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By Chris Snellgrove
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You know the most insidious thing about Mad Men? The show goes to painstaking depths to portray all of the greed and cynicism at the heart of commercial advertising. Nonetheless, when Don Draper gives a big speech to clients, you still get caught in the honeyed trap of his words. As with propaganda, nobody is immune to marketing, and Jon Hamm’s relentless sloganeering takes on a magic life of its own. My personal favorite moment is when he’s pitching to Kodak and says that, “In Greek, nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.”
In our world of endless reboots, revivals, and retro Funko Pops, how could your own nostalgia be painful? Simple: when it reminds you of something you’ve lost. This was all I could think about when watching Animal House on Netflix. As an R-rated, snobs vs. slobs boner comedy, it’s quite literally the kind of movie that Hollywood doesn’t make anymore. That’s not the part that hurts, though. No, the real nostalgic sting comes from the fact that these types of students (the slobs and the snobs) don’t really exist anymore. We’ve sanded down education even as students sanded down their brains, creating campuses as devoid of passion as they are of original thought.
Embracing The Chaos
In retrospect, the beauty of Animal House is that it doesn’t really have a plot. Sure, we are nominally following the exploits of two college freshmen (Larry Kroger and Kent Dorfman) as they pledge to a raucous fraternity house. Really, though, the story is just an excuse to revel in frat bros behaving badly, whether that’s throwing toga parties, starting food fights, or even creeping on sorority sisters as they undress. Predictably, our frat heroes are railroaded by snooty students and an angry dean who wants the college to be prim and proper. Quite unpredictablyour protagonists crash a college parade, effectively reasserting that chaos will always reign over order.
It’s a very unconventional story that represents a kind of thesis statement from director John Landis. Just as National Lampoon had taken the piss out of the college experience, Landis wanted to usher in a new kind of movie: the raunchy, college-centric comedy. It worked fabulously, with Animal House serving as a creative touchstone for literally decades of “boys behaving badly” films. While the film is as funny as it ever was, it can be a little painful to watch because this world no longer exists. The primary reason for this is that modern college students lack the joy of living of this film’s heroes and its villains.
A New Kind Of Student
When people talk about Animal House reflecting a forgotten time, they are usually talking about its portrayal of college as a place of endless partying and debauchery. The success of the movie initially led to a revival of fraternity life, with real-life students trying to emulate the raunchy antics they had seen onscreen, complete with binge-drinking and hazing. In turn, university administrators spent countless years tightening their own rules and doing their best to kill campus party culture before it could take hold. While all of that is a factor, the real reason that Animal House is a product of the past is that modern students’ view of college has completely changed for the worse.
Animal House was made back when college was considered a time of personal growth. Not just through the traditional liberal arts education (which is the reason you learn at least a little about so much outside your major), but through the experience itself. In its own demented way, that is something the movie is celebrating: that even when our audience surrogate characters are struggling academically, they are forming friendships, finding love, and generally becoming fully-formed young men. Crashing the parade is the most extreme example of this: these two went from weak-willed yes men to dudes ready and willing to defy authority in the loudest and most hilarious way.
Giving In To Temptation
Unfortunately, modern students see college as nothing more than a jumped-up trade school. They aren’t here to broaden their horizons; they’re here to get a piece of paper required for whatever job they want. It’s education by algorithm, really: they are chasing the careers likeliest to pay well by getting the degrees likeliest to land those careers. Along the way, most will just lean on AI to jump through all those pesky educational hoops. Making friends and joining organizations in meat space mean nothing to the modern generation of students. When they aren’t asking ChatGPT to invent a few more fake citations, these students are just trading brainrot memes on their favorite Discord servers.
Obviously, these students are a product of their environment. The pandemic made them embrace the internet as their only social outlet, and the easy availability of generative AI made them intellectually lazy. Meanwhile, poor job forecasts made the whole prospect of a college education feel like a gamble. Why spend four years mastering skills in an industry that will be dead in five years? Accordingly, these students are trapped in a kind of half-life, with one foot in the internet and the other in the increasingly uncertain real world. Is it any wonder, then, that they don’t have any real passion for classroom lectures, campus parties, or even partying?
The Party’s Over
All of this is why I get a bit sad watching Animal House. Most modern students will never have the kinds of friendships portrayed in this movie, and they most certainly won’t have the same R-rated campus shenanigans of the titular “animal house” fraternity. They won’t even have the same experience as the uptight snobs trying to shut the party frat down. All of that would require a genuine passion and intellectual curiosity that is completely absent from a generation raised by iPads and planning marriages to their AI girlfriends. It’s no longer slobs vs. snobs, it’s just screens vs. everybody else. And trust me, the screens are winning.
So, if the nostalgia is a little too painful, you might want to sit this one out. Otherwise, you can currently stream Animal House on Netflix. The antics of performers like John Belushi are just as funny as you remember, and there’s something joyful about returning to the age of the flamboyant R-rated college comedy. Plus, the film is filled with lines you’re likely to be quoting for the next week. Just don’t try any of those jokes on the Zoomers in your life; they won’t laugh, but they will make you an endless punchline over in the group chat!
