The Beach Bum looks like all your stoner dreams rolled into one enormous reefer. The trailer is a symphony of intoxication: gas-mask bongs, glowing cannabis plants, Snoop Dogg, a blind Jamaican pilot flying for Chronic Aviation and smoking a joint the size of a parsnip. And holding it all together (or not) is Matthew McConaughey, whose straggly hair, psychedelic beach garb and perpetual state of wild, cackling wastedness mark him out as a movie stoner of the first order.
That order would also include Cheech and Chong, Harold and Kumar, the Seth Rogen/James Franco Pineapple Express posse, Joaquin Phoenix in Inherent Vice, Danny from Withnail & I, Anna Faris in Smiley Face, and – as its high priest – Jeff Bridges’ Dude from The Big Lebowski. The latter made a surprise comeback this week, but it was in a Super Bowl ad promoting beer.
Movie stoners are like weed varieties: names and characteristics change but they basically all do the same thing. They are amiable, shambolic, essentially harmless clowns. They have immense difficulty accomplishing everyday tasks (hence Harold and Kumar’s feature-length quest for burgers). They will never amount to much (in The Beach Bum, McConaughey’s Moondog is writing “the next Great American Novel”). They hold up a funhouse mirror to “straight” life. “That shit’s gonna rob you of your ambition,” Samuel L Jackson tells Bridget Fonda’s bong-loving couch potato in Jackie Brown. “Not if your ambition is to get high and watch TV,” she replies.
But despite their apparent lack of drive, these movie stoners have actually accomplished something monumental. Recreational marijuana is now legal in 10 US states plus Canada, and the world has not descended into addled madness as a result. Maybe it is time the movies themselves reflected this change in mood?
In movies, drinking alcohol is just something people do: in bars, in restaurants, at home, during meetings, in Super Bowl ads. But with weed, one toke and you become “a stoner”. Rare are the characters whose weed consumption is treated as unremarkable, or at least logical. They are mostly on the small screen: the kids of Transparent, for example, or Ilana Glazer in Broad City, who smokes to cope with modern life rather than to drop out of it completely. This is closer to the off-screen norm. Which ought to make characters such as McConaughey’s Moondog something of a dinosaur. Maybe he will be the last movie stoner. It would be a poetic closing of the loop if so, McConaughey having begun his career some 25 years ago as a pothead in Dazed and Confused. (Whoah, maybe they’re, like, the same character!). If The Beach Bum really is the last of its kind, the genre will be fondly half-remembered for its contribution to society. Let’s hope it goes out on a high.
