Cheech And Chong Up In Smoke Movie Clips

[Gracia Bradshaw]

Premise: Two southern Cali kindred spirits meet and get arrested for possession of marijuana, only to be released on the technicality that their judge is drinking vodka. They form a band but, before they get much rehearsing in, set off on a quest to score pot that takes them on all sorts of misadventures.

Welcome to Slacker Fest, where we document our research and analysis of mass media\u2019s \u201Cslacker\u201D archetype, part of our effort to broaden the genre with a slacker film of our own. Find our master list of entries here. Previous entry: Office Space.

I must admit to watching this inaugural entry of the Cheech and Chong franchise with low expectations, only forcing myself to because they\u2019re iconic slacker characters credited with establishing the stoner genre. Also, Cheech plays one of the only Hispanic/Latinx slackers I know, so I wanted to see how that influenced the archetype. The scattered clips I had seen previously came off as basic sketch comedy, a-la Ernest or Mr. Bean, so I didn\u2019t get my hopes up.

I\u2019m glad to report that I was wrong and came away from Up in Smoke impressed by its not-even-so-coded social commentary. Its portrayal of \u201Cslackers\u201D challenges our culture more than other entries in the genre I\u2019ve seen so far. Either that, or I\u2019m reading too much into a patchwork of bits that Tommy Chong himself said \u201Cdoesn\u2019t take a lot of brain.\u201D

Auteurs: Tommy Chong and Cheech Marin, with help from director Lou Adler\u2019s very 70s camerawork. The film brought to screen various of their \u201Ccountercultural\u201D comedy routines, which at the time were groundbreaking. It\u2019s amazing to think of today, but before Cheech and Chong no one was making mainstream entertainment aimed at stoners or \u201Crock-and-roll kids.\u201D

The film revolves around Pedro\u2013an aspiring musician, broke even by the standards of his LA Mexican barrio\u2013and \u201CMan,\u201D a privileged White hippie who recently abandoned his parent\u2019s home. Despite their different backgrounds, these two bond instantly over their common love for music and, above all, weed.

While our heroes live in a society that overall rejects and persecutes them, their community of fellow stoners is surprisingly large. In it, you could include almost every single non-cop character (and at least one of the cops). It\u2019s notable that, far from being lone misfits, they know a lot of like-minded people who are all together in conflict against more conservative, establishment forces. Contrast this, for example, with how The Office\u2019s Peter Gibbons is mainly solitary in his slacker beliefs.

There\u2019s a few ways to look at this. On an external level, you have their desire for weed (the nominal engine of the story). A layer below that, their desire for weed interferes with their desire to make music\u2013a classic situation of \u201Cinner conflict.\u201D But, this being a stoner comedy and all, it\u2019d be ridiculous to expect them to \u201Covercome\u201D their \u201Cinternal flaw\u201D of weed obsession.

At the deepest level, I think what they really want is free self-expression, both in the form of music AND in exploring pleasures like weed and sex. Their antagonist in this pursuit is a law enforcement outfit of repressed and reactionary officers obsessed with scoring a drug bust that will \u201Ctake them right to the top [of their career.]\u201D

On the surface, Up in Smoke casts slackers as sloppy and clueless people (Pedro confusedly pisses into a hamper seconds after we meet him) who pursue desires like drugs and sex with self-destructive vigor. But I think it\u2019s more profound than that.

Take, for example, the \u201Cnaturalistic,\u201D healthy sensibilities it assigns Man. When we meet him, he\u2019s being lambasted by his dad just as much for drinking a fruit smoothie as he is for being unemployed. He and Pedro are also partial to the arts, while their antagonists either hold or glorify military-adjacent professions.

Finally, the slackers in the film are consciously and actively disdainful of authority (not clueless and unintentional menaces). This is apparent in the glee with which Pedro fucks with the cops, for example by trolling them over their own intercom system. These are people fully aware that they have a bone to pick with society\u2019s institutions, even if you or I may not see how they go about it as constructive.

With these extra layers, I see Up in Smoke defining a slacker more broadly as anyone who\u2019s in any way \u201Ccounterculture\u201D and seen as deviant by established society: because of drug use, sure, but also because of the music they like, their religion, or their non-normative sexual/gender identity. This last one surprised me the most (given that the film is from almost 50 years ago), but it\u2019s right there in the guys\u2019 winning battle of the bands performance. While Pedro is dressed in a ballerina outfit, he sings these lyrics:

There are fans who interpret this scene as mocking 1970s rockstar fashion, basically Cheech and Chong joining in on punching down against people who dress like that. But this song felt to me more like a fuck-you to the \u201Cdaddy\u201D and \u201Cbasketball coach\u201D elements in society, especially since it comes at the end of an entire movie\u2019s worth of those archetypes persecuting Pedro and Man.

Off the bat, duh: one of the two main slackers is Mexican-American. But even beyond that, the film shows a very diverse community of slackers including women and Black characters (even if the depictions are thin and stereotypical). Also, unlike in other slacker films, there\u2019s no \u201Cvoice of reason\u201D character who\u2019s friendly with the slacker but tries to get them to correct their ways (a character usually played by a woman). In this film, the women are arguably even worse train wrecks than the lead males, and the film doesn\u2019t apologize for them.

I\u2019m less enthusiastic about how Pedro\u2019s heritage played (or more precisely didn\u2019t) into the film. Beyond using it as a springboard for certain gags (his family self-reporting to La Migra in order to get a free ride to a wedding is hilarious), the film didn\u2019t explore it much, even though it took time to show us Pedro and Man\u2019s contrasting socioeconomic backgrounds.

I guess that wasn\u2019t the intent of these films, and getting too serious or heady about class/ethnic differences would have ruined what they were going for (I feel like I\u2019m gonna be saying that a lot about every movie in these analyses).

Beyond law enforcement, it\u2019s the establishment\u2019s rigid definition of \u201CAmerican normalcy,\u201D which the film casts in opposition to everyone who doesn\u2019t fit the mold. An interesting moment is when the cops, to infiltrate the battle of the bands, arrest a group of Hare Krishna devotees and take their outfits to use as disguises. That they see followers of eastern religion as blended with drug users and punk rockers betrays that their disdain isn\u2019t for people breaking the law\u2014it\u2019s for anything that\u2019s not \u201Cnormative.\u201D

I have to say it \u201Capproves\u201D of slackers, because it doesn\u2019t hedge or attempt any sort of \u201Credeeming\u201D moment for them (it also relentlessly mocks non-slackers). The film doesn\u2019t get into WHY it approves, what positive \u201Cfunction\u201D slackers serve, but I think its overall ethos is that there\u2019s no reason to deprive people of the freedom to enjoy themselves and self-express however they see fit.

At the same time, this is much more of a pure stoner movie than an \u201Canti-job\u201D one, as it doesn\u2019t touch the matter of employment beyond a couple throwaway digs at the concept of having a job.

\u201CI also underestimated these guys. I thought they were nothing more than stoner losers, until I saw their OBSESSION with weed. They hone in on it like attack dogs, baby! OBSESSION is the #1 INGREDIENT to success. These young men could have a weed EMPIRE, as long as they cut their bandmates, hot girlfriends, family members\u2013basically everyone they smoke weed with in the first place\u2013out of their life. NO WEED DISTRACTIONS, JUST WEED OBSESSION.\u201D

This is a sketch-driven movie, with very little plot even by slacker movie standards. It contains none of the cause-and-effect, setup/payoff, or \u201Ccharacter growth\u201D narrative structures that classical Hollywood usually demands. I wouldn\u2019t say this is unique to stoner movies (countless comedies in the early 2000s dispensed with worrying about coherent plotting), but a story this unworried about linearity feels very slacker in spirit.

Beyond that, the film has a very green color palette, with \u201Cnatural\u201D colors and textures often contrasted with more synthetic colors and rigid patterns on authority figures (parents, cops, etc.). I doubt this was the first instance of using this contrast to separate free spirits from squares, but it\u2019s cool to find this bit of \u201Ccoding\u201D early instances of the stoner genre.

Above all, I like that the film shows society\u2019s aggressive intentional attempts to stamp out slackers. The film\u2019s antagonists are visibly, ideologically threatened by stoner culture (they'd make good Fox pundits today) which in my opinion makes them more interesting in their role than shitty bosses or dormant coworkers just going through the motions.

I likely won\u2019t take the film's lead in its loose use of narrative\u2013I think I\u2019m too attached to cause-and-effect plots and enjoy the challenge of building them out. I\u2019d also like to do more character exploration and, it goes without saying, will want to hold higher standards in portraying the identities included. It\u2019s not the 70s anymore.

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