A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

PRIMITIVE CULTURES:  I think it's impossible to revisit Animal House in 2013 and not find it deeply problematic, as The Dissolve's writers did last week. It's one group of overprivileged WASP assholes against the other, with the racists, peeping toms, would-be rapists, and vandals of Delta House labeled the heroes and the student government/ROTC crowd the villains, but, spoiler!, nothing they do in college actually matters, because white male privilege ensures that they can still be gynecologists, White House aides, and United States Senators no matter what happened in college. Really, is this a movie I'm going to encourage my daughters to watch?  Keith Phipps:

I feel like talking about this movie has made me sound a bit like an Omega House snob, too uptight to appreciate the outrageous antics of the liberated Delta slobs. Sigh. Sorry. This won’t change things, but I’d like to talk about some of the film’s attitudes toward women and minorities. When we finished watching it in The Dissolve screening room a couple of weeks ago, Scott said, “There are gags in that movie you would not see today.” That list probably starts with the cartoon devil trying to get one of the protagonists to rape his passed-out date, who is later revealed to be 13 years old. And it definitely includes the scene in which a group of black nightclub-goers menace a table of white college kids, because apparently black people are just naturally threatening. And it almost certainly includes one of the movie’s first gags, in which the movie’s dorky freshman heroes get shuffled off to sit next to three minority characters and a guy in a wheelchair. I get that there’s an extra layer to those moments. The nightclub gag is also about the cluelessness of privileged white kids. But the film has a lack of empathy that I find disturbing. It’s very much a film told from the perspective of its privileged, white, male characters, and it treats everyone else as unknowable outsiders. It feels like the work of Omegas who only think they’re Deltas.

(As one of the commenters notes, "Having Pinto and Flounder shunted over to the corner with the minorities and misfits when they rush Omega House at the beginning is clearly meant to show what a priggish, exclusionary bunch the Omegas are - but none of the minorities and misfits get into Delta, either, do they?")