KStew’s stoner last stand

Kristen Stewart has been busy the last couple weeks promoting her new film, The Wrong Girls. But the film hits theaters today, so here she is in New York, outside one last time for the film. As Lainey said, the film is a celebration of friendship but also grown ass losers. I was thinking about this after reading Lainey’s post yesterday, about a lack of deadbeat representation these days, and I realized we don’t really get stoner comedies like we used to. It all seems part of the same thing.

Which is, chiefly, that weed is legal in a lot of places these days. Twenty years ago—and more—there was still a lot of stigma around weed. Now, though, it’s legal at the national level in Canada, and in the US, it’s legal in 24 states and Washington, DC. It’s just not taboo like it used to be, so it’s not as sexy as a subject as it once was.

But there is another element of the shift away from stoner humor that I blame on hustle culture. The grindset mindset killed lazy culture. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s—not for nothing, this all started during the Great Recession—we were encouraged to monetize our hobbies, turn every opportunity into a money-making scheme, and industrialize our downtime. As hustle culture rose, stoner culture faded. Even now, when hustle culture has been exposed as an exploitative trap, we can’t just be lazy, we have to “reclaim our time”, “protect our peace”, or, at most “bed rot”.

Between the destigmatization of weed and the death of lazy culture, we killed the stoner comedy, and we haven’t really figured out anything to fill that void. People frequently blame the death of comedies on action movies and superhero movies becoming comedies in disguise, but really, it’s that the world evolved and we just never figured out new stuff to make comedies about.

It’s not just stoner comedies, we almost never get sex comedies anymore, and when we do, they’re super f-cking weird, like One Night Only, and forget teen comedies. Those don’t exist, and attempts to revive the genre, like Booksmart and Bottoms, inevitably fail. I think it’s because teen culture itself doesn’t exist anymore, because teens no longer have third spaces where they can hang out and f-ck around and invent culture that the olds then copy. Now, it’s the other way around, and teens are forced to piggyback on the olds’ culture. (This is not good for anybody. We need to bring back mall food courts before this problem hits pop music.)

These are just thoughts. I appreciate that KStew, Dylan Meyer, and Alia Shawkat are out here, repping stoner loserdom. I hope The Wrong Girls does well this weekend, I hope stoner comedies aren’t going the way of teen comedies. The Wrong Girls might just be the stoners’ last stand.