that haven’t aged terribly well in the sixteen years since the movie was released. There are a lot of gay jokes and sexual humor that probably wouldn’t make it past the editing room in 2020. (That’s not to mention the difference a smartphone could make in the characters’ journey, a “why don’t they just look it up?” problem that afflicts many pre-2008ish movies and television shows in present-day viewings.) Marijuana’s gone much more mainstream in the intervening years, too, becoming less of a counterculture totem and more of a broadly-accepted, increasingly-legalized pastime and business.

One theme that made the film feel fresh at the time, though, and helps it still feel fresh now, is its portrayal of the characters — John Cho’s Korean-American Harold Lee, and Kal Penn’s Indian-American Kumar Patel — not as flimsy racial stereotypes, but as fully-rounded people who are forced to deal with facing those stereotypes on a daily basis. Harold, assumed to be a mild-mannered “workhorse”, gets work dumped on him by his frat-boy managers and is pushed around by bullies. Kumar, similarly, gets “Apu” barbs leveled in his direction, and is pressured to follow in the footsteps of his father and brother in pursuing a career in medicine. It’s been too easy for comedies of this ilk to rely on such stereotypes, rather than shining a light on them — take for instance the Ryan Reynolds-helmed college comedy Van Wilder, released only two years prior, where Penn himself was relegated to playing a heavily-accented exchange student named “Taj Mahal”. It’s never been easy for actors of Asian descent in Hollywood to just play themselves instead of a non-Asian comedy writer’s view of them.

Where Harold and Kumar truly shines is in the fact that those cruder elements — the stereotypes, the toxic masculinity, the meanness and so on — don’t exist between the protagonists. They’re simply good friends who want the best for one another, and they don’t have to chest-puff, brag, or try to impress. They might argue and squabble, but it’s more the loving tensions of a married couple than the testosterone-fueled shoulder-punching of many an on-screen platonic male friendship. One running subplot has Kumar trying to build up Harold’s confidence to speak to his beautiful neighbor crush Maria, without denigrating him (or Maria) in the process.

Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle isn’t a high-minded piece of art; it’s a silly comedy that trades in a lot of base humor, comically poor special effects, and a product placement so audacious that it’s the key setting of the film. It could’ve stayed dumb throughout, though, and it didn’t. In choosing to show its title characters as real people who care about each other, it created something that stands the test of time better than most of its genre brethren.

(It’s also really funny if you get high first.)

Scott Hines is an architect, blogger and internet user who lives in Louisville, Kentucky with his wife, two young children, and a small, loud dog.