The Hangover II
In Todd Phillips’ latest installment of The Hangover series, we have another engagement story, but as we know from the first movie, it’s an engagement that will end in marriage despite having every conceivable reason for being broken off.
Unlike the slightly more sensitive males of the “Bromance” genre, a salient characteristic of protagonists in mainstream male-bonding comedy is an attitude treating the present as a mundane playground for the begrudging enjoyment of the stable work and domesticity that defines their class and racial privilege. At the same time, memory and the unconscious serve as repositories for the symbolic and supposedly wild acts proving these men fit to transition to their newly domesticated status with their masculinity intact and beyond reproach. True Kierkegaardian Knights of Resignation these are, and none are better case studies than the hungover gang of Phil, Stu (and to some degree, the perpetually absent Doug). Only Zach Galafianakis as Alan defies this logic and remains something else, a kind of man-child-in-tennis-whites comic foil, the implication of which being that only those with manifest mental illness eschew conventional marriage and remain in a state of arrested development, in this case illustrated by his princely installment in the parental home.
As identified by David Denby in his New Yorker review, the trick of The Hangover franchise is that memory, inaccessible due to bizarre circumstances and extreme inebriation, must be reconstructed in the manner of the “police procedural” rather than simply recalled. It is far less entertaining to experience or witness a drunken rampage than to trace its arc the morning after in the company of friends. I would add that The Hangover II overlaps with another genre that takes personality schism and an alienated, typically male psyche as its precondition for narrative development, namely, the Superhero film. Like hungover Hulks, these men react with feigned shock and horror, but a measure of tangible satisfaction, each instance they uncover knowledge of their foreign alter-egos wreaking all types of unspeakable havoc, acts they never suspected themselves or each other capable.
For a film with a reputation for transgressive humor, it’s worth pointing out how predictable these acts are. Only Teddy, who as we learn in the photo montage superimposed over the closing credits has severed his own finger in a game of Mumblety-Peg, did anything unusual. For the others we have the usual loutish behavior that passes for wildness: tattoos, prostitutes, and firearms under the influence of copious amounts of booze. All of this takes place against a lushly photographed backdrop of Bangkok, exoticized, personified and demonized/feminized as taker of weak men, as evinced by the repeated statement “Bangkok has him now.” None of these manly men succumb to Bangkok’s clutches. After a half-baked tour of Bangkok’s criminal underworld to find Teddy, the gang is reunited, and arrive via a speedboat helmed by Alan to the colonial-style resort at which the wedding is to take place. Stu gives his unapproving, insulting father-in-law-to-be a piece of his mind, which not surprisingly earns Stu the respect and blessing he sought, but feared was all but lost during the adventure to recover his formerly missing, newly disfigured brother-in-law-to-be. Again we witness a curious reversal of power relations wherein white, financially secure males are objects of suspicion and must earn the approval of the racialized other, in this case represented as a condescending, snobbish patriarch of Thai extraction.
As a final note, how much better would the wedding reception scene have been if Phillips had wheeled out Murray Head to perform his authoritative reading of “One Night in Bangkok” from Chess instead of Mike Tyson’? This choice is revealing. Overestimating how memorable the original film’s kitschy cameo of the boxer was, Tyson is again (albeit not altogether unfairly) objectified as a freak, aligned only with Alan as a fellow outsider to the normal order of white masculinity.
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