Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2004/11/24/college_life_butlers_pistols_speakeasies.php
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
As with any human institution, college (or College) is ripe for cinematic exploration. Most lucratively, the movies have portrayed campuses as oases of Dionysian revelry, sometimes caked with a thin smear of academics. Bluto trumps Plato onscreen—as he often does in real life. College students should treasure these gems romanticizing the best of excess, if only to be philosophically inspired or to cut loose vicariously. There are, however, several good and bad films that depict sober collegiate living. While less rip-roaringly hilarious, they are often better acted and scripted than their fraternity-obsessed cousins. The college movie genre therefore deserves your perusal, even if aesthetics is not your bag; as a college student, this may be the closest you'll ever get to feeling like you're in the pictures.
In the consciousness of the College moviegoer, Animal House (1978) is the fountainhead. The jokes and characters are so often replicated that it's worth taking a fresh look, even if you've seen it too many times already. The script, which borrowed from several years of National Lampoon writing, coupled with the performances and restrained direction allowed the film to be smart about being dumb. It's a period film, too; Sam Cooke's smooth vocals and jokes about budding counterculture seemed as pleasantly anachronistic in the late '70s as they do now.
On the cheap, director John Landis and his writers managed to create a story with apparently archetypical resonance. Almost every frat boy will tell you his house is Delta house (although Alpha Delta has a stronger claim, with co-screenwriter Chris Miller '62 as an alumnus). Little character development is needed because we already have Bluto, Otter, Neidermeyer, and Mandy Pepperidge in our unconscious compendium of college characters. Everyone loves the story of a bunch of ragtag guys making war on the puritanical crumbs in charge on the high principle of—what? There's none, really. The climax of the movie is, in the words of Otter, "a really futile and stupid gesture," a sort of fun nihilism, one last gasp of freedom before the real world comes knocking and we become editors, gynecologists, and Senators.
In the shadow of Animal House lies many a college party flick. Consider Old School (2003), premised almost as if the remaining Delta boys had wandered back to campus. It lacks the pitch-perfect idiocy of its forebear, but the film finds a unique, though inconsistent humor of its own that manages to withstand even the shamelessness of Snoop Doggy Dogg's cameo. Vince Vaughan, Luke Wilson, and Will Ferrell give great performances of dispossession and desire. The most underrated moments come from Jeremy Piven as Dean Pritchard, who seems to have been the administration's favorite in college and saw no better destination than college administration. He's the slyer, nerdier version of John Vernon's brilliant Nazi-of-New-England, Dean Wormer. Memo to screenwriters: the crusty old Dean makes the frat movie.
But what about when the villainy stems from the frats? Hence we were given Revenge of the Nerds (1984) and Spike Lee's School Daze (1988), two decidedly different films about a similar subject: the less-than-popular independent versus the Greek colossus. Lee's movie delves into political issues like intra-racial racism, while Nerds settles for a guy in a Darth Vader mask having sex with a cheerleader. You may, however, settle for the latter once you realize that Lee tackles politics with all the subtlety of a jackhammer.
For the non-pledged, far better is Brideshead Revisited (1981), the everyman's tale of two young, British, mostly drunk, rich boys at Oxford in the 1920s. At least it begins that way. This stunning miniseries, adapted from Evelyn Waugh's affecting novel of the same name, soon moves on to less amusing topics such as Catholicism and the Second World War; however, the first several episodes follow Charles Ryder (Jeremy Irons), a reserved newcomer to Oxford's Christ Church College, as he falls in with "the very worst set in the university," including Sebastian Flyte, a quasi-alcoholic aristocrat with a teddy bear named Aloysius, and Anthony Blanche, a notorious, booze-guzzling homosexual.
If you aren't hooked then and there, consider that Charles has a personal butler at Oxford named Lunt who organizes Charles' schedule and scrubs the floor when Sebastian has vomited upon it. The series' stays true to the novel's text, so the real point of watching is to behold Oxford and aristocratic England in all of its resplendent beauty. It's decadent and 'unsustainable,' but perfect fodder for the screen. To its enormous credit, Brideshead does not dawdle in this antidemocratic Eden; it examines post-collegiate life in perhaps a more measured manner than does the end sequence of Animal House.
Campus antics, as even a cursory viewing of Brideshead should indicate, are timeless. The Marx Brothers' Horsefeathers (1932) installs Groucho as President of Huxley College in New England. After delivering the classic line, "Are you suggesting that I, the President of Huxley College, visit a speakeasy without even giving me the address?" Groucho moves quickly to illegally recruit football players at the bar, all the while delightfully skewering the pretensions of academia. Claiming that they cannot support both football and the college, he suggests that they tear down the college immediately. "But Professor," he is asked, "Where will the students sleep?" Groucho delivers, "Where they always sleep. In the classroom." Ha-cha-cha!
Our own College on the Hill starred in Winter Carnival (1939) alongside several B-actors shunned by the studio system. Few have seen this film; by most accounts, it's fairly mediocre. More noteworthy than the esoteric plot (a European Count courts the Carnival's Snow Queen) was that its intended writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald—by accounts a drunken sot—devoted too much of his time in Hanover to meticulously 'researching' fraternity basements, and was dismissed from the Hanover Inn and fired by the studio.
Of course, college isn't always a continual smorgasbord of fun. There's a lot of potential for campus suspense thrillers, but this fledgling genre seems already inextricably tied to horrible acting, oversexed melodrama, and cheap horror in the place of developed suspense. The Skulls (2000) is nothing less than an atrocity and the prototypical 'serious' college movie. Penned by some Yalie named John Pogue (who claims to have been in a secret society), this movie single-handedly rebuffs any fears that Skull and Bones controls the nation. Why would that cabal allow such an atrocity to be produced if this were so? And how would they account for the profusion of Skull dueling pistols?
The underrated Abandon (2002) actually exploits setting and mood to create a creepy if predictable mystery set on an elite New England campus. In terms of narrative, it's flawed, but it redeems itself through some penetrating characterizations that you're sure to recognize. Plus, one particular scene uses the studious-girl-alone-in-a-dark-library scenario to great effect.
An alternative to fun and scares is work. The only film that makes the academic slog seem cinematically exhilarating is The Paper Chase (1973), the Rocky of exam week. Set at Harvard Law School, it chronicles a One L's struggle with his contract law professor, Kingsfield, who wields the Socratic Method like a steel saber. His many rhetorical disembowelments make the film humorous, exciting and, yes, inspiring to the aspiring studier. A superb performance by John Houseman as Kingsfield helps to depict vividly the love-hate relationship between teacher and pupil.
None of these films, however, paints an adequately holistic picture of college, as a place, as a lifestyle or as a state of mind. The most comprehensive, honest, and humane portrait of the academy and the people who make it up is found in Wonder Boys (2000), directed by Curtis Hanson, a man whose range includes this fascinating and entertaining character study and also L.A. Confidential and 8 Mile. Substance abuse, homework, love, divorce, celebrity, accomplishment, administrators, faculty, students, staff, hangers on, dogs, film, and literature all figure heavily in this narrative about major changes in English professor Grady Tripp's life during a weekend conference for writers called 'Wordfest.' Armed with a celebrated cast, an accomplished director and a story by a Pulitzer Prize winner, I suspect that this film's stock will rise in coming years, if there is justice.
Of course, the college movie-watching experience isn't all about finding one's place in the Western canon. At the end of the day, you may prefer Bluto's reckless urination to Grady's detached soul-searching. Taken together, Animal House and Wonder Boys say a lot about what we think of life on a college campus, ostensibly rational but subtly absurd, intolerable yet addictive, a pleasant conundrum. Kind of like College.