By Matt Cole, Jeremy Zucker, Alice Oline, Lily Green, and Emmy Heyman (Block 2 2017)

“Much of the comedy in We’re the Millers stems from racist caricatures of Mexicans as criminals and drug dealers, the hyper-sexualization of women, the fetishization of lesbian—especially by heterosexual men, and the supposed shame surrounding being a virgin at age 18—especially for young men. Along these lines, the movie poster reduces the characters to one word descriptions, shrouding them in more stereotypes that do not allow for the audience to see them as complex people.”

“In our story we decided to have a contrived lesbian couple, Danni and Rhubarb, head the drug smuggling, with their recruited son and daughter, Kane and Kiki, to create the Miller-Jones family. In order to steer clear of the Mexican drug lord stereotypes, and highlight the white, upper-middle class demand for the drug trade, we revised the story so that our family was smuggling Marijuana (baked in a pie) across the Colorado-Utah border. The Miller-Jones are delivering the marijuana to an unlikely recipient: Danni’s friend from college who is undergoing chemotherapy. Because of Utah’s strict substance laws, this friend is unable to access medical marijuana, and so the Miller-Jones come to the rescue and smuggle an edibles-laced pumpkin pie across state borders.”