It’s almost surprising nobody opened an Animal House Saloon until now.
Once the establishment at 11th Avenue and Mill Street opens, Eugene will finally have the perfect tribute to a movie that has defined the town’s culture for nearly four decades – and given the film’s classic status, it seems likely the saloon will never run out of customers.
But Animal House, like most comedy films, is very much of its time. As a movie about the ’60s made in the ’70s, it reflects a world with different values than those of the millennium we live in now.
Much of the film’s humor comes from its glorification of the sexual harassment of women. And in an environment in which at least one in five women is sexually assaulted during their time in college–10 percent of women at UO report being raped, and the school is still recovering from last year’s sexual assault scandal involving the basketball team–it’s likely the University of Oregon and the town of Eugene will want to shake off this baggage in the future.
I attended a Ducks After Dark screening of Animal House, having not seen the movie in several years, and found reception to the film lukewarm. There were few laughs. Several people walked out during the scene in which a frat member contemplates raping his unconscious date— this I anticipated.
But as I watched more closely, I noticed humor pertaining to sexual assault is crucial to the film.
A man tricks a grieving woman into believing he is her deceased roommate’s date in order to hook up. A voyeurism sequence peaks with John Belushi looking triumphantly at the camera, breaking the fourth wall and communicating to the (assumed male) viewer: “Wouldn’t you love to be doing this?” Perhaps most importantly, the main reason the (opposing) Omegas want the (protagonist) Deltas kicked off campus is for their “acts of perversion” — presumably such as these.
It would not surprise me if future audiences sympathized more with the Omegas. It’s worth recalling the conversation between Omega president Marmalard and his girlfriend, in which he expresses his disdain of the Deltas’ molestation of women. Seeing as it’s the only conversation in the film between a man and a woman that isn’t a post-coital joke or a lead-up to sex, it makes Marmalard look pretty good. Still, she leaves the conversation because he’s not trying to engage her sexually.
At the end of the movie, we see her driving off into the sunset with Belushi.
It is common for classic films to survive changes in cultural values. Audiences are willing to overlook Mickey Rooney’s yellowface in Breakfast at Tiffany‘s or the faceless black workers in Dumbo. But in neither of these films is racism key to its appeal or humor.
Animal House, on the other hand, thrives on its treatment of women as a commodity for the Deltas to use, abuse and steal from their rivals. And it is for this reason that Animal House‘s lifespan will not be as long as the owners of the Animal House Saloon perhaps hope it will be.