MAGA Animal House
A 1978 comedy classic helps us understand the election results, including the fulminating rage of feminist celebrities.
by LOU AGUILAR.1/2
December 1, 2024, 10:20 PM
A 1978 comedy classic helps us understand the election results, including the fulminating rage of feminist celebrities.
“We know folly and evil when we see it,” X-posted the great American novelist Walter Kirn last week. “That is why literature and drama speak across time and across cultures.” Cinema certainly qualifies. And comic cinema may have the longest, deepest reach of all. At least it used to before Hollywoke killed the genre and wounded the art form. And few films have been more prophetic of the Trump Effect than one of the best screen farces ever made, National Lampoon’s Animal House.
Last week, Nineties male fantasy Sharon Stone … insulted America during an interview in Italy.
The 1978 monster hit shook the still pliant liberal order of the era, and retarded feminist-centric “entertainment” for more than a decade — by being hilariously brilliant. A single scene of John Belushi’s Bluto on a ladder peering into a sorority house window had more cultural power than anything in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, An Unmarried Woman, Maude, One Day at a Time, or the then fully Alan Alda-nized MAS*H. Another bit, where fraternity pledge Tom Hulce is torn between a little devil and angel over performing sex on a passed-out date, would trigger a riot in academia and multimedia today. Even without the losing devil’s insult, “Homo!”
Thanks to a masterful sequence from director John Landis, the movie re-popularized college toga parties, at the time deemed passe sexist bacchanalia. For years later, the highlight of every party we young people of both sexes attended was the Isley Brothers’ Shout. During which we would imitate the film’s revelers, even doing the Twist down and up.
But what makes Animal House great art is how well it challenged the late-Seventies zeitgeist forming under an unmanly President, post-Vietnam depression, a sense of male impotence, leftist sermonizing, and national Malaise(about to get much worse with the Iran Hostage Crisis). To be fair, Star Wars had punctured the progressive bubble a year earlier by resurrecting male heroes and the clarity of good versus evil. But Animal House magnified the virtue of masculine defiance of an oppressive establishment with a sense of fun.
The movie’s intolerant Dean Wormer (a superlative John Vernon) and his lapdog orthodox fraternity engage in 20th Century lawfare (“double secret probation”) against the uninhibited Delta frat “deplorables.”And no screen sequence is more predictive or evocative of today’s corrupt Democratic persecution of MAGAthan the Deltas’ kangaroo expulsion trial.“I’ll tell you what’s fair and what’s not!” Wormer decrees. This provokes Trump-caliber mockery by Delta House’s Otter(an unforgettable Tim Matheson).
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’ll be brief,” Otter orates.
The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules, or took a few liberties with our female party guests … We did. But you can’t hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few sick, perverted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn’t we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn’t this an indictment of our education institutions in general? I put it to you, Greg. Isn’t this an indictment of our entire American society? (Cheers from the Deltas).Well, you can do what you want to us. But we’re not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America!
At which point all the Deltas march out humming the Star-Spangled Banner.It is this concept of masculine ridicule mixed with patriotism that drove the male-led destruction of leftist rule last month. Like the Deltas, men showed their contempt for repressive government and cultural authority telling them how they should behave and what to say or think.
https://spectator.org/maga-animal-house/1