Film Friday: Young Deconstructionist

I guess I was doomed to be a deconstructionist when I was about 13. 

I didn't know that I was doing it.  It all seemed just kind of stupid.  But then, suddenly, I'm in college, and the prof. is telling us to determine how many times the word shit appears in a David Mamet play. It took me years to recover. 

Okay, deconstructionism is not just counting words -- or even totally empyting them of their meaning. (The latter does feel like a byproduct.)  And so what if the low point of deconstructionism resulted in the L.A. riots of 92, after the attorneys for the cops who beat Rodney King deconstructed the video to make it look like King beat himself up.   It was still kind of fun.   If dangerous. 

And what was that film that I watched a ton one summer, when it was on my local premium cable movie channel?  Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke.  Yep.  This was the end of the seventies/early eighties, and their high times were about to end. (Corsican Brothers, anyone?)  And being young and stupid, we thought this was a classic.  and we counted how many times the word "man" is said.  We gave up right around the point where Chong discovers that the judge's water is "fuckin' vodka, man!"  We were overwhelmed.  

The funny thing is: while we all laughed hysterically at the dope jokes, I don't think it made us any more or less interested in doing weed.   It was the seventies; every comedian and comedy show made dope jokes.   Even some sitcoms featured it: remember the barney miller  episode where they eat hash brownies?  Remarkably, we still thought Up in Smoke was funny, even though we were straight.  Probably, we thought it was so cool to be watching Cheech and Chong. 

I'm almost four times as old now as when I first saw it.  When I think back on the film, I do find it amazing that I thought it was funny.  There are some nice parts for Strother Martin, Stacey Keach, and Mills Watson (who seemed to be in every other tv show in the seventies).  And yeh the song "Earache My Eye" is a classic in its own way.  I couldn't share with you much of the plot: basically the boys get stoned a lot, form a band,  and have fun at the expense of Sgt. Stadanko, who had been an invention of the boys on earlier comedy albums.   You had to be there. 

Thanks to youtube, deconstruction has a new life! Enjoy!