Animal House. Then and Now.

I keep thinking about it.

The movie, that is.

I hate the movie.

But most regard it as some sort of odd classic.

I saw Animal House in its original theater run.  According to IMDB it was released in 1978, so I must have seen it in 78 or 79.  I recall that it was on a Saturday and I didn't have any intent on going to see a movie, but two friends of mind came over to the house and announced they were going to the movies and asked if I wanted to go along.  I'd almost always ask what a person was going to see, but oddly I don't think I did, and when I did ask, I'd never heard of the film and had no idea what it was about.

Now,  my friends thought it was funny but I didn't. I still don't.  I was bothered by its contents which portrayed a bunch of loutish behavior as really funny.

Among the behavior portrayed in the film, which is set in the 1960s*, is a lot of really crud behavior towards women, all of which is portrayed in the "boys will be boys" fashion.  And one of those things is a side plot involving a young member of the fraternity who makes a date with a girl that turns out to be underage, with that girl getting drunk at a party.  The male protagonist does not molest her, but the clear theme of it is that he could and but for her age that would be the goal, and by molest I'm being polite.  He returns her to her house in a shopping cart, with her clothes so disheveled it will be impossible for her parents not to assume the worst.

Animal House had a big impact on the juvenile culture of the time.  The movie portrays a toga party, i.e., a party where the members of the frat house wear togas, and that soon became very common among young college age people, particularly members of fraternities.  One of my friends who saw that movie with me that Saturday afternoon joined a fraternity a couple of years later and I can recall it having toga parties.  No, I didn't go, I just recall hearing about them.  Attendees were members of the fraternity and those young women invited from sororities.  They all wore togas.  That one was memorable, in attendees recollections, as one of the female attendees became heavily inebriated and togas being what they are, or aren't I guess, kept experiencing her boobs falling out of her toga to the viewing pleasure, or something of the male attendees.

So, why do I bring this up?

Well, because the entire Kavanaugh hearing thing keeps bringing this to mind as what I'm hearing on the news sounds so much like the behavior portrayed in that hideous film which was in fact adopted as admirable or amusing by the generation, or rather mostly the male members of that generation, as fun okay hi-jinks.  It's harder yet not to recall that the movie is actually "National Lampoon's Animal House" which associated it, properly, with the publication the "National Lampoon", which was more properly known as the Harvard Lampoon, as it was, and perhaps still is, a Harvard student publication.

The Harvard Lampoon is famous for its crude humor.  Unfortunately, because those who write for the Lampoon are to comedy writing what writers for Law Reviews are to judicial clerkship's, they've been massively influential in Hollywood, particularly in television writing.  If you ever wonder why almost every sitcom seems to have been written by the same writers, its because a high percentage of them come out of the Lampoon.  Moreover, because of their very narrow education, they're noted for being unable to understand any other kind of humor.  Closed sets, are closed, and admit in very little light.

Anyhow, I note all of this now as there it sits, Animal House, a film that still shines in the public memory like the polished horse apple it is.  And all while we're debating what occurred and why to young women in the 80s, and while those in the media and entertainment industry join a "Me Too" movement.

Now, I don't know what happened back then to the people involved in the public spotlight. But I do wonder how people can wonder why these sorts of things happened when they were celebrated as comedy not all that long ago.  They aren't funny now, but then they weren't funny then either.  But we let it happen then, and pretending we're outraged now sort of misses a deeper point, unfortunately.

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*The  movie is set, sort of, in the early 1960s, although that's only vaguely clear.  Exactly why it's set about twenty or so years prior to it being released isn't clear, other than that the "college atmosphere" seemed to be somewhat more properly defined, perhaps, in the pre Vietnam  War era, with the Vietnam War era being a very recent memory at that time.  College in the Vietnam War era wouldn't have seemed all that funny and a group of alcohol abusing male louts taking advantage of drunk teenage girls not as amusing or laudable.