Can you do satire of a past era? That is a question prompted by a viewing of Y2K. Perhaps to truly answer that question, we should be using a film better than this as a measuring stick, but it’s caught in my mind nonetheless. It seems so shallow and cheap to reduce an era to a stereotype and then poke fun at it, but that is Y2K’s formula: identify a 90s trend, imbue a character with it, and… laugh? I’m genuinely confused how much of this was supposed to be a mockery of the era and how much was supposed to be a trip down memory lane. Regardless, both are losing strategies.

If it’s the former—I thought we were through this already. The “Member Berries” episode of South Park came out in 2016. At the time, I found that episode annoying, but—holy shit—did we need to hear that. It took a while, but the ideas in that episode have aged better and better. But, I genuinely thought we were coming out the other end of that, not jumpstarting the concept for a whole new generation. “Member dialup?” “Member burning CDs?”

If it’s the latter, it’s a failure—strawman by depiction. Y2K is guilty of it with regards to just about any character. But let’s key in on a mainstay of American film and television: the hippie, aka the druggie. The guy who likes music, hanging out, dresses a particular way (depending on the decade), and does drugs without restraint. This stock character appears endlessly, and it’s baffling to me how derisively he or she (usually he) is depicted.

I have little doubt this is the genesis of this archetype: the hippies existed from the mid-1960s onward. Aside from the aesthetics and hedonism, the hippie was defined by two things: 1) belonging and 2) idealism.

This first was simple: before someone became a hippie, they felt alienated. After, they didn’t. The second was the real threat. The idealism promoted (turn on, tune in, drop out) scared the powers that be—particularly that third bit. It was in their interest to discredit the movement and its ideals. So, they make the hippie an idiot. They make the hippie movement one entirely composed of posers. No one believed; they were just there for the party. The mountain of doofus hippies in film throughout the decades act as an erasure of any principles ever existing in the movement.

And as the decades changed, this bastardization of the hippie was slotted into the role of any drug rug-wearing, grass-inhaling dimwit there for comic relief and subtle stigma building. Film writers are good at calling out propaganda in film when it’s promoting a government or it involves a historical event. But we’re not so good at parsing it out when it’s promoting social ideals instead of political ones, and the effects of that are equally nefarious if not more. Drug users are far from the only victims.

The defining characteristic of this stock character has always been a lack of self-awareness: the druggie doesn’t realize the way in which they’re being negatively perceived. The formulaic jokes wouldn’t work otherwise. But this is fundamentally at odds with what makes a person go down that path in the first place: they’ve been ostracized by society at large and are looking for something different. They’re self-conscious people trying not to be.

In this film, writer/director Kyle Mooney casts himself as this stock character. He seems to have some level of affection for this type of person, but does little to extricate himself from the stereotype. At one point the character gives a humorously measured, knowledgeable monologue about the effects of MDMA on your brain. It’s meant as a joke and the punchline is that this type of person would know anything. That right there shows how deeply engrained a stereotype this is.

Anyway, there’s a deluge of things wrong with how drugs are depicted in media and that’s all I’ll say in this installment.