Animal House

You can critise America and Americans for lots of things. I stick to the idea that it's not the American people I'm pissed off with, but the economic and foreign policies. True, Hollywood plays an important ideological role in securing US hegemony - but it's difficult to see how John Belushi et al in "National Lampoon's Animal House" can be thought of as indoctrination.

You know the film - made in 1978 pretty much at the height of the liberal comeback after the Nixon fiasco, it is America as I (outdatedly and politically suspect I know from an 'alleged' revolutionary) think of it's people: funny, anarchic, anti-establishment. OK, there are duff moments - the racism and the sexism jarr. But even here you could intellectualise a little and see it as that would be the way white priveleged males would have behaved at the time.

A friend told me, long ago, that he's bought a copy of the DVD (the film made more money than any other film in US history compared to its outlay $2m to $141m respectively) and said that quite a few 'controversial' scenes had been cut from the original. It's impossible to see how a similar film could be made these days in today's suffocatingly conservative artistic climate. Difficult to see anyone in America saying "Oh boy is this great!" and meaning it......