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Eurotrip
Dir. Jeff Schaffer
Reviewed by Hans Kneesenboom-Zedeysie
Friday, January 11, 2008
Hans Kneesenboom-Zedeysie is Professor of
Comparative Literature at the Universiteit van
Ghwentse Fanie
From Ohio to Berlin and back to Oberlin, Eurotrip’s parable of the journey
of life reminds us that the let’s-get-laid plans of men are aft gone agley,
and that pronouncements like ‘Let the crazy European sex-Odyssey
begin!’ are generally precursors to terribly disappointing events. Like New
Year, oder?
This whirlwind tour of the fundamentals of European culture is based on
a comedy of errors of Shakespearean complexity, initiated when Scott
misunderstands the gender of his German pen-pal Mike – actually Mieke:
‘a female name, similar to our Michelle’ – and demands that Mike ‘keep
[her] hands off my genitals’. Scott’s genitals, verstehen, not mine.
But having been unceremoniously dumped by his high-school sweetheart,
Fiona (Kristin Kreuk), Scott is suddenly at liberty to realise that Mike
(Jessica Boehrs) is actually, how do you say, a smoking piece of ass.
Some critics have attempted to read a gay subtext into Scott’s inability
to distinguish Mike from her cousin Jan – given that Jan is a 6’ tall
Obergrüppenführer with a side-parting, while Mike is a 6’ tall
Obergrüppenführerin with whopping fußballen – and the fact that Scott
and Mike wind up having sex in a confessional at the Vatican.
This is utterly ridiculous. The bit at the plage nudiste where all the
wrinkly old chaps have their wrinkly old chaps out… the ‘international
house of sausage’… that’s the gay bit. Or maybe the bit where the
Creepy Italian Guy licks Scott’s face. Still, it goes to show that some
academics will do anything to score a cheap laugh. (While on
secondment to our Department of Cognitive Recognisance, Jim Watson
once stuck a probe into the Vice-Chancellor’s brain while he was
sleeping, to ascertain whether he’d lied about the university’s sherry
budget. He hadn’t; but it was very funny…)
Seized with remorse, Scott sets out for Berlin to find Mike, accompanied
by his best friend Cooper Harris and the twins, Jenny (Michelle
Trachtenberg) and Jamie. Taking a totally logical route – London, Paris,
Crans sur Mer, Amsterdam, Bratislava, Berlin, Rome – he tracks down the
love of his life, a girl with whom he has only ever corresponded via the
medium of the internet, all the while planning to ‘show up and sweep her
off her German feet’.*
Here, surely, is an allegory for our age, a tale of distance yearning
familiar to youngsters everywhere who fall for slamming hotties they’ve
come upon on a social networking site.
‘I can’t believe you came all the way to Europe for a girl!’ Jenny taunts
our lovelorn hero. Indeed, many of our Californian readers may well
sympathise with this sentiment. But such are the things men will do for
sex: we see that the aim of life’s ultimate journey is, inevitably, to bury
one’s end (in the vernacular).
But romance is not the only theme in this multifaceted exploration of the
human condition. In fact, the bulk of the work is taken up with a
trenchant consideration of the nature of boundaries of all kinds.
The most obvious of these are historio-geographical: ‘Paris is practically
a suburb of Berlin: it’s a nothing commute. This is why France and
Germany have always been allies.’ Jawohl! My Dutch-German parentage
means that I have been brought up in the spirit of European
brotherhood, and when I was growing up in Schwingerbeybie, attending
a school funded by the EEC, we were taught always that any differences
we didn’t celebrate we could simply pretend did not exist.
Now, relative to the USA, we Europeans humbly understand that our
continent is actually so small that an entire trip around it can be plotted,
at a scale of 1:1, on the table-cloth of a Parisien restaurant. Aber, on
behalf of my compatriots, I feel that the sentiment ‘Europe is officially
the worst country in the world!’ is one to which I must take the gravest
possible exception. Clearly these script-writers have never been to
Bangladesh.
The climactic encounter between Coop and Jenny in the airplane toilet
does raise one very interesting question, however: ‘this still counts as
Europe, right?’ I, for one, have always been keen to know which
particular country’s laws I am breaking in my various attempts to gain
entry to the Mile High Club.
There are psycho-sexual boundaries to be confronted, too. Faced with
Scott’s reluctant ‘I can’t just go to Berlin, Coop’ mentality, Cooper leads
the way in embracing our contemporary understanding of priorities: ‘why
don’t you major in not being such a woman? … You know America was
founded by prudes… prudes who left Europe because they were offended
by all the steamy, kinky sex that was going on?’
So much for America. By contrast, of course, ‘Voltaire contracted syphilis
two blocks from the Louvre.’
The fact that every culture is different was never more beautifully
illustrated than by the young Jennys’ learning curves as she attempts to
hitch a lift on the Dutch motorway. Alas, she does not comprehend that
a) showing her impeccably perky 18-year-old breasts to truckers just
isn’t enough to get a lift in Europe (‘they have orange juice ads with
dildos and lesbians!’), and
b) since her delightfully buoyant breasts could themselves only be about
5 years old, at most, the Dutch drivers in question probably considered
this a little tasteless…
Und, finally, the language barrier. Everyone knows that it is unwise to
venture far without some basic knowledge of the local tongues you may
encounter. This is particularly vital if you plan to visit Dutch brothels,**
where, for example, one should at all times be able to summon up such
simple items of vocabulary as
FLǕGGȦ∂NKđ€ČHIŒβǾLʃÊN – the ‘safe’ word, for use in situations where
the erotic tendency to shout ‘yes’ when you mean ‘no’ (or vice versa)
might be detrimental to one’s health,
and on no account confuse them with such things as
FLUGGENKEIMKREMLE – a much easier word to pronounce, but
unfortunately one that means ‘massive, fluffy vibrator-trident’.
But it is not all existentialist doom und glüm. Even the most casual
observer can glean from Eurotrip many lessons of a smaller nature,
nonetheless useful in everyday circumstances. We learn, for instance:
Dir. Jeff Schaffer
Reviewed by Hans Kneesenboom-Zedeysie
Friday, January 11, 2008
Hans Kneesenboom-Zedeysie is Professor of
Comparative Literature at the Universiteit van
Ghwentse Fanie
From Ohio to Berlin and back to Oberlin, Eurotrip’s parable of the journey
of life reminds us that the let’s-get-laid plans of men are aft gone agley,
and that pronouncements like ‘Let the crazy European sex-Odyssey
begin!’ are generally precursors to terribly disappointing events. Like New
Year, oder?
This whirlwind tour of the fundamentals of European culture is based on
a comedy of errors of Shakespearean complexity, initiated when Scott
misunderstands the gender of his German pen-pal Mike – actually Mieke:
‘a female name, similar to our Michelle’ – and demands that Mike ‘keep
[her] hands off my genitals’. Scott’s genitals, verstehen, not mine.
But having been unceremoniously dumped by his high-school sweetheart,
Fiona (Kristin Kreuk), Scott is suddenly at liberty to realise that Mike
(Jessica Boehrs) is actually, how do you say, a smoking piece of ass.
Some critics have attempted to read a gay subtext into Scott’s inability
to distinguish Mike from her cousin Jan – given that Jan is a 6’ tall
Obergrüppenführer with a side-parting, while Mike is a 6’ tall
Obergrüppenführerin with whopping fußballen – and the fact that Scott
and Mike wind up having sex in a confessional at the Vatican.
This is utterly ridiculous. The bit at the plage nudiste where all the
wrinkly old chaps have their wrinkly old chaps out… the ‘international
house of sausage’… that’s the gay bit. Or maybe the bit where the
Creepy Italian Guy licks Scott’s face. Still, it goes to show that some
academics will do anything to score a cheap laugh. (While on
secondment to our Department of Cognitive Recognisance, Jim Watson
once stuck a probe into the Vice-Chancellor’s brain while he was
sleeping, to ascertain whether he’d lied about the university’s sherry
budget. He hadn’t; but it was very funny…)
Seized with remorse, Scott sets out for Berlin to find Mike, accompanied
by his best friend Cooper Harris and the twins, Jenny (Michelle
Trachtenberg) and Jamie. Taking a totally logical route – London, Paris,
Crans sur Mer, Amsterdam, Bratislava, Berlin, Rome – he tracks down the
love of his life, a girl with whom he has only ever corresponded via the
medium of the internet, all the while planning to ‘show up and sweep her
off her German feet’.*
Here, surely, is an allegory for our age, a tale of distance yearning
familiar to youngsters everywhere who fall for slamming hotties they’ve
come upon on a social networking site.
‘I can’t believe you came all the way to Europe for a girl!’ Jenny taunts
our lovelorn hero. Indeed, many of our Californian readers may well
sympathise with this sentiment. But such are the things men will do for
sex: we see that the aim of life’s ultimate journey is, inevitably, to bury
one’s end (in the vernacular).
But romance is not the only theme in this multifaceted exploration of the
human condition. In fact, the bulk of the work is taken up with a
trenchant consideration of the nature of boundaries of all kinds.
The most obvious of these are historio-geographical: ‘Paris is practically
a suburb of Berlin: it’s a nothing commute. This is why France and
Germany have always been allies.’ Jawohl! My Dutch-German parentage
means that I have been brought up in the spirit of European
brotherhood, and when I was growing up in Schwingerbeybie, attending
a school funded by the EEC, we were taught always that any differences
we didn’t celebrate we could simply pretend did not exist.
Now, relative to the USA, we Europeans humbly understand that our
continent is actually so small that an entire trip around it can be plotted,
at a scale of 1:1, on the table-cloth of a Parisien restaurant. Aber, on
behalf of my compatriots, I feel that the sentiment ‘Europe is officially
the worst country in the world!’ is one to which I must take the gravest
possible exception. Clearly these script-writers have never been to
Bangladesh.
The climactic encounter between Coop and Jenny in the airplane toilet
does raise one very interesting question, however: ‘this still counts as
Europe, right?’ I, for one, have always been keen to know which
particular country’s laws I am breaking in my various attempts to gain
entry to the Mile High Club.
There are psycho-sexual boundaries to be confronted, too. Faced with
Scott’s reluctant ‘I can’t just go to Berlin, Coop’ mentality, Cooper leads
the way in embracing our contemporary understanding of priorities: ‘why
don’t you major in not being such a woman? … You know America was
founded by prudes… prudes who left Europe because they were offended
by all the steamy, kinky sex that was going on?’
So much for America. By contrast, of course, ‘Voltaire contracted syphilis
two blocks from the Louvre.’
The fact that every culture is different was never more beautifully
illustrated than by the young Jennys’ learning curves as she attempts to
hitch a lift on the Dutch motorway. Alas, she does not comprehend that
a) showing her impeccably perky 18-year-old breasts to truckers just
isn’t enough to get a lift in Europe (‘they have orange juice ads with
dildos and lesbians!’), and
b) since her delightfully buoyant breasts could themselves only be about
5 years old, at most, the Dutch drivers in question probably considered
this a little tasteless…
Und, finally, the language barrier. Everyone knows that it is unwise to
venture far without some basic knowledge of the local tongues you may
encounter. This is particularly vital if you plan to visit Dutch brothels,**
where, for example, one should at all times be able to summon up such
simple items of vocabulary as
FLǕGGȦ∂NKđ€ČHIŒβǾLʃÊN – the ‘safe’ word, for use in situations where
the erotic tendency to shout ‘yes’ when you mean ‘no’ (or vice versa)
might be detrimental to one’s health,
and on no account confuse them with such things as
FLUGGENKEIMKREMLE – a much easier word to pronounce, but
unfortunately one that means ‘massive, fluffy vibrator-trident’.
But it is not all existentialist doom und glüm. Even the most casual
observer can glean from Eurotrip many lessons of a smaller nature,
nonetheless useful in everyday circumstances. We learn, for instance:
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That all Italian gentlemen are perverts who wear checked
underpants; everyone (male or female) in Eastern Europe looks like
Rade Sherbedgia; and all Amsterdam hoteliers look like Joanna
Lumley. This last is surprising.
That the Vatican is 0.5km sq. and has been a papal residence since
the time of Constantine the Great.***
That Matt Damon knows how to pick a cameo role, whilst Ben
Affleck – his Oscar-winning co-writer – prefers to make movies like
Gigli.
That the hiding of valuables in your anus ‘will deter some – but, of
course, not all – thieves.’
That, discounting the scene beside the very moving monument to
fishermen at Crans Sur Mer, there are actually more hotties in Ohio
than in Europe. I never excelled in the mathematical subjects, but
by my count, Ohio wins 5:3.
That you should be wary of any woman who owns a battery-
operated monkey that plays the cymbals. Unless you are paying
extra, natürlich.
Also, that any central-European sex scene will be sound-tracked by
The Hoff,**** and that you can get a free t-shirt if you’re only
willing to be violated with the Fluggenkeimkremle. A silver lining to
every kraut, as we like to joke back home, while listening to David’s
records.
underpants; everyone (male or female) in Eastern Europe looks like
Rade Sherbedgia; and all Amsterdam hoteliers look like Joanna
Lumley. This last is surprising.
That the Vatican is 0.5km sq. and has been a papal residence since
the time of Constantine the Great.***
That Matt Damon knows how to pick a cameo role, whilst Ben
Affleck – his Oscar-winning co-writer – prefers to make movies like
Gigli.
That the hiding of valuables in your anus ‘will deter some – but, of
course, not all – thieves.’
That, discounting the scene beside the very moving monument to
fishermen at Crans Sur Mer, there are actually more hotties in Ohio
than in Europe. I never excelled in the mathematical subjects, but
by my count, Ohio wins 5:3.
That you should be wary of any woman who owns a battery-
operated monkey that plays the cymbals. Unless you are paying
extra, natürlich.
Also, that any central-European sex scene will be sound-tracked by
The Hoff,**** and that you can get a free t-shirt if you’re only
willing to be violated with the Fluggenkeimkremle. A silver lining to
every kraut, as we like to joke back home, while listening to David’s
records.
It was of great academic interest to me to witness the intricate levels of
metatransinfrapostliterature at play within Eurotrip. Highlights were the
arrival of leather fetishists Hans and Gruber (Hans Gruber was Alan
Rickman’s character in Die Hard, my favourite non-adult film as a little
boy); and a tacit reworking of the ‘ass or crotch’ dilemma from Fight
Club, where I was charmed to note how unselfishly Jenny offered the
crotch to Coop, and the ass to the camera.
All of which philosophical musings are scored to variations on the theme
of ‘Scotty doesn’t know’, the anthem celebrating Fiona’s repeated
infidelities with the lead singers of a punk band. Aside from being a
reflection on the issues of meaning and knowing, here we see the hard-
earned lesson that if your good lady is having it away with a rocker, you’
re probably never going to hear the end of it. The universal appeal of a
decent tune – nomatter how revelatory the lyrics concerning your sexual
inadequacy – means that it will be remixed and played in every club in
Bratislava before you can fly there and put a stop to it. Try very hard
never to find yourself in this position. I have suffered this indignity on
more than one occasion, my only consolation being that Slovakians speak
very bad Dutch, and it is particularly hard to make a rhyme out of
Kneesenboom-Zedeysie.
---
* The feet, like the cabbage, being very sensual items in German culture.
** Vander-RED ** Vander-HOT ** Vander-SEXXX **
*** Author of the immortal bull: ‘If I wasn’t then why would I say I am?’
(Despite extensive education, Constantine always struggled with the
conditional.)
**** Don’t hassel him. We were at school together, and he’s a really
nice fellow. Besides, he’s just trying to make a living.
© lizardmagazine.com, 2008
metatransinfrapostliterature at play within Eurotrip. Highlights were the
arrival of leather fetishists Hans and Gruber (Hans Gruber was Alan
Rickman’s character in Die Hard, my favourite non-adult film as a little
boy); and a tacit reworking of the ‘ass or crotch’ dilemma from Fight
Club, where I was charmed to note how unselfishly Jenny offered the
crotch to Coop, and the ass to the camera.
All of which philosophical musings are scored to variations on the theme
of ‘Scotty doesn’t know’, the anthem celebrating Fiona’s repeated
infidelities with the lead singers of a punk band. Aside from being a
reflection on the issues of meaning and knowing, here we see the hard-
earned lesson that if your good lady is having it away with a rocker, you’
re probably never going to hear the end of it. The universal appeal of a
decent tune – nomatter how revelatory the lyrics concerning your sexual
inadequacy – means that it will be remixed and played in every club in
Bratislava before you can fly there and put a stop to it. Try very hard
never to find yourself in this position. I have suffered this indignity on
more than one occasion, my only consolation being that Slovakians speak
very bad Dutch, and it is particularly hard to make a rhyme out of
Kneesenboom-Zedeysie.
---
* The feet, like the cabbage, being very sensual items in German culture.
** Vander-RED ** Vander-HOT ** Vander-SEXXX **
*** Author of the immortal bull: ‘If I wasn’t then why would I say I am?’
(Despite extensive education, Constantine always struggled with the
conditional.)
**** Don’t hassel him. We were at school together, and he’s a really
nice fellow. Besides, he’s just trying to make a living.
© lizardmagazine.com, 2008
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