Summary
The scene shifts and we see the brothers of Delta assembling for a meeting. Robert Hoover announces to the group that everyone's answers for the midterm were wrong. "Those assholes must have stolen the wrong fucking exam!" says Boon angrily, as Dean Wormer comes into the house. He chastises the brothers for drinking while on probation, then asks if they have seen their grade point averages. "It's the lowest on campus! It's the lowest in Faber history!" he yells.
Wormer then tells the brothers that they have been on double secret probation for the entire semester, and if they slip up again, the fraternity will get kicked off campus. After Wormer leaves, Robert Hoover is worried that Wormer knows about the midterms, and implores his fellow brothers that they need to do something to improve their standing at the college. Otter proposes they have a toga party, insisting, "They're gonna nail us no matter what we do, so we might as well have a good time!" The brothers begin chanting "Toga! Toga! Toga!"
We see Katy and Boon at a laundromat, where he tells her the toga party is not going to be an orgy. "It's cute, but I think I'll pass this time," she says, telling him she doesn't want him to go, saying, "I'll write you a note. I'll say you're too well to attend." Boon is determined to go to the toga party and walks away.
Outside the Delta house, Otter, D-Day, Pinto, and Boon admire Flounder's car, which Flounder's brother is letting him use temporarily. Otter asks Flounder to drive them all to the Food King and they get in and drive into town. At the Food King, Otter throws a bunch of food off the shelves, all of which Flounder struggles to catch. Meanwhile, Boon stuffs some food in Pinto's pants and sweater to shoplift. Over by the vegetables, Otter flirts with an older woman by telling her that he picked out a bigger cucumber than she did. When he introduces himself to her, she introduces herself as Marion Wormer, the dean's wife.
At the register, the cashier notices that Pinto's pants and shirt are stuffed and stops him for shoplifting. When he tells her it's a prank for his fraternity, she assures him she won't punish him and he smiles at her. Back in the vegetable section, Otter invites Mrs. Wormer to the party they're having that night, but she tells him she has to go to a dinner at the college. At the register, Pinto asks the cashier to come to the party and she agrees to meet him there.
The scene shifts and we see a keg flying out of the window of the Delta house as guests arrive at the toga party. Flounder pulls up in his brother's car and escorts his girlfriend, who is dressed in a nice dress, into the frat. Flounder introduces his girlfriend, whose name is Sissy, to Otter, who admires her beauty. When Flounder goes to get them punch, Otter escorts her to go sit down somewhere.
We see a man in a black turtleneck playing the guitar for a group of admiring girls. As Bluto passes him on the stairs, he grabs the guitar and smashes it to pieces abruptly. The scene shifts and we see the cashier from the grocery store arriving and greeting Pinto, who gives her a cup of punch that she drinks in one gulp. After downing another punch, she agrees to dance with Pinto. We see a soul band playing "Shout" in the next room, and Boon stands nearby singing along. The party guests dance to the song, and Pinto kisses the cashier.
Outside, Mrs. Wormer pulls up, ramming into some other cars as she parks on the lawn in front of the fraternity. She gets out of her car, clearly drunk, and takes a swig from a flask. We see the cashier leading Pinto upstairs as Mrs. Wormer comes into the party, where she is greeted warmly by Otter. "Cut the crap, give me a drink," she says.
Upstairs, Pinto and the cashier go into Hoover's room and begin kissing passionately. The cashier lifts up her dress and begins undressing as Pinto watches expectantly. Downstairs, partiers in togas slow dance and Bluto accidentally pours a jar of mustard on himself.
Otter brings Mrs. Wormer into his room where he plays romantic music and dims the lights. All of the fabrics in the room are animal print and he mixes her a drink at his in-room bar. The scene shifts back and forth between Pinto, who innocently and awkwardly unclasps the cashier's bra, and Otter, who ceremoniously lays Mrs. Wormer down on his bed.
When Pinto cannot undo the cashier's bra, she takes it off herself, before passing out suddenly from drunkenness. Pinto then realizes that she's stuffed her bra with tissues.
All of a sudden, a miniature devil appears over Pinto's shoulder, and advises him to have sex with the cashier even though she is passed out. Then an angel appears over his other shoulder, advising him not to. "If you lay one finger on that poor defenseless girl, you'll despise yourself forever!" yells the angel. The devil says, "You homo," and they both disappear.
Pinto brings the cashier home passed out in a shopping cart. As he arrives at her house, he realizes that she is the daughter of Mayor Carmine DePasto and looks anxious as he leaves the shopping cart near the front door. Carmine comes out and looks exasperated at the sight of his daughter, drunk in a shopping cart.
The scene shifts and we see Dean Wormer on the phone with Carmine, who blames Wormer for the incident. Suspecting that Delta is behind the mess, Wormer promises Carmine that he will punish them, as Mrs. Wormer falls on the ground, laughing and drunk.
The next day, we see a student reading the school paper about the probation hearing for Delta. Ominous music plays as the camera pans down to another headline: "Mrs. Marion Wormer to Vacation in Sarasota Springs."
We see Bluto running down a staircase, followed by Boon and Katy. When Boon asks Katy to dinner that night, she tells him she's busy, and walks away. Otter comes up behind Boon with Hoover and they head to the probation hearing, taking their seats at the defense table to massive cheers from the students watching.
Greg leads the hearing, and Neidermeyer stands and reads the charges against the fraternity. After they have been read, Robert Hoover stands and gives his defense, stating that Delta has been the home to many exceptional members over the years. Greg and Wormer cut him off after a few sentences, declaring that the court will make its decision. Suddenly, Bluto pretends to cough, saying "Blowjob!" as he does so. The rest of the students erupt into coughing "Blowjob!" as Wormer struggles to gain control of the room.
Otter stands and makes a speech in Delta's defense. "The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules, or took a few liberties with our female party guests—we did. But you can't hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Greg: isn't this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!" At the end of his speech, the members of Delta all file out of the room triumphantly as Wormer yells after them, angrily.
Analysis
The stakes rise in this section of the film when the Delta brothers fail their midterm and Wormer announces to them that they are one infraction away from getting kicked off campus. The carefree fraternity is now at risk of being permanently booted, which raises the stakes considerably. While the film does not change its lighthearted and absurd tone, Wormer's threats do create a sense of tension and suspense in the plot, as the viewer wonders what will become of the fraternity.
Comically enough, the heightened stakes and newfound threat of expulsion do little to deter the Delta brothers' debaucherous attitudes, and as soon as Wormer leaves, Otter proposes they have a toga party. Toga parties, large events in which all the guests wear togas, are representative of the kind of wild and carefree attitudes shared by all of the fraternity brothers—the exact attraction to chaos that has them on such thin ice with the college. The defiance that the brothers show, the laissez-faire attitude they take towards Wormer's threats, just goes to prove what consummate slackers they are, a designation they wear with pride.
One of the major tensions in the plot is Boon's having to decide between being a mature boyfriend to Katy and living out his happy college days with his fraternity brothers. Previously, we have seen Katy's desire for him to get more serious come into conflict with his party-loving antics, but this conflict was smoothed over easily. Now she wants him to actively choose to spend time with her rather than attend his fraternity's toga party, and a more serious rift opens up between them.
The only thing that the fraternity brothers in Delta love as much as partying is sex, and they spend a great deal of time chasing it. When sex does happen, it is nearly always accompanied by some kind of humiliation or mishap. The innocent Pinto struggles to unclasp the cashier's bra, and when he finally does, she falls down completely drunk, and the tissues stuffing her bra fall out. When Otter sleeps with Mrs. Wormer, he struggles to smoothly mix her a drink and show her an erotically mature evening. The Delta brothers are ready for sex, but they are still relatively new to post-adolescence, and a great deal of comedic mileage in the film comes from lampooning the contrast between their desire for sex and their lack of experience.
The film aims to create comedic moments out of staging the tensions and inner conflicts faced by heterosexual men in a misogynistic society. After the cashier passes out on the bed, nude and unconscious in front of Pinto, a devil appears on his shoulder advising him to rape the girl, while an angel tells him that he will hate himself if he does. When the angel wins out and Pinto opts not to have sex with the woman, the devil, in what is intended to be a comedic flourish, calls Pinto a "homo" and they both disappear. The film stages this conflict between a misogynistic impulse and the impulse to be ethical as a tension between being a macho man and being feminized, or "a homo." This is further illuminated when Otter makes a speech in defense of Delta and admits that its members have taken certain liberties with female guests at the house, winking as he does so. Thus we see that the film seeks to turn rather dark and disheartening scenarios of sexism and harassment into comedic fodder. Doubtless, if this classic film were released today, it would not be met very forgivingly by critics and audiences.
