Don't ask me why, but I've just spent half the summer viewing, then re-viewing, National Lampoon's Animal House, Revenge of the Nerds, Back to School, and a dozen other proudly low-brow comedies set on college campuses. And as if this weren't embarrassing enough, I've come to the conclusion--now that the numbness has worn off--that many of these movies aren't nearly so empty-headed as their video boxes would have you believe. For though their main objective may be to serve as the cinematic equivalent of a bacchanalian ritual, quite often (and sometimes, clearly despite themselves) these films are also beer-drenched celebrations of integrity--tributes to the triumph of an authentic and vibrant human spirit over oppressive, soul-deadening societal conventions.
True, campus comedies tend to portray the forces of conventionality in rather, well, conventional ways. Re-rent that rollicking progenitor of academic farces, 1932's Horse Feathers, and you'll see that the view of the university as a tradition-bound, stultifying place has been around a long time. In a scenario that could exist only in the Marx Brothers' universe, Huxley College has just appointed a new president, Professor Wagstaff (Groucho, of course), whose administrative policy is best summed up by the title of his signature song, "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It." Huxley's moribund, gray-bearded professors quickly become easy foils for Groucho's absurdist barbs, not to mention the slapstick ambushes of Chico and Harpo. Picture the famous anatomy class scene, where a pontificating prof, bedecked in cap and gown, drones on and on even as Chico and Harpo carry him out of the room, leaving Groucho to take up where he left off: "We then come to the bloodstream. The blood rushes from the head down to the feet, gets a look at those feet and rushes back to the head again. This is known as auction pinochle."
A few generations later, the movie professor's uniform may have changed, but the stuffy stereotype remains basically the same. Take the 1994 film I.Q., in which Stephen Fry, playing a bow-tied, tweed-jacketed physics professor, must compete with grease-stained garage mechanic Tim Robbins for the heart of grad student Meg Ryan. Little matter that at the onset Ryan is engaged to Fry, and even less that she happens to be Albert Einstein's niece (and, thus, you'd think, rather at home among academics). You know from the start that Fry doesn't stand a chance in this love triangle; after all, not only does he drive a snooty little British roadster, but he's cursed with a fondness for deerstalker caps. His effete British accent is merely the last nail in a well-sealed coffin.
Other movie professors tend to fare just as badly in matters of love. In 1986's Back to School, this scenario of doom reaches what must surely be its nadir, as business professor Paxton Whitehead fails to win the heart of English prof Sally Kellerman, even though his only rival is . . . Rodney Dangerfield. Ah, but surely it can't help that when Whitehead proposes marriage to Kellerman, he refers to it as a "merger." Meanwhile, Dangerfield, playing a self-made millionaire who enrolls in college in order to encourage his son not to drop out, is--in this movie, anyway--oddly sexy, in a leeringly absurdist, Groucho-like way. "Oh, what lovely girls," he murmurs, rubbing his hands before a crowd of cheerleaders. "How would you like a life of luxury and deceit?"
The fact that college movies tend to portray teachers as erudite buffoons is no surprise. More remarkable are the positive and even complex professorial portraits that crop up here and again in campus comedies. In Back to School, for instance, Sally Kellerman's English professor is allowed to be not only smart, but sexy too. Likewise, the professor Donald Sutherland plays in 1978's Animal House is a deadpan-cool, pot-smoking aspiring novelist who gets to have a sexual liaison with undergrad Karen Allen. That both these professors teach English is surely not accidental--it seems that English teachers are the only remaining brand of academics allowed to be seen as hip, no doubt because so many young screenwriters feel a certain kinship and indebtedness to their own English profs, whose career path they surely have followed themselves if they had not lucked out!
In a way, of course, it's silly to talk about portraits of teachers in campus comedies, because so little of what happens on screen takes place in a classroom. Most of these films focus on what we might as well call extracurricular activities--frat parties, football games, hazing rituals, late-night campus pranks. Watching these movies is enough to make you think not only that college is supposed to be one long, drunken weekend, but that you yourself must have attended the wrong school. The quintessential example--and, more or less, the grandfather of the whole frat-movie genre--is, of course, Animal House. Basically an epic tale of one fraternity's escalating adventures in depravity, it tips its lascivious hand from its opening scene, in which a female mannequin crashes from a frat-house window and lands at the feet of two bewildered young pledges. From then on, it's nothing but an onslaught of food fights, car crashes, drunken brawls, sexual conquests, and toga parties--and that's just the trailer...
Still, even the makers of Animal House felt the need to establish some kind of dramatic suspense beyond the issue of which fraternity brother would develop cirrhosis first. Enter the evil administrator, who would become a staple of college cinema for decades to come. In Animal House he's given the aptly loathsome title of "Dean Wormer," and his Melvillian quest is to get the delinquent Delta Tau Chi fraternity expelled from campus. One would think this would be fairly easy work--seeing as the Deltas have a collective grade point average of 0.3--but it takes Dean Wormer (John Vernon) a hell of a lot of time and demoniacal planning to do it, and even then the Deltas have the last laugh.
Sometimes college movie administrators aren't so much evil as ineffectual. In 1984's Revenge of the Nerds, for instance, administrative authority is embodied in the faculty representative for the Fraternity Council, a weak-willed little man (a nerd himself) too intimidated by the college's football coach to stick up for the frat that the titular Nerds have founded. When the football team accidentally burns down its own living quarters, for example, the faculty rep is persuaded to allow them to take over the Nerds' dorm, forcing the Nerds to relocate to a makeshift Hooverville--a cramped line-up of cots and folding chairs--in the school gym.
But by far the most common view of administrators in college comedies is as venal capitalists concerned only with raising money for the school. Back to School's affable--and wonderfully titled--Dean Martin (Ned Beatty), for instance, eagerly accepts high school dropout Dangerfield into his college after Dangerfield provides the cash for a new campus building. In I.Q., Princeton's president is so determined to stir up good publicity that he doesn't consider whether the source of that publicity--a phony cold-fusion theory--has any merit. Similarly, the professor (William Atherton) in charge of the think tank at Pacific Tech in 1985's Real Genius pushes his students to develop an advanced laser technology even though he knows it will most likely be used as a peace-time assault weapon.
In general, in campus comedies, college as an institution is seen as a tradition-bound, conformist, capitalistic machine, and the films' rebel-heroes are anarchistic, fun-loving students who flout school rules and make laughingstocks of authority. Sometimes, granted, the methods of rebellion are crude--along the lines, in Revenge of the Nerds, of applying deep-heating ointment to the football team's jockstraps. But sometimes cinematic college pranks are so elaborate and well-planned that you may begin to wonder what accomplishments these students might be capable of if they actually paid a moment's attention to their coursework.
The Nerds--who, to their credit, are also very good students--use their superior technological skills to implant a comprehensive closed-circuit video system in the house of the sorority whose members have been abusing them. The brainy students of Real Genius invent a chemical that turns their dormitory hallway into an ice skating rink. Even the Animal House delinquents summon enough brainpower and energy to create an elaborate, havoc-wreaking float for the homecoming parade.
The student-rebels in campus comedies are generally portrayed as kind-spirited, sometimes even heroic young men. (And, yes, they're very nearly always men. With a few exceptions, the women in college movies are a peripheral, alien, nubile commodity.) The Nerds are a decidedly good-hearted bunch--attentive to their parents and loyal to one another. Their relationships with women, insofar as they exist, tend to be respectful and innocently affectionate: one of the sweetest moments in the film occurs when a near-sighted Nerd couple exchange eyeglasses, and the delighted girl murmurs, "Gilbert, we have almost the same prescription!"
Similarly, Back to School's Dangerfield is an exceedingly likable fellow. Sure, he's an overbearing philistine, but he's so fun-loving and generous--in line at the campus bookstore, he calls out, "Shakespeare for everyone!" and picks up the tab for the rest of the students' books--that you readily forgive him his crassness. The 1992 comedy Big Man on Campus takes the concept of the likable iconoclast a step further: its hero is a sweet-natured hunchback (Allan Katz) who regularly swings through the quad, wreaking havoc, but always for what he thinks is a noble cause.
Indeed, the student-rebel is often portrayed as a sort of wild-eyed innocent. Bluto Blutarski, John Belushi's character in Animal House, may be an alcoholic maniac prone to throwing empty liquor bottles through plate-glass windows and smashing beer cans against his head, but he's a gentle-hearted maniac, and his nearly wordless performance--Belushi can convey a whole world of pure-id craziness with an arch of an eyebrow or a satyrical smile--rarely conveys so much as a hint of malice. There's a wonderful scene in which a frat brother's car has been wrecked, and Belushi tries to cheer the brother up by doing little slapstick tricks, from making faces to breaking a beer bottle over his own head. It's a moment reminiscent of the Marx Brothers--with Belushi as a reprobate Harpo.
Most college rebels don't mean to be rebels at all. The Animal House rowdies are basically just looking for a good time--and their ruffling of the administrative feathers is simply a pleasant bonus. The Nerds, at first, try desperately to fit in with college society, and only when they find themselves maligned and ridiculed at every turn do their actions become a straightforward protest for the rights of nerds everywhere. Even Bob, the lovable, anarchic hunchback of Big Man on Campus, has the poignant dream of passing for normal.
Those college rebels who rebel on purpose--who take arms against the system with the clear, and sometimes remarkably insightful, intention of subverting what they see as an oppressively conformist authority--are usually secondary figures. Often these supporting players are smart and articulate. Sometimes they have Marxist leanings (toward both Groucho and Karl), and always, even as they're part of the college scene, they stand scornfully outside it. In 1989's How I Got Into College, an amiable satire in which a directionless high school senior runs up against the cutthroat college recruitment system, the protagonist's best friend (Christopher Rydell) is a long-haired idealist, with a Kerouac-style dream of a picaresque life on the road; his disdain for the self-stereotyping students he sees at a college fair leads him to rueful musings about "the nerd factor, followed by the Asian factor, all of us expected to play our allotted roles according to future needs of a planned economy."
In Back to School, Robert Downey, Jr., who plays the dorm-mate of Dangerfield and son, is a witty devotee of one political cause after another. He turns up at random throughout the film, always in a new and more eccentric style of dress, disparages some offshoot of the status quo, and in the process steals whatever scene he's in. At one point he's on his way to what he calls "an anti-pep rally," organized to illuminate the fact that "a violent ground-acquisition game like football is, in fact, a crypto-fascist metaphor for nuclear war." The intriguing tension in lines like these is that, while we're clearly supposed to see the Downey character as an innocuous nut, his views are often so well-spoken and persuasive that we can't help but wonder if they may also be the views of the screenwriter.
Val Kilmer, who, in Real Genius, shuffles about in bunny slippers and keeps goldfish in his dorm-room water cooler, has developed and nurtured his eccentricities on purpose; they've served as a way to divest himself of the straitjacket that his upbringing, and especially the educational machine, has placed on him. In the process of mentoring another young genius (Gabe Jarret), he laments the fate of his own former mentor, who "loved solving problems" and "thought that the answers were the answers for everything." That genius eventually burned out and is now a hermitic basket case, all because of an educational curriculum, as Kilmer succinctly puts it, of "all science, no philosophy."
Just as the forces of rebellion take many forms in college comedies, so, too, the bastions of conformity are often not grown-up authority figures at all, but other students. Sometimes, as in Revenge of the Nerds, the most oppressive villains are muscle-bound, neanderthal football players and their cruel, Barbie-doll girlfriends. Or else--as in Real Genius and Animal House--they're sanctimonious brown-nosers who serve as minions for calculating administrators. The rebel students have to resist them partly in order not to become them: for example, Lara Flynn Boyle's character in How I Got Into College writes a university admissions essay entitled "Secret Confessions of a High School Prom Queen," in which she expresses her desperate desire to break away from the stereotypical, all-American-girl life that up till now has seemed her fate.
Here we run up against a central complexity in the ethos of campus comedy, for at the same time that these movies depict the institution of higher education as being stiflingly conformist, they also display a fondness--even, sometimes, a reverence--for college life itself. It's not merely the fact that a movie camera can't seem to help but linger lovingly as it pans a prototypical college campus: the overarching trees (which seem perennially autumnal), the ivy-covered buildings, the fresh-faced students strolling across the quad with their armloads of books. Even as campus comedies tend to depict collegiate institutions as diversity-crushing prisons, they also look to the university as a ripe new world of freedom. In How I Got Into College, high school senior Corey Parker sums this view up nicely: "Trying things out is what happens at college. You get a great chance to start all over again, just when most people need to. It's like a federal protection and relocation program for teenagers."
College is a place where isolated misfits can gather strength by banding together. The Nerds, for example, are a motley group, with (sometimes token) representatives of every ethnic group, social class and sexual proclivity--but once they become a cohesive unit there's no stopping them. Likewise, in Animal House, the Deltas' sense of fraternity goes far deeper than the symbols on their letter jackets.
College is a place to establish a new identity. As the self-invented, ultra-hip Kilmer tells his freshman protégé: "I was just like you. My mother dressed me in white shirts and hush puppies and made me carry a briefcase, guaranteeing that a girl would never talk to me." An even more striking case of upgrading one's identity can be found in Revenge of the Nerds, when supreme geek Louis (Robert Carradine) dons the Darth Vader mask that one of the football stars had been wearing earlier, and uses it as a ruse to have sex with the football star's girlfriend. Obviously, this scene provides the on-screen fulfillment of every real-life nerd's fondest fantasy--not least because the sex is so great that, far from reeling in disgust when Carradine removes the mask, the girl can only lie back luxuriously and murmur, "Are all nerds as good as you?"
This motif--of heading off to college and coming back a changed man--amounts to an academic version of the American Dream. College, according to the movies, makes everything else possible. Take a look at American Graffiti, for instance, in which (according to a set of rather heavy-handed after-titles) Steve (Ron Howard) remains in his home town, only to become that most mundane of professionals, "an insurance agent," whereas Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) flies away to college and becomes not only "a writer," but "a writer living in Canada." Or Breaking Away, in which, without the prospect of a university education to propel them, the main characters' lives seem to have braked to a standstill at their high school graduation.
But while movie colleges can be, simultaneously, places of conformity and self-creation and still make sense, the movies' view of learning itself--intellectual and esthetic pursuits, the art-for-art's-sake quest to better one's mind--tends to be more problematic. There's a basic contradiction in Animal House, for instance, in which you're meant to admire Donald Sutherland's beat-generation artistic temperament, yet at the same time laugh at a scene in which John Belushi takes the guitar of a sad-eyed, folksinging beatnik and smashes it against the wall.
Likewise in Back to School, Paxton Whitehead's business prof is understandably offended by the fact that, by donating a building, millionaire Dangerfield has effectively bought his admission to the school. He publicly denounces such bribery as "undermining the efforts of our legitimate students who are here as a result of hard work," and for a brief moment the movie seems on the verge of coaxing its audience into actual thought. But Dangerfield's reply is quick, and it's meant to be persuasive: "Hard work? Listen, Sherlock. While you were tucked away up here working on your ethics I was out there busting my hump in the real world."
This "real world," by the way, comes up often in college comedies, for no matter how harsh a college scenario may be, we're often reminded that life beyond it is harsher. Hunchback Bob may be a misunderstood loner on campus, but in the real world he's considered a dangerous freak who's likely to get locked up. Likewise, while the frat pranks of the Animal House gang eventually lead to their expulsion, they get away with far more hijinks, for a far longer time, than they ever would if they were, say, welders in an automobile factory.
Yet despite the low-brow mindset of most college comedies, they're generally not anti-intellectual. Instead, they often seem to regard knowledge with a kind of sentimental awe that doesn't translate into the goal of inspiring viewers to seek knowledge for themselves, nor to try to understand it when it's put before them. Books and lectures and mathematical theorems become symbols of learning that are supposed to knock us dead with reverence, but whether they actually mean anything is clearly beside the point. We know Val Kilmer's character is a genius because he can sound persuasive while making statements like "It is possible to synthesize excited bromide in an argon matrix." Likewise, the rough-hewn genius in Good Will Hunting--not exactly a "campus comedy," I realize, but partaking of a similar ethos--flings algebraic signs onto a chalkboard with such nimble-brained fervor that it hardly matters for a second that all these daunting equations might, in real life, add up to gobbledygook. Their meaning is irrelevant--Will Hunting is brilliant, and brilliance enthralls us all, especially when it stands so purely and cockily before us, majestically free of any particular content.
College movies also don't quite know how to deal with the perennial tension between the pursuit of learning for its own sake and the scramble for a passing academic grade. For the most part, their solution is to make fun of the incongruity. In Big Man on Campus, for example, when the hunchback's roommate Alex (Corey Parker) wonders why he needs to study history--when history, after all, is merely "stuff that has already happened"--Bob replies, "Without understanding of history, Alex will not know where he came from. Without understanding of history, Alex will not profit from mistakes of the past. But mainly, without understanding of history, Alex will end up [selling] furniture in New Jersey."
Likewise, Rodney Dangerfield's character begins his own higher education as pragmatically as possible--he hires NASA scientists to do his astronomy homework, and, assigned to write a paper on Kurt Vonnegut, he brings in Vonnegut himself to write it for him. As he admits to Sally Kellerman, who's agreed to become his tutor, part of his cynical approach to learning stems from a deprived background: "The high school I went to, they asked a kid to prove the law of gravity, he threw the teacher out the window."
But, to the movie's credit, Kellerman rouses Dangerfield's intellectual drive by passionately enumerating the joys of reading: "to share the thoughts and feelings of the writer without the interference of your actor and director and professor's point of view getting in the way, to truly share and understand the common feelings of all mankind, the feelings of being alive." No great wonder, then, that after a few speeches like that, Dangerfield is poring over history texts, and reciting poetic masterworks from memory. Late in the film, during an oral exam that will determine whether he's allowed to remain in college, Dangerfield is asked to summarize Dylan Thomas' defiant villanelle, "Do Not Go Gentle." His response is concise: "Don't take shit from no one!"
What Dangerfield does in that scene, and what college movies often try to do, is to meld a set of seemingly abstract, arcane and intimidating ideas with the workaday, experiential knowledge that an incoming student already possesses, providing the student with a renovated but familiar vernacular that will serve him well for the rest of his life. This marriage of ethereal truths and earth-rooted sensibilities is exactly the scenario that college movies like best, for it permits their student protagonists to challenge themselves and to grow, even as they still retain their individuality.
It's a very American, almost Capra-esque philosophy that drives movies like Revenge of the Nerds and Animal House. Our sympathies will always lie with underdogs--the nerdy genius, the smartass underachiever, the social misfit, even the beer-guzzling free spirit--precisely because, no matter the consequences, these characters always remain true to themselves. On the opposite side of the cinematic spectrum are the over-coiffed preppie, the vapid cheerleader, the bow-tied stuffed shirt, the venal administrator, the neanderthal bully--caricatures ripe for ridicule for the mere reason that they've given up the struggle to remain authentic, self-determined souls. Conventionality is set off, in large type, as a sort of ultimate offense against one's own personhood, and any price--social, emotional or even economic--is worth paying in order to become and remain an original self.
In fact, college movies sometimes remind us, the struggle to remain authentic may require us to reject the collegiate institution itself--or, certainly at the very least, its impressively ornate yet artificial trappings. Consider the terrific scene in Good Will Hunting in which an MIT grad student tries to intimidate one of the film's townie characters with a spate of highfalutin economic theory. Will--our blue-collar genius-hero--gives caustic, rapid-fire rebuttal to every theory that dares dribble from the grad student's mouth. He then accuses the student of plagiarizing ideas from textbooks, and muses that one day the student will realize that "you dropped 150 grand on a fucking education you could have got for $1.50 in late charges at the public library."
"Yeah," the grad student replies, "but I will have a degree and you'll be serving my kids fries at a drive-through on our way to a skiing trip."
Will shrugs, then smiles and says, "Yeah, maybe. But at least I won't be unoriginal."