Summary
Bluto and the other Delta brothers watch as men clear out the fraternity house. When one of the men drops a box filled with beer on the ground, wasting it, Bluto screams in horror. The men then lead a cow out of the house.
As Pinto and Boon walk across campus, Neidermeyer yells at them, teasing them about losing their fraternity from his lawn. Pinto tells Boon that they won't be allowed to enter a float in the homecoming parade, when suddenly they notice that the house is getting cleared out. Bluto is furious and Otter walks over and grabs a bottle of liquor from a man, throwing it to Bluto, who takes a giant swig of whiskey, then smashes the bottle on a nearby car. Otter turns to Boon and Pinto and tells them they ought to take a road trip.
The scene shifts suddenly to Flounder begging Otter not to take his car, as his brother wants it back by Sunday. Otter ushers him into the car and with Boon behind the wheel, they drive away, Flounder screaming all the while.
The boys drive to Emily Dickinson College, where the girls are "fast." Boon advises the boys, "Just mention modern art, civil rights, or folk music, and you're in like Flynn." The boys arrive on the college campus and Otter goes in ahead to Emily Dickinson Hall, where he asks the girl at the front desk to ring up to Fawn Leibowitz, the girl that Boon has been talking about. The girl seems shocked and calls someone named Shelly down to the desk.
After she hangs up, the girl tells Otter that Fawn's roommate is coming down, and that Fawn isn't there. Shelly, Fawn's roommate comes downstairs and introduces herself to Otter, who introduces himself as Frank Lymon from Amherst, Fawn's fiancé. Shelly tells him to sit down, before telling him that Fawn is dead, before showing him a headline explaining that Fawn died in a kiln explosion. Otter feigns grief, as the girl offers to help him feel better. "I just don't think I should be alone tonight, would you go out with me?" he says to Shelly, who goes to get her coat.
Shelly brings three friends along to go out with the boys. They drive towards a club where Otis Day and the Knights are playing, and pull over to go listen. Boon hits a car as he parks and the group goes into the club. As they enter the club, everyone stops what they're doing, including the band, and stares: the group makes up the only white people in the bar. Otis continues to sing as the group sits down at a table, nervously. Boon goes and orders drinks for everyone, and when he yells up to Otis, Otis looks confused. When Boon turns to his left, a man at the bar pulls out a knife and holds it up threateningly.
Shelly asks Otter if he is okay and he pretends to be very sad before going outside to the car, Shelly following. "I'm really sorry, Frank, I know what you must be going through," she says to him in the car, before kissing him on the cheek. They begin to kiss. Back inside, Pinto asks his date what she's majoring in, and she tells him, "Primitive cultures."
Outside, Otter and Shelly kiss passionately in the car, removing articles of clothing as they do. Inside, a black patron sits next to Flounder, who asks him where he goes to school, to silence. When Pinto goes to look for Otter, seeking an excuse to leave the bar, his date pulls him back down into his seat. An imposing patron walks up to the booth the boys are sitting at and asks if he and his friends can dance with the girls. Boon agrees, and the man pulls their table out of the floor to make way for the girls to come dance. The boys run from the bar, hollering in fear, and drive away hastily, crashing into various cars in the process. Flounder screams about the damage to his car.
We see the girls wandering back to Emily Dickinson College, complaining about their dates. When Shelly tells them, "I thought Frank was kind of cute!" they are all disgusted.
The next day, we see Boon calling Katy on a payphone at 6 AM, but she doesn't answer. He gets back in the car and tells Otter she isn't home. The scene shifts and we see Greg building a homecoming float with his fraternity brothers and asking one of Mandy's friends where Mandy is. Her friend gets upset as she tells Greg that Mandy is having an affair with Otter. Greg is upset for a moment, before smirking and asking the friend to do a favor for him.
The boys return to Delta and Boon goes to find Katy while Flounder cries about his brothers' ruined car. Seeing how upset Flounder is, Bluto tries to cheer up his despondent brother by crushing a can and breaking a bottle on his head. Otter comforts Flounder by devising a plan where they wreck the car and pretend it was stolen so that Flounder's brother's insurance can give him a new car.
Boon goes to Katy's apartment, where he finds her with Professor Jennings, with whom she's having an affair. He leaves angrily.
Back at Delta, Otter gets a call from Mandy's friend saying that Mandy wants to see him at a motel nearby. We see Mandy's friend in a bedroom with Greg, clearly planning a trap for Otter.
Otter goes to the motel to meet Mandy, but when he goes into the designated room, he finds Neidermeyer, Greg, Chip, and two others waiting for him. Greg starts things off by punching him in the face, and the rest of the group begin to pummel him.
The scene shifts and we see Hoover, D-Day, Bluto, Pinto, and Flounder in Dean Wormer's office. He asks where Boon and Otter are, but they cannot find them. He reads each of them their midterm grades, all of which are horrible, before telling them they are expelled and have to leave by nine o'clock on Monday morning. He then says, "And I'm sure you'll be happy to know that I have notified your local draft boards and told them that you are now all eligible for military service." Suddenly, Flounder vomits everywhere.
Greg and Babs, Mandy's friend who told him about her affair, sit in his car on a hill. She masturbates him just as Mandy did, but again, he cannot get erect.
Analysis
In this section of the film, the fraternity is unceremoniously disbanded. All of the mismatched items in the large dilapidated house are removed and confiscated, much to the brothers' chagrin. In spite of Otter's rousing (if nonsensical) speech, the college wins out and the brothers find themselves without an organization on campus to which to belong. They must now set about scheming a way to get their fraternity back, and with it, the ability to live the wild idyllic life of slobbery to which they have become accustomed.
The whiteness of the college students is thrown into comedic relief when they pull over at a bar that Otis Day is playing at near Emily Dickinson College. When they first walk into the bar, all of the black patrons of the bar stop talking and the band stops singing to look at them. For the first time in the film, we see the cocksure brothers of Delta seeming less sure of themselves, and Boon's assurance that Otis is his friend is met with a chilly confusion when he calls up to Otis onstage. The film uses various stereotypes to mark the contrast between the black patrons and the white college students, including a black man brandishing a knife at Boon just for looking at him, and Boon ordering a round of stereotypically "black" drinks.
The scene at the club is, to a contemporary eye, trafficking in stereotypical and potentially offensive territory, in that it frames the experience of black culture through a fearful white lens. While it satirizes the black patrons' experience of seeing white students at the bar in a way that is not totally aligned with a white perspective, there are many moments that are blatantly offensive. For instance, after Pinto's date tells him she is majoring in "Primitive cultures," the shot shifts rapidly to Otis singing at the microphone. This juxtaposition has exceedingly racist implications, and at the end, when the boys come to the realization that "Negroes stole our dates," the satire is more offensive than humorous, as their fear takes on a hysteria that dehumanizes the black experience. While the iconic black comic Richard Pryor famously gave his personal approval of the scene and the film, there are many who see this scene as one of the film's largest missteps, a dated representation of racial tension.
As aligned as the film is with the sloppy fraternity brothers, it also doesn't shy away from painting them as incompetent imbeciles. After their dates with the Emily Dickinson girls, we see the girls complaining about the date and comparing the Delta brothers to criminals. By showing this external perception of the protagonists, the filmmakers put the boys' behavior in a certain amount of perspective, and seek to demonstrate a kind of ethical ambivalence, as if to ensure that the viewer knows that these men are not model citizens.
Much of Animal House's datedness, as well as its significance as a film, can be traced to its historical context. The film was made in 1978, but it is a period film, taking place in 1962. The story of debauchery and party-hearty antics makes a lot of sense in the context of the late 1970s, when audiences were reflecting on the end of the hippie peace-and-love era and the divisions surrounding the Vietnam War. The brothers of Delta are just trying to get by, caught between the counterculture of the 1960s and the specter of the military as represented by their more straitlaced classmates like Neidermeyer and Greg Marmalard. The vindictive Dean Wormer wants not only to expel the brothers of Delta, but relishes the fact that, once expelled, they will be eligible for military service. The film tracks the story of baby boomers who feel caught in between, who run towards ecstatic experiences so as to avoid contemplating their incongruous position in society: either fit in and conform, or else get sent off to war.
