Double secret probation.

August 15, 2023 6:57 PM

I was on campus when ‘Animal House’ debuted. It changed everything. Although “Animal House” was a professedly anarchic comedy that identified with the freaks, the misfits and anyone wanting to fight for their right to party, the movie ironically helped crystallize a new strain of cultural and political conservatism that started on campuses and ran all the way up to the National Mall and Wall Street. In other words, “Animal House” is where the 1960s finally and decisively turned into the 1980s.
posted by Toddles (74 comments total)

The article holds this movie catalytic of an enlightened selfishness — that spilled over into the political sphere

En-lightened of ethical baggage, I suppose. Were the standards of the time really that insufferable?
posted by grokus at 7:16 PM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

If you were a rich white reactionary, probably.
posted by Reyturner at 7:19 PM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

You know what they say equality feels like when you're accustomed to privilege...
posted by clawsoon at 7:20 PM on August 15, 2023 [6 favorites]

It’s hard to accept that the entertainments that defined your youth have aged right alongside you.

Yep.
posted by Mitheral at 7:26 PM on August 15, 2023 [7 favorites]

It absolutely wasn't enlightened selfishness-- being drunk and destructive is short-term selfishness. The other parts of the essay about the id and impulsiveness are more accurate.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 7:41 PM on August 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

I remain convinced that corrosive effect of Harvard on the modern US cultural zeitgeist cannot be underestimated. There are of course some very bright exceptions but I feel like so much moral rot (of the "greed is good" sort) has its roots there
posted by treepour at 8:19 PM on August 15, 2023 [21 favorites]

I feel vindicated in never really liking that movie
posted by serena15221 at 8:21 PM on August 15, 2023 [17 favorites]

ZITIPPITY POP!
posted by clavdivs at 8:26 PM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

made the Lampoon brand a commercial powerhouse

[citation needed]
posted by zompist at 8:27 PM on August 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Well, at least John Landis is otherwise unproblematic.
posted by brundlefly at 8:41 PM on August 15, 2023 [29 favorites]

In the 80s you saw:
The death of the FCC fairness doctrine
The death of PATCO and the continued decline in US organized labor and manufacturing in general
The death of 100,777 to AIDS in the US while Reagan told the CDC to look pretty and do as little as they could
The death of any economic alternative to the ancien regime

But sure a movie did it
posted by StarkRoads at 8:44 PM on August 15, 2023 [97 favorites]

Metafilter: the entertainments that defined your youth have aged right alongside you.

(I say this with love)
posted by chromecow at 8:55 PM on August 15, 2023 [13 favorites]

It didn't escape my attention that the founders of the National Lampoon all graduated from Harvard, and that the writers of this movie (including one of the NatLamp founders) all graduated from good schools, but the ultimate message of the movie (in the epilogue) was your basic too-cool-for-school bullshit: that actually learning and, crazy thought, maybe growing as an individual was beside the point.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:03 PM on August 15, 2023 [8 favorites]

My very conservative parents enjoyed this movie (the sanitized TV version) which surprised the heck out of me, because they were even offended by The Simpsons which shares the same pedigree. I always saw this movie as an example of class solidarity and collective action, but what do I know about partying or anything else.

It did teach me that "vegetables are sensual, people are sensuous" which is more than I can say for most movies, so bravo.
posted by credulous at 9:42 PM on August 15, 2023 [13 favorites]

It’s hard to accept that the entertainments that defined your youth have aged right alongside you.

So true. It’s hard to admit that maybe the icons of your youth were a bunch of selfish dicks. Were those characters entertaining? Absolutely. Worth admiring? Nope.

Ferris Bueller is another one. It’s a jolting moment when you see that — hey, maybe the sister was right. And here, maybe Dean Wormer is right too, or at least a lot more sympathetic (gleeful anti-Semitism aside). I don’t see this as a turn towards conservatism so much as growing the fuck up.
posted by Capt. Renault at 9:53 PM on August 15, 2023 [8 favorites]

It’s hard to accept that the entertainments that defined your youth have aged right alongside you.

I suppose I did first watch Animal House in my youth (i.e. some time in my mid-teens) but was old then so it’s hard to call it of my youth, and while there are specific things in it that really, obviously didn’t age well, it always surprised how much better something about it’s core comic sensibility held up than a lot of its “peers.” I mean, I definitely laughed, which is more than I can say for a lot of the 80s comedy classics/first gen SNL cast movies.
posted by atoxyl at 9:59 PM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

Oh how I wish to live another 30 years or so to sit back and watch as all of your favorite movies turn into problematic evil badness that should be forgotten. It will be so chuckle worthy.
posted by zengargoyle at 10:04 PM on August 15, 2023 [23 favorites]

Anyway I’m not much into this essay, and I don’t think it’s just because of my residual soft spot for Animal House. I think it’s because it’s a guy from, you know, that generation, getting around to experiencing some dissonance with the values of his youth, after everybody else has kind of talked this kind of thing to death, and deciding to frame it as representative of a national turning point.
posted by atoxyl at 10:14 PM on August 15, 2023 [7 favorites]

but the ultimate message of the movie (in the epilogue) was your basic too-cool-for-school bullshit: that actually learning and, crazy thought, maybe growing as an individual was beside the point

I was eighteen or nineteen when Animal House showed up, one year out of high school, one year into university. So you might say, I was the target audience. And I loved it for what it was, which was a rip roaring comedy, which if it had any message beyond fuck-yeah-parteeeee!!!! would've been something along the lines of, don't just do what your parents and your teachers and your profs tell you, have a life, go off, embrace some anarchy, crash and burn, live to tell the tale ... and so on.

Not that I wasn't already doing all that stuff -- it was just cool to see some it reflected up on the big screen. As for actual frat parties, can't say I ever went to one that wasn't a deadly dull affair, no proper party animals to be found anywhere. You had to get far from campus for that kind of stuff.
posted by philip-random at 11:11 PM on August 15, 2023 [8 favorites]

My very conservative parents enjoyed this movie (the sanitized TV version) which surprised the heck out of me, because they were even offended by The Simpsons which shares the same pedigree.

Same situation here. My best understanding is that it was fun to romanticize one's past and shrug off SA or alcohol poisoning or just being gross rowdy kids in general. My father had an Animal House type of college experience and a lot of his friends are known to me, even posthumously, only by nicknames like "Beef Head" and "F-Up." This has been totally fine with elders, priests, deans, and employers on all sides, and everyone with these nicknames went on to have successful careers in business, law, etc.

But in the case of The Simpsons? Where children are sometimes disrespectful to adults?? Unforgivable! Bart Simpson got a lot of hate from parents of the early 1990s for having a kicky little attitude and not bowing to authority. Which kind of sums up a lot of boomer-era attitudes towards power and respect--okay for us to spit in the face of The Man, but our kids and their friends had better address us as as Sir and Ma'am! And no pranks, ever!!
posted by knotty knots at 12:18 AM on August 16, 2023 [40 favorites]

At least it's not Revenge of the Nerds.
posted by Nerd of the North at 1:07 AM on August 16, 2023 [29 favorites]

the ultimate message of the movie (in the epilogue) was your basic too-cool-for-school bullshit

This has been totally fine with elders, priests, deans, and employers on all sides, and everyone with these nicknames went on to have successful careers in business, law, etc.

All I can remember now of the epilogue is that John Belushi's character went on to become a senator. The point of the satire there seemed to be that, not matter how appalling your behaviour at Harvard had been, the inborn privilege that got you there in the first place would remain undamaged and continue to ensure you had a comfortable life.

Unfortunately, The unspoken coda for Harvard alumni - be they among the movie's writers or its audience - was "... and that's fine".
posted by Paul Slade at 2:28 AM on August 16, 2023 [22 favorites]

I still find it a very funny movie. It was representing the exact year I started college. The high school yearbook is wonderful too.
posted by Czjewel at 3:03 AM on August 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

Do Porky's next.
posted by flabdablet at 3:35 AM on August 16, 2023 [8 favorites]

This reminds me of The Paper Chase, which encapsulates the way the zeitgeist transformed from hippie idealism to yuppie entitlement.
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 3:54 AM on August 16, 2023 [7 favorites]

Animal House has some terrible parts (the foreign students at the very beginning who get nastily shunned even by "good" Delta house!) but in general is a very funny movie. It's more anarchic than anything else, a cartoon, like Bugs Bunny. Heck, a guy gets run over by a steam roller at the end and is flattened into a cartoon pancake! The allegedly "racist" parts like at the Black club are not really racist, IMO, in that the entitled White shits from Delta House (the "heroes") think they can sidle in and own the place, and that they are best friends with Otis Day because they hired him and his band for a party. No one is really a hero in Animal House.

Everyone gets a comeuppance. It's so many of the Animal House knockoffs that are truly grim, such as Revenge of the Nerds, etc.
posted by SoberHighland at 4:34 AM on August 16, 2023 [11 favorites]

There was (and is) a sort of left-to-fascist pipeline that you can define between the 70s and the early 2000s. The pattern in Animal House with rock-and-roll rebels acting out in defiance of authority is one that some persons in that pipeline have tried to co-opt.

Today these guys are a year or so from retirement, listening to "morning zoo" shock jocks on classic rock oldies radio as they drive to work from their far exurban starter castle, unwilling to accept that they've become the "man" they were supposedly sticking it to.

There's a white female variation on this too, often identifiable by their "biker chick" affectations and cultural shibboleths, which are more likely to be cosplay than reality.

You can identify several milestones along the path for these people: Trump, Tea Party, 9/11....but if you go back far enough, many of them would have been cheering on "disco demolition night" in 1979, in the same era as Animal House. It's all identitarian, pulling together the in-group and putting down the out-groups.
posted by gimonca at 4:42 AM on August 16, 2023 [27 favorites]

Concerning the changing times, the movie (or more specifically the reaction to it) was, at most, a weathervane, and not the wind itself.
posted by Artful Codger at 5:44 AM on August 16, 2023 [21 favorites]

The guitar smashing scene is enough to make me hate that movie. You don't smash someone else's instrument, ever, full stop, not even for yuks, unless you are the villain in a movie.

Also, Earl Stephen Bishop is not "twerpy" - the use of that pejorative in the article says a lot about the author's actual leanings.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:16 AM on August 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

I don't want to paint with too broad of a brush here, but it amazes me how much cultural commentators of a certain generation tend to take the hippie idealism of the 60s at face value in order to draw a distinction between the liberal pieties of the sixties and the unchecked greed of the 70s (or 80s or etc) to set up a kind of fall-from-Eden historical narrative, rather than acknowledging that there's a continuous through-line of libertarian individualism (people pursuing their individual desires at the expense of the common good) that runs straight through the hippies of the 60s to the Me Decade of the 70s to the Gordon Gekko 80s.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 6:35 AM on August 16, 2023 [45 favorites]

The idea that “Americans once valued class” is disproven by The Three Stooges, professional wrestling, gangster flicks, and other such pre-1978 forms of highbrow entertainment.

But for centuries, men at elite colleges had said that their manners and behavior (as gentlemen of privilege), and their work “for the nation”, were in a certain sense their payback for the power and privilege. (Of course this was often lip service as drunk collegians set fire to Harvard and destroyed the economies of South American nations.). After noblesse oblige became unfashionable, some college students still worried about privilege. Even today students at elite schools are explicitly told “you will contribute, your degree is worth the time and money and societal coddling because you will improve the world , you are the future leaders and you have a great responsibility ” (even if let’s be real they’re mostly going into consulting).

I can see how Animal House, with its explicit repudiation of both “you will deport yourself as public-spirited gentlemen of breeding” and “you will interrogate your privilege and behave like a Sensitive New Age Guy”, was incredibly appealing to a lot of teenage guys: the idea that you didn’t even have to pretend to behave in public, yet of course you would still get the power and privilege.
posted by Hypatia at 6:37 AM on August 16, 2023 [9 favorites]

From the article: I’m not saying that “Animal House” led directly to the election of Ronald Reagan two years later. But I am saying the movie empowered a generation of 20-somethings to aspire to a new hedonism — call it, at best, enlightened selfishness — that spilled over into the political sphere.

The 1970's was dubbed the "me" decade before the decade ended, it was that obvious. There was also a distinct demand for rowdy late night movies at local cinemas, for somewhere to go. This is before cable TV, movie rentals, at a time when broadcast stations signed off at ten or eleven.
posted by Brian B. at 6:40 AM on August 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

I saw this in the theater when it came out. I was really young, definitely younger than the intended audience. Maybe kindergarten-ish age? So basically everything except the most slapstick humor went right over my head (like, I remember whispering to my mother to ask why Belushi was staring through windows at women in their underwear, what was the point of that?), though I remember the audience howling with laughter. (I'm not sure if my parents couldn't afford a babysitter or just liked bringing me along, but I got taken to every inappropriate adult movie through my entire childhood. I didn't find anything scary or traumatizing, but I was frequently completely confused and bored.)

The next time I saw it I was in high school, and it was being shown in the theater at the student center on the nearby state university campus. That audience loved the movie in the most direct, uncritical way possible. (Part of why movies were fun in that theater was because if the audience howled loud enough at a given scene, the projectionists would rewind the film and replay that scene. This was mostly used for shower scenes (Carrie, Porky's) but also for bits that people found extra funny like the steamroller.) The movie showed the most carefree, party-centered life possible to imagine. College with all the freedom and none of those pesky classes taking up your time.

I haven't seen it since, and have wondered, like with so many other movies that were funny at the time, how well it has stood up to changing times.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:57 AM on August 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

don't just do what your parents and your teachers and your profs tell you, have a life, go off, embrace some anarchy, crash and burn, live to tell the tale ... and so on.

Sure, that's totally fine. For your summer vacation. And, even if you wanted to go down that road for a bit longer, you could get away with it, because early 60s America was still riding high on the postwar economic boom that still had a decade or so to go before it literally ran out of gas; a lot of people did that very thing. Not so much by the late seventies, when the movie came out and the people running NatLamp were already nostalgic for their young adulthood. (The magazine itself had already peaked, although it would chug along for several more years, getting a boost from the likes of P.J. O'Rourke and John Hughes on their way to their own successful careers.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:59 AM on August 16, 2023

Metafilter: I didn't find anything scary or traumatizing, but I was frequently completely confused and bored.

[Just kidding, Metafilter. I love you really.]
posted by Paul Slade at 7:00 AM on August 16, 2023 [8 favorites]

I had an Animal House like college experience. I learned early that "Sorry officer, fraternity prank" could go a long way. We had the fraternity rolls down to all girls schools for mixers, open house band parties with 10 kegs, a file cabinet with 100s of old tests, etc. By my fourth year, my major involvement with the fraternity was intramural basketball and flag football. At 21, I was too old to keep up with the partying or too old to want to.

Fast forward a few decades and my daughter is at the same University. It was the during her first semester she texted me one Saturday night saying she was in my fraternity at a party. I asked her to see if my composite was still on the wall. Then I realized it was a Saturday night around midnight and she was at my house. I quickly texted her that no female should be on the 2nd or 3rd floor of that house. She texted back, "Lol dad." I texted her back, "NO lol, seriously." She just texted back, "It is not like the old days dad."

To her credit, I went down to her sorority father-daughter dance a few months later and met her friend who was a member of my fraternity. He was a good guy. Kind of a straight nerd. I was not sure if I should be proud of my daughter for making good choices or disappointed in the fraternity brother for not being more like the brothers of my era.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 7:04 AM on August 16, 2023 [7 favorites]

I spent first year in one of the dorms reputed to have been the inspiration for Animal House: Woodstock Hall at McMaster. We had a lot of rules to follow that resulted from the wild blowout parties that were still being talked about more than a decade afterwards. Frosh week was much more closely monitored, student parties were policed, dorm visitors (and especially overnight guests) were monitored closely and you had to leave within 24 hours of your last exam.

It wasn't awful and probably resulted in better living conditions for many of the non-party students, but there was a real sense that us gen-x kids in the 80s and 90s had to live with the consequences of the boomer's actions in the 70s. Everyone bitched about at least some of the restrictions. The move out one was often particularly bad as it frequently mean having to get your parents/friends to take a weekday off to move you out.
posted by bonehead at 7:54 AM on August 16, 2023 [10 favorites]

I was not sure if I should be proud of my daughter for making good choices or disappointed in the fraternity brother for not being more like the brothers of my era.

I think you should be proud of him for being better than your generation, given the warning you gave your daughter.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:06 AM on August 16, 2023 [32 favorites]

(useless trivia)The Delta house from the movie was a fraternity house in the 50s, and it was one of my fraternity's chapters back then. (/useless trivia)

As a silly slapstick comedy, it holds up way better than much of what followed it in the 80s. Being in college in the late 80s, my experience wasn't that far off what is depicted in the movie. We regularly crammed 500 people into our party room, which was visible on a prominent corner near campus and often dusted off 20 kegs in a night. The police never stopped by, even though 75% of the attendees were underage. I'm on the alumni board these days and it is very different. They have to register every party with the university and turn in a guest list, check IDs at the door, etc. Kegs aren't allowed on the property. The PITA factor to throw a party is so high that I sometimes wonder why they bother. *

* Not really, although as an alumnus I do wonder if the risk is so high they should stop doing parties. So much can go wrong when teenage brains and alcohol mix, and unlike in the 80s, they are held responsible for those bad decisions today.
posted by COD at 8:24 AM on August 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

So true. It’s hard to admit that maybe the icons of your youth were a bunch of selfish dicks.

I mean, I know Greta Thunberg and all your kids are awesome empathetic heroes, but have you met teenagers? Speaking for myself here, but I think many (most?) of us are selfish dicks for a while so we grow out of it and people can tell us what generous and mature adults we've turned out to be or whatever. And during that selfish dick period, it's a lot easier to relate to/aspire to/indentify with other selfish dicks, a fact that some of the best teenage-adjacent entertainment ("Heathers" comes to mind, but I'm old) rightly critiques/lampoons.

But for real, I think I speak for myself and all of my dickhead youthful heroes when I say, THANK YOU FOR HOLDING OFF ON INVENTING SOCIAL MEDIA UNTIL I WAS WELL OUT OF COLLEGE
posted by thivaia at 8:28 AM on August 16, 2023 [16 favorites]

True facts as reported by the author of the original Animal House stories, Chris Miller. It was a real fraternity at Dartmouth, that he was a member of from 1959 to 1963. A lot of the characters were based on real people. And some of the events. So we are discussing the antics of people born during the early days of World War II. Pre-boomers for those of you who insist on generational names. His book, The Real Animal House (2006), has all the gory details.

Flabdablet, you beat me with your posting!
posted by njohnson23 at 8:28 AM on August 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

This Atlantic article has been linked on the blue before, but it looks at a lot of the post-Animal-House changes in frats.
posted by rmd1023 at 8:32 AM on August 16, 2023

"how well it has stood up to changing times."

Poorly. It has a few really funny scenes, I still love Belushi's "was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!" (He's on a roll.) I love the food fight, crashing the parade, and generally the broad slapstick comedy. But there's too much that didn't age well.

As others have said, I don't think Animal House had that much influence. I won't deny it had some, but it was more of a mirror than anything.
posted by jzb at 8:34 AM on August 16, 2023

> True facts as reported by the author of the original Animal House stories, Chris Miller. It was a real fraternity at Dartmouth, that he was a member of from 1959 to 1963.

kiiiinda not surprised that animal house came out of 1) an ivy 2) with an inferiority complex 3) with a reputation for launching the careers of hard-right attack dogs.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:35 AM on August 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

At least Jurassic Park taught me not to mad scientist super predators that I don't understand, no matter how cool it is
posted by Jacen at 9:12 AM on August 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

At Carnegie Mellon in the mid-late 90's, all of the parties I went to were like mini-raves with long lineups of DJs and occasionally some live electronic acts. It was awesome.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:16 AM on August 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

it amazes me how much cultural commentators of a certain generation tend to take the hippie idealism of the 60s at face value in order to draw a distinction between the liberal pieties of the sixties and the unchecked greed of the 70s (or 80s or etc) to set up a kind of fall-from-Eden historical narrative, rather than acknowledging that there's a continuous through-line of libertarian individualism

There are a lot of oversimplified versions of this take (I suspect the direct hippie to Reagan voter pipeline was a lot narrower than some people seem to believe) but yeah, that’s part of what I found unconvincing in this piece. Like, the sensitive guitar guy in Animal House doesn’t represent an idealistic, political 60s - he’s just trying to get laid like everybody else. My “like everybody else” here is the kind of cynicism that easily blurs into self-justification, of course. If everybody else is strictly self-interested, why shouldn’t I be? I think that offers a more nuanced critique of the movie that still overlaps with what Burr is trying to say. But at the same time, if you do consider the through-line, and other revisionist takes on the 60s, and later iterations on that type of guy, that particular critique of that type of guy holds up pretty well!
posted by atoxyl at 9:29 AM on August 16, 2023

I spent first year in one of the dorms reputed to have been the inspiration for Animal House: Woodstock Hall at McMaster.

I am convinced that literally every single college and university in America with a Greek system either has a frat that was supposedly the "inspiration" for the movie, or has a chapter of that frat. At Illinois State, it was Tau Kappa Epsilon, whose alpha chapter was at nearby Illinois Wesleyan, and whose most famous member was Ronald Reagan.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:41 AM on August 16, 2023 [6 favorites]

the idea that you didn’t even have to pretend to behave in public, yet of course you would still get the power and privilege

In a nutshell, that's also a great descriptor for Trump and his political spawn.
posted by gimonca at 9:54 AM on August 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

kiiiinda not surprised that animal house came out of 1) an ivy 2) with an inferiority complex 3) with a reputation for launching the careers of hard-right attack dogs.

someone mentioned the epilogue a while back, the bit at the end of the movie where we got a quick summary of the subsequent lives of all the key characters. As I recall, the two main upright, uptight, narcissistic assholes from the "good" frat both had entirely plausible bad ends.

- one got killed in Vietnam, an officer shot by his own troops,

- the other went into the Republican politics, got caught up in the Watergate scandal, went to prison, suffered more than a bit.

So yeah, to its credit, Animal House (the movie) wasn't pretending that Faber College didn't produce world class bastards; it just had the good sense to take sides against them.
posted by philip-random at 10:07 AM on August 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

njohnson23: True facts as reported by the author of the original Animal House stories, Chris Miller. It was a real fraternity at Dartmouth, that he was a member of from 1959 to 1963. A lot of the characters were based on real people. And some of the events. So we are discussing the antics of people born during the early days of World War II. Pre-boomers for those of you who insist on generational names. His book, The Real Animal House (2006), has all the gory details.

Very funny book. Standout character was Rat Battles, whose party trick was to swallow a coin and eject the change from his foreskin.


As for the article, I thought PCU had a way more conservative leaning tone in retrospect than Animal House did.
posted by dr_dank at 10:09 AM on August 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

I am convinced that literally every single college and university in America with a Greek system either has a frat that was supposedly the "inspiration" for the movie, or has a chapter of that frat.

This is probably true; at the same time, I’d point out that while McMaster did not have a Greek system, it was the university that producer Ivan Reitman attended, so while its claim is not airtight, it has a better chance than most.

one got killed in Vietnam, an officer shot by his own troops,

Niedermeyer’s death is mentioned in the Landis-directed, Vietnam-set segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie released a couple of years later.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 10:15 AM on August 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

Comedies are always an interesting reflection of their time period. Almost every comedy from the 80s is about winning some kind of competition. The 90s bring the apolitical end-of-history nihilism of stuff like "American Pie" or "Something About Mary." The 2000s usher in the Apatow era trend, comedy that is "liberal" and "inclusive," but is still more or less entirely centered around white men, and uses tropes like calling somebody 'gay' pejoratively until the last possible second before their official expiration date) - much like the 2000s, an awkward era where it was okay to be gay but also "okay" to make fun of being gay...

What we seem to have coming out over the last few years is "almost no comedies," which probably reflects these times pretty well.

Barbie may be an archetype of a coming surge in more socially aware comedies, following in the footsteps of Adam McKay's Don't Look Up and The Other Guys; arguably you could put The Wolf of Wall Street in as a mile marker, depending on whether or not you consider it to be a comedy.
posted by mellow seas at 10:16 AM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Animal House sucked so bad, a truly embarrassing and toxic movie. The only highlight was making fun of the person who recommended it and then avoiding hanging out with them ever again.
posted by GoblinHoney at 10:19 AM on August 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

Animal House sucked so bad, a truly embarrassing and toxic movie. The only highlight was making fun of the person who recommended it, what a jackass.

Yeah that is a blunt way of putting it, but it pretty much sums it up.

It's hard for me to reconcile how lame Belushi's schtick is 40+ years later with all the comedy heroes of my youth like Adam Sandler and Bob Odenkirk insisting he was a revolutionary genius - I guess I just have to accept he made sense in his epoch. It's like when people say, "well sure, Al Jolson was a gigantic a-hole, and he was incredibly racist, but boy could he sing!" and then you hear a recording and it's just warbly garbage. It's just, I dunno, that's what people liked in the 20s. In the 70s they liked a fat guy acting like an asshole.
posted by mellow seas at 10:22 AM on August 16, 2023 [13 favorites]

he was an asshole whose prime targets were worse assholes. Animal House is very much a 70s movie.

... Watergate and Vietnam. That is, abruptly "wised-up" young people, and the directors hoping to effect them, were looking for "behind the curtain" reality in films, narratives that stripped away the tropes --which they saw were often comforting lies and near-propaganda-- of too many studio pictures of the previous few decades. They wanted movies that reflected the "actual" world they had experience with ...
posted by philip-random at 10:30 AM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Comedies are always an interesting reflection of their time period.

I realize we're talking about films, but I Think You Should Leave and Detroiters can take all my money anytime

and with all the backwards glancing and measuring of these entertainment artefacts, it's good to be mindful that we will all be in someone's rearview mirror one day
posted by elkevelvet at 10:45 AM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

The guitar smashing scene is enough to make me hate that movie. You don't smash someone else's instrument, ever, full stop, not even for yuks, unless you are the villain in a movie.

They are the villains, they are just slightly less villainous than the other villains.

What we seem to have coming out over the last few years is "almost no comedies," which probably reflects these times pretty well.

I'd say 'geared for children' or focusing on silly violence (Cocaine Bear) or silly situations (Strays, Champions) rather than 'none'.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:52 AM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

I was going to recommend Cocaine Bear. Hard to think of it as comedy at times ... except I did find myself laughing a fair bit. And what the hell was it if not a comedy? I did like its rather compulsive (and sometimes savage) unpredictability.

and yeah absolutely a children's movie even if is rated as a pretty solid R (Drug Content|Bloody Violence and Gore|Language Throughout). By which I mean, I would have LOVED that movie when I was eleven or twelve.
posted by philip-random at 11:03 AM on August 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

Not sure how we keep analyzing these political trends, and pop cultural touchstones, without noting that the major ideological strain that holds seemingly disconnected decades of cultural change together (and which continues to be a pipeline to the extreme right) is misogyny.

Animal House may be a thrilling portrayal of partying and anti-establishment behavior, but it depicted no progress in the lives of the women (barely shown), who are treated as inscrutable, kill-funs, or sex objects.

I, mean, who cares, misogyny is as normal and ubiquitous as asphalt in this country, but it feels like we're actively trying not to notice it at this point -- even when we know that mass shooters are almost all domestic abusers, even as we know that extreme right influencers are radicalizing young boys and men by appealing to their desire for power over others and offering up those easy cultural marks: people of color and women. It frequently feels like cis (and even some trans) men, however "progressive," are a bad day, hair's breadth from spouting traditionalists nonsense about "women's place" (and utility).

Meanwhile bodily autonomy is a right we offer corpses but not living, breathing people with wombs.

Sorry to get all heavy, but I guess I'm tired and feeling the raw edge of an old broken hope: that things would be better now. What I'm saying is, that, to some, it's no surprise that a film like Animal House ushered in an era of conservatism. Look at the women.
posted by whimsicalnymph at 11:27 AM on August 16, 2023 [27 favorites]

Animal House may be a thrilling portrayal of partying and anti-establishment behavior, but it depicted no progress in the lives of the women (barely shown), who are treated as inscrutable, kill-funs, or sex objects.

It's also interesting, to bring in the comparison to PCU a bit upthread, to note how Animal House treats women (barely, as you note) and how PCU takes it several steps further into outright hostility and mockery. They've also set themselves up nicely and future-proofed all of those jokes by framing it as "satire" and "just jokes" about "extremes," etc. etc. etc. etc. I'm so tired of this discourse it's just so exhausting to want to see women portrayed as equal human people who shouldn't expect to get assaulted if we let our guards down for one second. Not even to mention anyone who isn't white or cishet.

All of these movies (including in the recent the Apatow era) reinforce the primacy of men doing whatever they want--at the expense of the dignity of those around them--and how, if you have a problem with it, you just can't take a joke. It's a real net negative for the culture and seems to have turned us into a bunch of jerks, collectively.
posted by knotty knots at 12:23 PM on August 16, 2023 [6 favorites]

Confession: I've never actually seen the entire movie.
posted by mike3k at 12:31 PM on August 16, 2023

I was in college the later 00s and very early 10s and in the decade from that time to the pandemic there was a stream of frat scandals typically about hazing and kids drinking themselves to death or getting very drunk and fatally injuring themselves while the rest of the frat continued partying around them.

I remember seeing articles mid-decade saying that by the late 70s frats were well on the way to fading out due to being out of style as a thing for and by the older/parents' generation and changes in how young people wanted to live and socialize but then two things happened:

The first was "Animal House" was released in the late 70s and it made frats look cool and like a lot of fun which totally rejuvenated them and reinvented their culture to be all about partying and debauchery.

The second was in the early 80s the drinking age was raised to 21 which created a demand from 18-20 year olds for proximity to 21 year old seniors who could supply them with alcohol and frats fulfill that.

Here's an example article from 2019.
posted by Blue Tsunami at 4:29 PM on August 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

We had a frat in my town that was worse than the one in the movie. My uncle was the president and was reputed to have slept with over 200 women. When I was in high school, my friends and I drank there often. One night, I picked a fight with someone I shouldn't have and the guy knocked me out and dragged me across the street by my hair, while taunting my friends. This was the kind of place where they'd play Ozzy's Crazy Train and everyone would two-step to it because they two-stepped to everything. Also, one time a guy murdered another guy by shooting him in the head.

You know, good old-fashioned American fun.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 7:19 PM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

I graduated from high school in 1985 and my takeaway from having seen the (sanitized for TV) version of Animal House in the day was this: I knew enough in 1984, when I was applying to universities, about frats to be terrified of them. There were a crapload of stories about "training", which was basically gang-raping semiconscious drugged women one at a time with your frat brothers, in the news back in the day. I opted for the rare US school with no Greek system and my fear of being raped by frat dudes was a piece of that.

Was Animal House responsible? Surely not, but it was part of the culture that made that shit aspirational for some dudes.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 7:51 PM on August 16, 2023 [7 favorites]

Didn’t the conventionally handsome guy with the overrevved libido and who held up a zucchini to Dean Wormer's wife (whom he later seduced, of course) in the grocery store and said 'Mine's bigger' become a Beverly Hills gynecologist, according to the epilogue?

That one certainly lands differently these days, but it doesn’t seem any less true as a reading of his character.
posted by jamjam at 10:56 PM on August 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

As for the article, I thought PCU had a way more conservative leaning tone in retrospect than Animal House did.
- I liked PCU when it was first released, but reviewing it in my increasingly foggy memory, it seems quite mean-spirited.

Niedermeyer’s death is mentioned in the Landis-directed, Vietnam-set segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie released a couple of years later.
- And somewhere in there he had time to teach high school and father a son who was no longer going to take it.
posted by JohnFromGR at 3:02 AM on August 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

Doug Kenney was one of the writers, and a founder of National Lampoon. There is an interesting film about him, including the development of Animal House, that explains the background and ethos - A Futile and Stupid Gesture.
posted by goo at 5:18 AM on August 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

Doug Kenney's wiki bio sums up a lot.

Kenney was one of the originating forces of what became known during the 1970s as the "new wave" of comedy: a dark, irreverent style of humor that Kenney used as the basis for the magazine. Kenney was editor-in-chief from 1970 to 1972, senior editor from 1973 to 1974 and editor from 1975 to 1976. Thomas Carney, writing in New Times, traced the history and style of the National Lampoon and the impact it had on comedy's new wave. "The National Lampoon," Carney wrote, "was the first full-blown appearance of non-Jewish humor in years -- not anti-Semitic, just non-Jewish. Its roots were W.A.S.P. and Irish Catholic, with a weird strain of Canadian detachment. . . . This was not Jewish street-smart humor as a defense mechanism; this was slash-and-burn stuff that alternated in pitch but moved very much on the offensive. It was always disrespect everything, mostly yourself, a sort of reverse deism."[5]

Kenney died on August 27, 1980, aged 33, after falling from a 35-foot cliff called the Hanapepe Valley Lookout. Police found his car the following day. His death was classified as accidental by Kauai police.[6] However some friends believed he had committed suicide, causing Harold Ramis to joke: “He probably fell while he was looking for a place to jump”.[7]

Found in Kenney's hotel room were notes for projects he had been planning, jokes, and an outline for a new movie. A gag line that he had left was also found: "These last few days are among the happiest I've ever ignored."[3] The National Lampoon published a tribute to him by Matty Simmons, and a cartoon showing a sign next to the edge of a cliff with the inscription, "Doug Kenney Slipped Here."[8]
posted by Brian B. at 6:12 AM on August 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

causing Harold Ramis to joke: “He probably fell while he was looking for a place to jump”

goddamn that is an absolutely savory roast
posted by FatherDagon at 10:27 AM on August 17, 2023 [10 favorites]

goo: Doug Kenney was one of the writers, and a founder of National Lampoon. There is an interesting film about him, including the development of Animal House, that explains the background and ethos - A Futile and Stupid Gesture.

What startled me about the film was Martin Mull as the narrator, playing a Doug Kinney at an age he never reached in real life, as a participant in his funeral scene. Definitely felt like a David Wain move as director.
posted by dr_dank at 12:25 PM on August 17, 2023

there's a continuous through-line of libertarian individualism (people pursuing their individual desires at the expense of the common good) that runs straight through the hippies of the 60s to the Me Decade of the 70s to the Gordon Gekko 80s.

Indeed, I’m often thought that Altman’s M*A*S*H (made at the tail end of the ‘60s counterculture era, and generally viewed as rooted in that sensibility) in many ways provides the template for the Animal House/Porky’s/Caddyshack/Revenge of the Nerds style “bro” comedy.
posted by non canadian guy at 2:54 AM on August 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

M*A*S*H was among the first wave of late night revival movies, so definitely a film that people were letting wash over them. Slackdom was a relatively new thing in the 70's, the tail end of a puritanical productivity culture that people were associating with follies like Vietnam, the film's context (though set during the Korean war). This was before grifters converted the financial markets to make a killing on rampant consumer lending.
posted by Brian B. at 9:23 AM on August 19, 2023

My Dad bought me this film on LaserDisc at 14 so BULLSEYE

The dream of the counterculture actually changing our social hellhole dystopia had been destroyed. Happiness and fulfilment (yes selfish goals, but so what?) were still possible, but would not be found going back to 50's style rat-race conformity.

Sex and Drugs and Rock 'n Roll (NOT folk NOT Disco) and knee-jerk reacting against all other Square authorities, reigned supreme as the path forward.

Animal House was PUNK AF
posted by goinWhereTheClimateSuitsMyClothes at 5:18 PM on August 19, 2023 [1 favorite]