The Wisdom of the Illiterati (via offnotesnotes)
My fear with Pinapple Express was that the movie couldn’t possibly live up to the trailer. It did—it surpassed it—but the fact remains that the trailer is really, really good, in no small part because it completely reconfigures “Paper Planes.” It’s always hard to know how seriously to take MIA given how the furrowed-brow political rhetoric sits on top of super-poppy bright and colorful images and sounds. The trailer resolves that by making it more complex—by bringing out the implicit critique of “first-world” (I hate saying shit like this) fantasies of righteous violence, made most explicit in the break where Danny McBride quotes Tupac’s tatoo in a high-pitched voice: “Thug life.” There’s a lot going on in that line. The movie is a joke about gangsterism (in place of a standard action-movie gang that is ruthless and cold and deals stimulants like coke or meth, the villains in Pinapple deal pot and so are kinda goofy and ineffectual), but the trailer, with its use of “Paper Planes,” is a criticism of white Americans’ empathetic embrace of gangstaism. Where Kala translates “hustle” from drug dealing to third worldisms like passport counterfeiting and motorway vending, the trailer translates it back to America by comparing that hustle with white hustle and deflating the self-importance that is generally inflated with the use of rap. The trailer makes “Paper Planes” not just a expression of third-world pride, but an explicit criticism of a particular American image.
