Has "National Lampoon's Animal House" ever really been forgotten? I doubt it. When it was released in 1978, it struck like a lightening bolt. There had never been anything quite like it, and though many have tried, there has never been anything quite like it since. Is it one of the funniest movies ever? Debatable, but it is impossible to deny the film's worth, both in and of itself, and as a cultural influence.
Who doesn't know the plot? Who needs to? "Animal House" isn't about plot, it's about character, set-up and punchline. It is all one good, well-crafted joke, and like all good jokes it uses broad characterizations to stand in for real people. The characters aren't believable, but they don't need to be. There is the party animal, the ladies' man, the stuffy dean of students, etc. The characters are written as cardboard cutouts and it's up to the actors to make them work.
In many films of this kind, that's what goes wrong. But not here. The actors were mostly unknowns, with the exception of a few older greats like John Vernon and Donald Sutherland, but they filled out the characters so well as to turn these cutouts into near brilliant comic caricatures. It says a lot that you can't help thinking of Tim Matheson without thinking of the egotistical, sex-obsessed grifter "Otter" (this is assuming you ever spend time thinking of Tim Matheson, which would be very sad state of affairs).
And then of course there is John Belushi. As "Bluto" Blutarsky, he is a force of nature unto himself. He is wild, destructive, drunk, hedonistic, gluttonous and vulgar, yet never unlikable. It is easy to say there has never been a character quite like him in the history of cinema. Belushi embodies Bluto so well that it's possible to believe a bottle of Jack Daniel's you see him consume was not just a prop.
Another area where the film excels is in the soundtrack, which is full of the soul, pop and rock that filled the airwaves of the early 1960s. And the Kingsmen's version of "Louie, Louie" -- the anthem of beer-soaked partygoers -- is used in all its three-chord glory. It's also an interesting bit of trivia that blues artist Robert Cray makes an unaccredited appearance as a member of soul band Otis Day and the Knights.
One of the major problems with comedies is they have a tendency to become dated pretty quickly, with only the best being worth remembering. "Animal House" avoids this pitfall by taking place in the past, in this case circa 1962. But the film would probably survive the advance of age, anyway. Unlike many comedies today, the film does not depend on references to modern pop culture or on satire of current trends. Instead the humor has an almost timeless feel to it, capturing a few aspects of American college life that never seem to really change. College students drink, party, worry about dates, worry about tests and worry about whether or not the person they spent the night with last night really was 18.
The film takes these things and finds the humor in them. It's not funny when a man crushes a beer can against his head, it's funny that other people find it funny. A scene where a group of students experiment with pot for the first time isn't funny because the students act absurdly while stoned, but because they act generally like anyone would act. The film exaggerates college life, but it exaggerates in the same way your memory exaggerates. You laugh because deep down inside this is what you see college as being like.
Ryan Nyburg is a freelance reporter
for the Emerald.
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