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Dude, Where’s My Gender? or, Is There Life on Uranus?
Judith Halberstam
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies - Volume 10, Number 4, 2004
"We have not heard such a preponderance of anus jokes since Wayne’s World... but in a comedy where the bumbling male buddies share many a nude moment, and even engage each other in a little openmouth kissing, the Uranus jokes register a new casualness about the homosocial-homoerotic divide. At a time of deep and continuing crisis, when George W. Bush can rally new support with every shit-eating grin, let us take comfort where we can find it, and Dude, Where’s My Car? (hereafter referred to as Dude) is as good a place as any to start.
What can a film about two idiot stoners who lose their car and then have to reconstruct the events of the previous night to find it, repay money they owe, and win back the love of the twins they are dating while saving the universe from certain destruction and in the process kicking the ass of moronic jocks, pissing off male supermodel Fabio, escaping from a fifty-foot hot space alien woman, receiving as presents from the other space aliens some necklaces that make their girlfriends develop huge hoo-hoos (to use the film’s own vernacular), and receiving in return not sex but only some dumb berets with their names embroidered on them—what can such a film tell us about the relationships among sexuality, gender, nation, and race today? More precisely, is this going to be another ridiculous essay about queering a fourth-rate adolescent comedy with a few laugh lines, lots of butt jokes, a weak heterosexual resolution, and no political consciousness whatsoever?...
Jesse and Chester return home, only to awake the next morning as befuddled as they were, wondering why they remember nothing of the night before and why their fridge is packed with chocolate pudding. The exchange that began their picaresque journey across the landscape of mini malls and miniature golf courses—“Dude, where’s my car?” “I don’t know, dude, where’s your car?” “I don’t know, dude, where’s my car?”—begins again, and the lessons that the pair learned the night before are lost and remain to be relearned. This Nietzschean act or nonact of forgetting on which the loopy narrative depends arrests the developmental and progress narratives of heteronormativity and strands our feckless heroes in the no man’s land of lost knowledge and scatological humor...
While each dude lacks self-knowledge, each finds himself reflected in and completed by the other. Jesse and Chester face threatening obstacles—castration and humiliation at the hands (and beaks) of some mean ostriches, for instance—as a team, a unit, a collective, and each functions as the other’s phallus or weenie. Their doubleness is mirrored all around them in the twins they date, the gay Swedish aliens, and the tranny couple, and in the first two cases, at least, the doubling is homo- rather than heteroerotic. When Jesse and Chester pull up in their new car alongside the coiffed and buffed Fabio and his girl, they enact a queer mirror scene that could have been scripted by Jacques Lacan and edited by Judith Butler. In a Toronto weekly, the Eye, the gay alternative filmmaker and reviewer Bruce LaBruce describes this infamous scene by way of explaining Dude’s appearance on his top-ten movie list:
Fabio looks over contemptuously and revs his engine; [Ashton] Kutcher [i.e., Jesse], behind the wheel, does the same. Fabio responds by putting his arm around his vixen; Kutcher rises to the challenge by placing his arm emphatically around [Seann William] Scott [i.e., Chester]. Fabio then leans over and gives his girl a long, deep tongue kiss.
The movie could have gone in infinite directions at this point, but amazingly Kutcher leans over and, gently yet convincingly, delivers the lingering tongue to Scott. The actors neither overplay nor underplay the moment and show no visible trace of disgust or regret afterward. I was almost in tears. This one scene does more to advance the cause of homosexuality than 25 years of gay activism
... While Jesse and Chester find themselves mirroring white queerness, otherness, in this film, is reserved for people of color: the black pizza shop owner who berates the dudes for their shoddy work ethic; the Chinese take-out lady who responds to each order by saying, “And then . . . and then . . . and then . . . ”; the Asian American tailor who sews the boys some Adidas suits; the racially ambiguous group of jocks. Yet, as it turns out, in the land of bland blonds and dumb jocks, otherness is not such a bad place to be. In fact, the Chinese take-out lady’s “And then . . . and then . . . and then . . .” becomes the defining principle for the narrative form of Dude, a long shaggy-dog tale with a supplemental, or simply mental, rather than developmental logic. The Asian American tailor provides the way out of one of the film’s most enduring and maddening loops...
The tailor sees the whole picture, while each dude can see only his buddy’s back. Suture, we could say, is in the position of the tailor, literally; he sews meaning into the narrative and stands in for the patriarchal voice of reason and sense that the film seems to resist and that the stupid white man is unable to supply. For a moment, everything makes sense, the dudes embrace, the tailor smiles knowingly, the dudes are marked by their gender, their whiteness, their stupidity, but as quickly as knowledge comes, it disappears, like the car (dude, where’s my car?), like a Freudian lost object (dude, where’s my mother’s breast?), like the thread of this argument (dude, what’s my point?)...
Dude offers a potent allegory of memory, forgetting, remembering, and forgetting again. We can use this allegory to invent and describe the present moment in queer studies, poised as it is and as we are between offering a distinct “negative” strand of critical consciousness to a public that would rather not know and using more common idioms to engage those who do not know why they should care."
[Ed: Updated with working copy on 27/01/2009]