A watchtower at Guantánamo Bay. Photograph: Tomas van Houtryve/AP
The scandal of the US internment camp at Guantánamo Bay continues to be a subject for film-makers. Alex Gibney's Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, out this week, suggests that the place is not merely home to a new generation of torturers, but that the whole place is a giant theatre of cruelty with no intelligence value, a PR spectacle set up to persuade the public that something is being done about the "war on terror".
For a while, we have been wondering what would be the first straight fiction feature solely about Guantánamo - and now we know. That honour goes to the stoner comedy Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay. The two dopehead idiots, played by John Cho and Kal Penn - already known to their fans for an epic journey to the nearest White Castle burger joint, after a spliff-induced attack of the munchies - find themselves mistaken for terrorists and imprisoned in Guantánamo. From here they make a sensational escape and embark on a terrifying cross-country journey across the US to Texas, where they hope to use an acquaintance's contacts with the Bush White House to secure a pardon.
There was no press screening for this film for critics, and it appears mysteriously to have vanished from the complete list of movie releases issued to the media by the Film Distributors Association. Perhaps the distributors were nervous that it would provoke unhelpful press complaint.
It is certainly crass and gross and adolescent and fantastically, unremittingly, confrontationally offensive. There is hardly anyone, from left or right, man or woman, religious or non-religious, who could not find themselves offended, although the movie shrinks from mentioning the word "Islam".
It is also often hilarious and brilliant. And it might even prove to be more important in cultural history than any of the impeccably serious documentaries. It marks the moment at which Hollywood could laugh at the "war on terror". Is this a healthy new development, or an insidious way of making a joke of the whole thing? I'm not sure. Is this a movie to be compared with Jerry Lewis's suppressed second world war comedy The Day the Clown Cried? Or is it the bastard great-grandson of Ernest Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be in which Jack Benny laughs, "We do the concentrating and the Poles do the camping"? Again, I'm not sure. But for liberals and non-liberals, Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay is the most pleasurable guilty pleasure of the year.
Harold and Kumar get on a plane bound for Amsterdam, keen to sample the drug culture. Impatient, Kumar gets into the lavatory and fires up a hi-tech bong of his own invention, which with its weird gas seepage, flashing blue lights, and crude black duct-tape, does look worryingly like a bomb. The toilet door crashes open and the passengers scream at the sight of it. "It's a bong! It's a bong!" shouts the dark-skinned Kumar, and amid the screams it sounds like he's shouting triumphantly: "It's a bomb!"
They are taken for questioning by the Homeland Security chief, a paranoid anti-Semitic racist incompetent who doesn't like the look of Harold: "What's up with his eyes?" "He's of Korean extraction, sir." "Oh my God, North Korea has teamed up with al-Qaida. This thing is bigger than I thought."
It is when Harold and Kumar are kitted out in their orange jumpsuits and find themselves in the Guantánamo cage that the film attains a kind of Zen level of offensiveness. Defiantly clinging to their injured patriotism, Harold and Kumar speak to the prisoners in the next cell, who so far from being innocent, or even ambiguous, are gloating Middle Eastern terrorists straight out of central casting. "Some would call us 'heroes'!" jeers one, and claims that he wouldn't need to do what he does were it not for the hateful Americans, always eating doughnuts. Harold explodes with righteous anger: "Fuck you, man, doughnuts are awesome!" Later, when the guards come round to sexually abuse the prisoners, a disturbance enables Harold and Kumar to join in a general breakout and climb over the razor-wire fence by treading on the impaled corpse of a fellow escaper - one of the unrepentant terrorists, of course.
The sheer bad taste of everything is, in its way, magnificent. As a fully paid-up liberal, I guess I was getting the finger right in my face, but then so were the neocons. For many, doing this kind of comedy material on this subject will be unforgivable. But satire has to take its chances, and doesn't always come from the approved sources or polite progressives or the elegant conservatives, or from any of those who have been properly licensed for approval.
