Tuesday, December 3, 2013

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?")

15 comments:

  1. Genevieve10:51 AM

    I will cease feeling like a prude for never wanting to watch this movie - I've tried a few times and couldn't stand it. (This doesn't mean other people are wrong who find it funny and have fond memories of it, just that it's nice to have a little validation for being someone who never liked it when everyone said it was a comic masterpiece.)

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  2. Jordan11:51 AM

    How do you (or anyone else with young kids) deal with pre-Lasseter Disney movies? Every kid watches them, but there's a long line of misogyny and racism that runs from "they're young, it'll go over their heads" to "I'm physically uncomfortable sitting here watching this"?

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  3. carried1:26 PM

    I totally agree with this. And I went to Dartmouth (which is where the writers went), and I always want to emphasize that MY Dartmouth experience was NOTHING LIKE THIS.

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  4. Becca1:34 PM

    This is only tangentially related: I recently read "Outrageous Conduct" as research for the show I'm currently working on. It tells the story of the Twilight Zone helicopter crash court case. It is also, in its own way, a searing indictment of John Landis', well, outrageous conduct. I've never seen Animal House, but I don't think I'll ever be able to, now.

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  5. Adam B.1:46 PM

    During a press conference in New York to promote “Coming to America,” Mr. Murphy was asked if he would ever work with [director John] Landis again. Without hesitation, he said: “Vic Morrow has a better chance of working with Landis than I do.”

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  6. Adam B.2:15 PM

    It's not necessarily misogyny as much as it is bad role models -- princesses who are beautiful objects saved by men, rather than heroines saving themselves. The answer is ... focus on the better movies, which which the marketing is more everpresent anyway.

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  7. Genevieve3:33 PM

    For things like "Peter Pan" where it's unmistakable, I discussed it with the kiddo when we came to those scenes. For subtler things like the bad role models, I think I brought it up after the movie - didn't feel the need to interrupt the movie for it, but mentioned it. At age 4, the kiddo one day said it wasn't fair that all the movies and books only had boys doing the rescuing, so I started looking for books/movies/TV where girls rescued someone (or at least were independent), which he liked. The Paper Bag Princess, Petronella, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Mulan, the Brandy version of Cinderella (where she was about to leave her stepmother's house for good when the prince found her), etc.

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  8. Genevieve3:34 PM

    Holy cow.

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  9. Adam B.4:06 PM

    I don't believe my girls have ever seen Peter Pan -- "What Makes the Red Man Red?" is indefensible.

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  10. Adam C.4:11 PM

    I read "Outrageous Conduct" a while back too. There's no way to come away from that book, which I believe came out around 1988, and then look at Landis's career from that point forward (roughly after the release of Coming to America) and wonder what the hell happened to this guy -- you can pretty well guess that studio execs must have decided he was poison. That said, Murphy wound up working with him again just 6 years after CtA, in Beverly Hills Cop III.

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  11. Becca4:29 PM

    Wow. And yet Landis kept on working. If you look at his imdb page, he appears to only have taken the time for the trial. There were clearly people who were still eager to work with him.

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  12. Genevieve4:45 PM

    I had forgotten about it until we got to that point in the movie. Think I fast forwarded and explained why.

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  13. Jordan6:52 PM

    That's actually what caused me to pose the question.

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  14. Adam C.9:11 AM

    Kept on working after a fashion, but look again at that IMDb page: after the book came out in 1988 the prestige of his feature assignments dropped off dramatically into dreck and dreck sequels. He's also done some episodic TV, mostly on shows he was also producing.

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  15. It's only a movie, and an entertaining one at that. Lighten up Francis

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