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National Lampoon’s Vacation as Biting Social Commentary
Makes the movie funnier than ever
My husband and I recently re-watched the original Vacation for maybe the hundredth time, but this time, it was like I was watching a whole new movie. I used to think of Vacation as a sort of silly, slap-sticky movie with a few funny spots in it, but after surviving the Trump years, every second of Vacation was an indictment of stupidity and consumerism in the US, and of white America, in particular.
Clark Griswold, played by Chevy Chase, is your basic middle-class, middle-aged, Midwestern white schlub who’s managed to kiss the right ass at his cushy job making food additives in order to provide his vanilla family with a nice home and a brand-new ugly ass “Family Truckster” to take them on a vacation. They’re all decked out in khaki shorts and alligator polo shirts with their white tube socks pulled up to their knees for the trip, all like clueless dorks.
The vacation goes awry immediately when Clark takes the wrong exit from their home town of Chicago and lands the family right in the middle of East Saint Louis. “We shouldn’t ignore the plight of our inner cities,” Clark says, as the family cruises past streetwalkers, drug dealers and pimps — all Black, of course — against a background of boarded up buildings scrawled with graffiti. Most of…
