National Lampoon's Animal House

For the month of May, I thought I would look at some of the classics from the “National Lampoon” franchise. Let’s start off with the 1978 classic, “National Lampoon’s Animal House.”

“What we need right now,” Otter tells his fraternity brothers,” is a stupid, futile gesture on someone’s part.” And no fraternity on campus – on any campus – is better qualified to give such a gesture than the Deltas. Roger Ebert noted in his review, “They have the title role in "National Lampoon's Animal House," which remembers all the way back to 1962, when college was simpler, beer was cheaper, and girls were harder to seduce.”

The movie is vulgar, raunchy, rude, and occasionally scatological. Ebert said, “It is also the funniest comedy since Mel Brooks made "The Producers" (1968). "Animal House" is funny for some of the same reasons the National Lampoon is funny (and Second City and "Saturday Night Live" are funny): Because it finds some kind of precarious balance between insanity and accuracy, between cheerfully wretched excess and an ability to reproduce the most revealing nuances of human behavior.” On one hand there has never been a campus like this movie’s Faber University, which was apparently founded by the lead pencil tycoon and has as its motto “Knowledge is Good.” Ebert said, “In another sense, Faber University is a microcosm of ... I was going to say our society, but why get serious?” Let someone else discuss the symbolism of Bluto’s ability to flatten a better can against his forehead.

Obviously, Bluto is the savage of the Deltas. He’s played by the late John Belushi, and the performance is all the more remarkable because Bluto has barely any dialogue. He isn’t a talker, he’s a show. His best scenes are played in silence (for instance, when he profanely climbs a ladder to peep at a sorority pillow fight).

Ebert said, “Bluto and his brothers are engaged in a holding action against civilization.” They are in favor of beer, women, song, motorcycles, Playboy babes, and making inappropriate sounds. They are against studying, serious thought, the Dean, the regulations governing fraternities, and, at the top of the list, the disgusting behavior of the Omegas – a house so respectable it has even given an ROTC commander to the world.

The movie was written by National Lampoon contributors (including Harold Ramis, who was in Second City at the same time Belushi was), and was directed by John Landis. It’s like an ending around Hollywood’s traditional look of comedy. It’s radical, messy, and filled with energy. It offends us. Part of the movie’s impact comes from its simple level of insane energy: When beer kegs and Hell’s Angels break through the windows of the Delta House, the anarchy is contagious. However, the movie’s better made (and better acted) than we might at first see. It takes skill to make this sort of comic idea, and the movie’s filled with characters that are designed a little more grippingly than they had to be, and acted with awareness.

For example: Tim Matheson, as Otter, the ladies’ man, wins a kind of grace in his obsession. Ebert noted, “John Vernon, as the Dean of Students, has a blue-eyed, rulebook hatefulness that's inspired. Verna Bloom, as his dipsomaniacal wife, has just the right balance of cynicism and desperation. Donald Sutherland, a paranoic early sixties pothead, nods solemnly at sophomoric truisms and admits he's as bored by Milton as everyone else.”

Moving through everything is Bluto, almost a natural force: He desires, he thirsts, he eats cafeterias full of food, and he pours an entire fifth of Jack Daniel’s into his mouth, belches, and observes, “Thanks. I needed that.” Ebert reiterates, “He has, as I suggested, little dialogue.” However, it is telling. When the Delta House is kicked off campus and the Deltas are expelled, he makes, in a moment of silence, a philosophical thought: “Seven years down the drain.” Obviously, the problem requires a stupid, useless gesture on someone’s part.

I recently saw this on Netflix while exercising, and I cannot believe what I have been missing out on. If you haven’t seen this, you should definitely check this one out. This is one of the funniest movies ever made. I wouldn’t be surprised if “Monsters University” took a lot of inspiration from this movie. Because there are a lot of similarities between the two films. Either way, check it out because you will have a great time laughing at this classic comedy.

Stay tuned next week when I look at another classic in “National Lampoon’s Month.” I apologize for posting this really late as I was really tired from not sleeping much last night and from work today.