Stereotypes in EuroTrip, by Caio Bonatti

     The movie EutoTrip was released in 2004 and depicts several clichés—chiefly national stereotypes—an American teenager may have about Europe and Europeans. The plot is the following: Scott is dumped by his girlfriend Fiona during their graduation; his best friend Cooper mocks him all the time for the footage of Scott crying over Fiona in public just after the dumping. Scott sends an e-mail to Mieke, his German friend telling the whole story and Mieke cheers him up, immediately making Cooper say Mieke is some kind of pervert. After a party on which the twins Jamie and Jenny are presented to us, Scott, in a drunken state, sends a furious e-mail to Mieke; in the morning, Scott finds out Mieke is in fact a German girl, not a man as he thought. For Mieke had blocked Scott’s e-mail address, he and Cooper decide to fly to Germany: Scott for Mieke, his recently discovered love and Cooper for European girls and adventure. After a manly night on an English Pub, they both wake up in a double decker on route to Paris, where they later get together with the twins. After the team is complete, they start travelling and hitchhiking through the continent and its common places.
      Sexism is a constant: everything must involve sex in a chauvinistic way, especially for Cooper, whose primary objective was to get laid; for him, Europeans women are all nymphets waiting for men like him. The macho man stereotype is also explored on the English people: according to the movie, English are all football fanatics, hooligans, rude and violent but slightly dumb. As said on the beginning, Scott and Cooper wake in a double decker, as the English they met were going to Paris to see a football match. Surprisingly, the French stereotype are not overexploited, there is just a French street artist with a thin mustache who performs a robot and fight with Scott.
      At a train station Fiona meets Christoph, a charming prince: handsome, polite and rich; later he will be revealed as bisexual and married (still, he tries to seduce Jenny). During the train travel, a perverted Italian man causes confusion in the cabin; apparently, Italians are very passionate, sexual and abusive, while showing a naïve look. And they always wear fine suits and grease on the hair, of course.
      Amsterdam is shown as a city of drugs and prostitution; also, the drugs are sold by Rastafarian/Jamaican bakers. Eastern Europe is, accordingly to the movie, so poor that American cents can buy a luxurious lifestyle; the whole scenario is bluish and devastated. And the last stereotypes presented are the Germans: first as a crazy and violent old man who takes the group to Bratislava and later as Mieke’s little brother, who, out of the blue, paints a Hitler mustache and stars marching like the füher when nobody but Cooper is seeing.
      The movie is indeed a sarcastic comedy, but we must remind that these stereotypes come from actual ideas many people have and are extremely dangerous if taken seriously.