Whenever I am down in the LA area, as I am today, my mind runs to ordering French fries “animal style” from In-n-Out burgers. (IYKYK.) But today, opening up the Washington Post, I discover the origins of a possible new sect of conservatism: Animal-House conservatives, who naturally do things “animal-style.”
Yes, the Post really does suggest that the 1978 comedy blockbuster Animal House bears some responsibility for the Reagan era coming to pass. The movie, quite simply in the eyes of the Post, “changed everything.” You think I’m kidding? The author offers a disclaimer:
I’m not saying that “Animal House” led directly to the election of Ronald Reagan two years later. But I am saying the movie empowered a generation of 20-somethings to aspire to a new hedonism — call it, at best, enlightened selfishness — that spilled over into the political sphere.
But after this throat-clearing, he takes most of it back:
Although “Animal House” was a professedly anarchic comedy that identified with the freaks, the misfits and anyone wanting to fight for their right to party, the movie ironically helped crystallize a new strain of cultural and political conservatism that started on campuses and ran all the way up to the National Mall and Wall Street. . .
In other words, “Animal House” is where the 1960s finally and decisively turned into the 1980s — the 1970s being understood as a transition period highlighted by double-knit and “Kung Fu Fighting.” With “Animal House,” we crossed the line from hippies to yuppies, from “all you need is love” to “greed is good.” It seems crazy to say it, but the film’s Deltas — a fraternity of proud, self-defined losers — became role models for a generation obsessed with winning.
At this point I expected the author to argue that Animal House, with its emphasis on”winning,” was responsible for Donald Trump, too.
Not everything in the article is ridiculous, though it misses a parallel to our current moment:
By 1978, the progressive liberalism that had sustained the counterculture from before the civil rights era to the fall of Richard M. Nixon had started to feel like oppressive doctrine. Still, if you were young and in college, you had to subscribe to it, didn’t you?
“Animal House” said, no, man, you didn’t. You didn’t have to mean it at all. The movie fed into and articulated a growing frustration with an overbearing political correctness, the fear that you couldn’t say what you wanted to without stepping on someone’s toes. Which, of course, made a lot of people want to step on someone’s — anyone’s — toes. The left, some felt, had been guilting us for years that we should always be better than ourselves, that we should join forces to help those less fortunate. But what was wrong with us? And, really, who cared about them?
Given that our colleges are awash in “oppressive [leftist] doctrines,” isn’t it then time for a sequel—Animal House II? I hope some striking screenwriter might be at work on the script right now. Today’s Animal-Style campus conservatives have dozens of Dean Wormers to torment. Feel free to post script ideas in the comment thread. I think the Delta house of our time should turn up at a Black Lives Matter rally and dress up as mid-transition women’s soccer players.
UPDATE—All this talk of French fries animal-style made me hungry:
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