In 1998, when the world became aware that the President of the United States had conducted an extramarital affair with a White House intern, I was alarmed that a person in such a powerful position would show such poor judgment, but I was not exactly shocked.
I could be indignant about Bill Clinton’s recklessness, his willingness to risk political capital for moments of release and gratification, but I could not ignore what I understood to be reality: given the opportunity, a lot of heterosexual men would have behaved as Clinton behaved. A lot of the people in the Republican Party who were calling him out for his transgressions were opportunistic hypocrites.
I think I understand how it must have been for Clinton. Maybe he was not, as has often been suggested, terribly good with the girls in high school. He was a popular kid, but a little too goody-goody and not an athlete but a drum major. (In my high school, he might have been regarded as a “band fairy,” a term that for us carried no particular sexual connotation but suggested a certain uncool enthusiasm.)
A lot of young men get into politics for the same reasons they join rock ’n’ roll bands. Bill Clinton probably did not become a dating commodity until he was in graduate school. He was human enough to be flattered when a 22-year-old woman wanted to be especially nice to him.
And there is also something in Clinton that made him susceptible to accepting reckless chances. What I saw as the real problem with Bill Clinton as President of the United States was not that he was less moral or less honorable than most men, but that he still had a teenager’s sense of his own immortality and invulnerability. Before he matured into a dependable, sly, and even somewhat lovable eminence gris, he was a coltish serial disappointer.
In 1998, my theory was that Clinton was always able to convince himself that he could, if he had to, always save himself. I wrote that I didn’t know whether he simply thought he was smarter than everyone else or not, but that he seemed to think of himself as a kind of escape artist. I wrote that I didn’t know that he thought we were stupid, but that he was overconfident in his own brilliance. I wasn’t sure that he didn’t take a kind of perverse pride in the “Slick Willie” nickname Paul Greenberg gave him years ago.
I never got a Christmas card from the Clintons after that column ran.
For the record, I never said Bill Clinton was a less-than-able president or that he was morally corrupt. I just meant to point out that he had not uncommon weaknesses that he compounded by relying on his considerable charm and talent to disarm and impress us.
That, as Tammy Wynette might say, “after all, he’s just a man.”
•••
I can relate to Clinton because I too am a man who is not proud of everything I’ve ever done in pursuit of sex and affection. While certain lines were never crossed, I can’t say that I never hurt any feelings or did any damage. All I could do was apologize and hope to be forgiven, or better yet, forgotten.
My experience is not atypical. I remember discussing Clinton with a colleague of mine, a generation older than myself, who was a genuine “Friend of Bill.” While he was heartbroken over the scandal, he disagreed with me that Clinton should resign.
“Any man who hasn’t done something foolish with his clothes off never had the opportunity,” he said. (I told him he should use that line in one of his columns and that if he didn’t, I probably would. More than a quarter century later, I finally have.)
I think my friend is right, at least about the men of our generations. We all have behaved foolishly, if we had the chance.
I think of the Philip Larkin poem “Annus Mirabilis,” which includes the marvelous stanza:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me)—
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
Larkin is looking back on the dawing of a cultural revolution that took place in Britain and the U.S. in the 1960s (which as a cultural epoch—the “Sixties”— probably started in this country after the assassination of J.F.K., probably with the rejuvenating arrival of the Beatles on these shores in early 1964, and ending with the resignation of President Richard Nixon in August 1974). Larkin captures the irony of the sexual revolution—a seismic cultural shift that promised liberation but came with its own complexities and contradictions.
I turned 16 years old in 1974; my childhood was spent in the Sixties. I grew up largely on Air Force bases and in suburbs in North Carolina and Southern California, but I spent a considerable amount of time visiting my uncle who was embedded in the counterculture of the San Francisco Bay Area. I had first-hand knowledge of hippies, I read the Berkeley Barb; my uncle introduced me to members of the Jefferson Airplane.
But, if the Sixties arrived too late for Larkin, they arrived a little too early for me. By the time I started thinking impure thoughts about girls, the subversiveness of the so-called sexual revoultion had worn off. Premarital sex, cohabitation, and open relationships were widely accepted even in Northwest Louisiana, where my family moved the summer before I started high school.
Sex had been largely uncoupled from politics, a certain nihilistic hedonism rushed in to fill the vaccum created by the failure of love to save the world. I remember the curdling of the dream, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. I was fascinated by the Manson murders; it felt odd to know the cult had lived not too far away from where we did. My father had on a couple of occasions spotting the Manson girls hitchhiking.
I think my parents we relieved to remove us from California, my father requested the transfer to Barksdale Air Force Base, where he’d serve out his last couple of years of service before retiring. At the time, I didn’t think it had anything to do with me. In retrospect, coming from a junior high school with fewer than three hundred students, I do not think I would have thrived in a high school that had more than three thousand students. (On the other hand, the school I ended up attending wasn’t that much smaller.)
Like Bill Clinton, I was popular enough in high school, but I was not sexually precocious. I dated some, I went to all the football games and dances and occasionally took girls to movies or out for dinner, but most of my socializing was pack-centered. My friends and I would drive around to various nodes of teenage activity—to McDonalds, to a park alongside the river—and talk to whoever we met who would talk to us.
I am slightly embarrassed by the kind of boy I was, but I was more than a year younger than almost all my classmates (my birthdate came late in the calendar and my parents had chosen to start me in school as early as they could) and even though Louisiana allowed 15-year-olds to drive, I couldn’t get my license until my junior year.
I was a jock, but I didn’t play football, which was the only sport that mattered socially, and while I was a bright kid who made very good grades I tried very hard not to call attention to myself in the classroom. I was quiet, polite and I never volunteered an answer.
(That didn’t keep Mrs. Blackadar from recognizing something in me—after the first week of Freshman English she marched me down to the school library and enrolled me in “Independent Study,” a program for college-bound seniors who were allowed the freedom to work on their own projects under the light supervision of the school guidance counselor. We were, I remember, required to turn in one or two essays or research papers each semester. I stayed in the program all four years. Once or twice over the years I’ve been asked to reveal something interesting about myself. I invariably reply that I never took high school English.)
I was a painfully shy kid, though I was able to perform in high school musicals and plays and I did well with speeches. I only seemed to have trouble talking to girls.
Only I didn’t. I could talk to girls, or rather, I could get girls to talk to me. But I wasn’t good at decoding the language of flirtation, I never imagined that any of these creatures would actually want to be with me. I had crushes but I never really acted on them.
It wasn’t until I was in college that I learned that I had actually been discussed by young women who were frustrated by my naivete. When a girl I’ll call V.C. wrote in my senior yearbook that she had been waiting two years to “jump [my] bones,” I honestly thought she was making fun of me. (She wasn’t, she was just trying to be clear.)
When, many years later, when a former teenage beauty queen who off-and-on dated one of my friends for a decade told me that she thought of me as “the one that got away” I was genuinely shocked. In our twenties, I had been alone with this woman many times, sometimes late at night in a collegiate or post-collegiate apartment.
From my point of view, nothing had ever come close to happening. We drank beer, we talked—usually about her tumultous relationship with my friend. But she said she remembered dozens of times when she was ready to crumble under my touch.
By the time I entered law school, I was probably a cad. I had filled out, I lifted weights daily, I had some physical confidence. I had a nice car and I knew a little bit about wine. I had a sense of what sort of clothes looked good on me. I was kind of full of myself.
I think Bill Clinton developed along parallel lines. He was probably a cad at Oxford. A charming and selfish young man who finally understood that he had a little juice.
••••
Philip Larkin was not one of the “top boys” in the social hierarchy at King Henry VIII School, Coventry. Larkin himself described his younger self as shy, introverted, and physically awkward due to a stammer and poor eyesight, which necessitated thick glasses. While he was academically gifted and excelled in his studies, he was not particularly prominent in sports or other activities that often define popularity in school. His shyness and introspective nature made him more of an observer than a participant in the competitive social world of schoolboys.
While Larkin did form a few significant friendships during his schooling, including a lifelong one with the writer Kingsley Amis during their time at St. John’s College, Oxford, no one ever described him as a a social butterfly. Instead, we can assume his early experiences of isolation and introspection contributed significantly to the themes of loneliness, mortality, and alienation that characterize much of his later poetry.
The picture of Larkin that emerges from his letters and biographies is that of a somewhat asexual being, or, at the very least, as a man ambivalent about sex and intimate relationships.
(The persistent rumor that Larkin might have been the biological father of Martin Amis, the celebrated British novelist, is entirely speculative and unsupported by concrete evidence. Larkin’ was apparently fond of Kingsley’s first wife, Martin’s mother Hilly Bardwell, and he was a significant figure in Martin’s life, particularly as a kind of literary mentor, Martin Amis consistently expressed annoyance at this unfounded rumor, which he thought detracted from the real dynamics within his family.)
It seems that while Larkin was aware of and interested in sex as a concept he often distanced himself from its physical and emotional implications. While he did have a few significant romantic relationships during his life—most notably with Monica Jones, Maeve Brennan, and Patsy Strang—these were often marked by emotional distance, lack of physical commitment, or infidelity.
There’s plenty of documentary evidence to suggest he was uncomfortable with the physicality of sex and may have found the idea of sexual intimacy more troubling or complicated than appealing. Larkin was a practical sort; he didn’t think sex—or the maintaining of a relationship with a woman to ensure the availablity of sex—worth the bother. He had more important things to do.
Larkin was no more a Christian than he was a lover. He was raised not to be. The second child of an unhappy marriage, he described his long-suffering mother as “an obsessive, sniveling pest.” His father Sydney was an odd and unpleasant man who had admonished his son to “Never believe in God!”
In the 1930s, Sydney kept a statuette of Hitler on the drawing room mantelpiece in his home and a swastika and other Nazi memorabilia in his city treasurer’s office in Coventry, though whether he was an un-ironic supporter or simply a provocateur—what we might call today a “troll”—can be debated. It is said he once took young Philip to a Nuremberg rally, and the poet once allowed his father was “the sort of person that democracy didn’t suit.”
We should remember the British establishment had a deep infatuation with Hitler and Nazism in the early and mid-1930s; and while most of this support evaporated with the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, there was still a remenant of Hitler admirers until (and even after) the London Blitz. While many Brits were appalled by Hitler’s open antisemitism, Germany seemed to be flourishing under the vulgar little man who had abolished democracy and declared himself dictator in 1933. He was making Germany great again.
And while Larkin’s father might have been unusual in his enthusiasm, the British upper class was made up of people who democracy didn’t suit; they were still sending their daughters to German finishing schools and had them “doing the the season—attending balls, learning about art and husbandhunting—in Germany until the outbreak of war in 1939. Larkin’s father was hardly an anomaly.
Like most sons, Larkin’s feelings toward his father were complicated. Sydney shaped his son’s taste in literature and made him mostly unfit for human society as a terrible boyfriend. They fuck you up, your mom and pop.
By some lights Philip was a godless and miserable loner, an alcoholic who misused women, harbored horrible prejudices he often spoke aloud, and took no comfort in religion, which he called a “vast moth-eaten musical brocade/Created to pretend we never die.”
He was the sort of genius that the forces of woke would have shouted down and forgotten, consigned to consumption by his private demons.
He is one of my favorite poets. He was very unlike Bill Clinton, very unlike myself. But somehow he managed to be a cad too.
•••
“Annus Mirabilis” is a poem about the sexual and cultural liberation of the 1960s from the perspective of a conscientous objector, an intellectual deeply suspicious of the coming “brilliant breaking of the bank” which, while acknowledging the joyand excitement of the era ushered in by the lifting of the ban on Lady Chatterly’s Lover and the emergence of the Beatles, suggests that with iconclasm comes recklessness, and the new frontier’s era’s freedoms might come with unforeseen costs.
Another thing that occurred in 1963, that Larkin does not directly address in “Annus Mirabilis” is the Profumo affair, one of the defining scandals of the decade. John Profumo, the British Secretary of State for War, was implicated in a scandal involving Christine Keeler, a 19-year-old model. The gossipy itemn became a full-blown political scandal when it was revealed Keeler was also involved with Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché, raising concerns about potential national security breaches during the Cold War.
Profumo initially denied the affair in a statement to the House of Commons but later admitted to lying and resigned in June 1963. The scandal had far-reaching consequences, damaging the reputation of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s government and ultimately contributing to its decline.
Larkin published “Annus Mirabilis” in 1974, so its safe to assume the poem was at least informed by the scandal if not intended as a direct commentary. Larkin had to have at least thought about Profumo and Keeler when he set the poem in 1963; the affair is widely seen as marking the end of the age of deference in Britain, leading to greater public scrutiny of politicians. It contributed to the eventual resignation of Macmillan and the defeat of his Conservative Party in the 1964 general election.
Before 1963 was over, a quickie dramatized portrayal of the affair, The Christine Keeler Story (also known as The Keeler Affair) was produced in Denmark, with Christine Keeler and her friend and roommate, Mandy Rice-Davies, playing themselves.
According to the Internet Movie Database, Keeler and Rice were also played by, respectively, Yvonne Buckingham and Alicia Brandet. Drew Barrymore’s father, John Drew Barrymore, played Dr. Stephen Ward, the society osteopath and artist who introduced Profumo to Keeler. I have never had occasion to see the movie, which was effectively banned in the U.K. when the British Board of Film Classification refused to grant it certification in December 1963, but Box Office rather liked it, calling it an “uncompromising, poignantly probing dramatization of what will probably be the decade’s most sordid story of professionalized vice…. ”
Though the National Legion of Decency was reportedly condemned the film for its “‘irresponsible exploitation of a contemporary sex scandal,” the film was shown in the United States, with many theaters promoting the pruient aspects the NLD had found objectionable. A critic for The Blackpool Tribune, J A S Haworth, saw the film in Boston in 1964. He called it the “filmic equivalent to a sex comic,” and “cheap to a degree that hardly seemed possible,” but argued that it should have been allowed to screen in the U.K. for “nothing in its content fell within the legitimate considerations of the censor who has confused (or, more likely, had confused for him) the difference between embarrassment and moral indignation.”
“It seems likely that Haworth’s attitude to the film was, in part, politically motivated,” the British film historian and critic Richard Farmer wrote in the Journal of British Cinema and Television. Farmer points out that the “Tribune was a left-leaning publication” and Haworth saw the ban as “a wasted opportunity to lay bare the failings of the Conservative political elite as represented by Profumo and Macmillan.”
Farmer’s point is that Haworth may have been more interested in the film’s potential to embarrass conservative politicians than in its merits as a movie. Though Farmer could find no direct evidence that the BBFC was under pressure from the government to prevent the film from screening in the U.K., he wrote “it cannot be denied that the BBFC swam in political waters. It often worked in consultation with other bodies, both connected to and independent of the state, to ensure that films did not break the various laws that governed cinematic exhibition in Britain…. its leadership, particularly its presidents, ‘frequently had political connections.’”
•••
While a dramatization of the Profumo scandal was in theaters months after news of the affair broke, Clinton various sex scandals had been pulped for entertainment even before his affair with Monica Lewinsky was made public. Mike Nichols’s Primary Colors (the screenplay was credited to his longtime collaborator Elaine May) was released on March 20, 1998, which was just a few weeks after the Lewinsky scandal became public. While nominally fictional, based on the 1996 novel by political commentator Joe Klein (who had originally published it anonymously), there was no doubt that the character of Governor Jack Stanton (John Travolta) was based on the philanderer Clinton, or that while Emma Thompson’s was based on Hillary Clinton.
Both the movie and the book were based on—or “inspired by”—Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign (and both the movie and the book faltered a little when, in the final act, they strayed away from roman a cléf territory.) There was plenty of gossip about Clinton’s caddishness, even before I moved to Arkansas in 1989 I had heard stories about his rumored escapades, which included his attendance and cocaine consumption at Animal House-style “toga parties” in the early ’80s.
Clinton has consistently denied he ever went to one of these parties, if they even existed. I tend to believe him. I don’t know if any these allegations have ever been corroborated by credible sources. Many of the claims originate from individuals with agendas and their accounts don’t withstand serious journalistic scrutiny. While there’s plenty of evidence that Clinton may have on occasion done foolish things with his clothes off, there really was, beginning in the 1980s, a loose confederation of political operatives promulgating myriad unverified rumors in the hopes of damaging Clinton’s political career.
I talked to the Republican political strategist Lee Atwater in 1988 when he was working as campaign manager for George H. W. Bush’s successful presidential bid, and he told me that Clinton “gave him nightmares,” and that derailing his national political ambitions was crucial to the GOP’s strategy for maintaining long-term dominance in American politics. Atwater recognized Bill Clinton as a charismatic and highly skilled politician with the potential to unify key Democratic constituencies and appeal to moderates, which made him a formidable threat to Republican control of the White House in future elections. (Atwater assumed Clinton would make a serious run for the White House in 1996, not 1992.) He believed that undermining Clinton early—before he could solidify his national reputation—was essential to neutralizing his potential as a rival to the GOP’s vision for the country’s direction.
While Atwater explicitly didn’t tell me there was a vast right-wing conspiracy designed to thwart the Clintons, the argument that there wasn’t one boils down to semantics: it depends on your understanding of the word “conspiracy.” I don’t know that there were meetings held and marching orders handed out, but in the late 1980s people were offering plenty of incentive for people to surface information damaging to the Clintons. Some of what got surfaced was made up, most of it was at least exaggerated but it is reasonable to assume that Bill Clinton had the opportunity to do foolish things with his clothes off and he took advantage of at least some of those opportunities. Maybe he may never have attended one of those toga parties, but his reputation, even before the Lewinsky scandal was one of sexual rogueishness.
Late in the 1996 presidential campaign, Clinton’s Republican opponent Bob Dole attacked Clinton’s ethical record, seeming invoking National Lampoon’s 1978 classic movie Animal House. (Dole was familar with—or had at least seen—the film; a January 21, 1996 New York Times story reported he watched a video of the film before addressing a crowd of students at Dartmouth and filming an interview with MTV.)
“They’ve turned the White House into something else, I don’t now what it is. It’s the animal house! It’s the animal house!” Dole raved, “It’s no longer the White House….
I can’t believe any thinking American except the real partisans want four more years of this.”
•••
My feeling is that Bill Clinton may have been just a little too old for Animal House, the Jon Landis-directed 1978 frat-house comedy set in 1962 (before the Beatles’s first LP and the lifting of the Chatterly ban), before the ’60s began in earnest. When the movie was released, Clinton was serving as Attorney General of Arkansas, in the nascent stages of his political career. He would be elected Governor of Arkansas later that year and while he might have found time to see the film, I doubt it had the same kind of cultural impact on his life that it had on mine.
My college experience was weirdly informed by Animal House. It came out during my first full year in college at Lousiana State University and my college life in Baton Rouge directly imitated the film. My buddies and I conspicuously styled ourselves as Otters and Boons and went to toga parties where Joe “King” Carrasco played tequila reggae.
While I’m not someone who re-watches favorite movies as a pastime—it’s not a luxury I feel I can afford as a working critic—Animal House is probably the one movie I’ve seen more than any other. Whenever I run across it in the wild, I watch for a few minutes, if just to marvel at how young all the actors seems. It makes me smile. It transports to that post-adolescent limbo where women seemed so mysterious and strange to me.
In 2017, as the film was about to turn forty years old, there was a spate of hand-wringing, and some people decided it was a good time to to signal their virtue by declaring Animal House a very bad, not good at all movie that celebrated alcoholism and sexual abuse. (Of course it did – it was a movie about college-age males of privilege in the presumably innocent, pre-JFK-assassination ’60s.) But what was missing from most of these revisionist critiques of the film was any awareness that the filmmakers understood they were making a satire.
While Animal House is, abouve all, a commerically minded attempt to make a popular teen sex comedy, it also happened to be a very funny, very smart movie. (It’s not Blazing Saddles or Some Like It Hot, but for people like me who came of age in the late ’70s it was a significant cultural event.) But while it depicts college-age men doing horrible stuff, I’m not sure anyone should take it as an endorsement of sexist, homophobic or racist behavior. I’m not sure that anyone should look to the entitled white male characters in Animal House as models of how to live.
Yet I know people who did just that.
Lots of guys I knew modeled themselves on Tim Matheson’s portrayal of Eric “Otter” Stratton, a character that was a pivotal influence in shaping the archetype of the charming, quick-witted rogue in American comedy films. Otter’s blend of irreverence, charisma, and underlying cunning set a template for similar characters, paving the way for performances by actors like Chevy Chase and Ryan Reynolds.
Chase’s iconic roles in Caddyshack (1980) and Fletch (1985) carried Otter’s DNA, with his sarcastic charm and ability to effortlessly navigate absurd situations while maintaining an air of self-assured detachment. Decades later, Reynolds brought a modern iteration of this archetype to life, most notably in Van Wilder: Party Liaison (2002), a film directly inspired by the campus chaos of Animal House.
Reynolds’ sharp delivery, comedic timing, and mix of arrogance with vulnerability trace back to Matheson’s Otter, demonstrating the character’s lasting impact on the portrayal of the lovable, rule-bending scoundrel in film.
It is mere speculation to suggest that Bill Clinton may have modeled himself on Otter, but it’s not at all difficult to see points of congruency between the rogueish Clinton and the fictional Otter. (And while John Travolta did a fine impersonation of Clinton in Primary Colors, Matheson would have made an interesting casting choice. In my movie, Matheson plays the Bill Clinton manque, sprinkling a little of the Otter dust over the production.)
It certainly could be argued that Animal House was not good for American society. It absolutely inspired toga parties. It probably inspired a lot of binge drinking and boorishness. But young men have always drunk too much and behaved badly around young women. Reflecting that fact in fiction doesn’t necessarily glorify problematic behavior.
Animal House captured and exaggerated the ethos of a particular time and place, exposing the absurdities of privilege, the recklessness of youth, and the inevitable clash between conformity and rebellion. It’s satire, not scripture, and while it may have contributed to a few regrettable frat-party antics, it also stands as a cultural time capsule—a reflection of both the innocence and ignorance of its era. For better or worse, it left an indelible mark on comedy and on those of us who came of age alongside it.
It’s interesting that one of the scenes that people are now finding most offensive—the Deltas’ sortie to a black club to see their beloved Otis Day and the Knights is a actually a pretty shrewd parable about cultural appropriation (the Deltas, especially Boon, are looking to borrow the cool of their favorite bar band). And sure, the line about “primitive cultures” lands wrong today—it wasn’t funny in 1978 either—but if you allow comedy to be transgressive you’re going to experience moments when you involuntarily cringe.
Yes, there are people who are suggestible; who, despite all warning, will try out dangerous behaviors at home. I don’t know what we can do about them except patch them up or bury them, use their stories to demonstrate the types of idiocy to which our kind is susceptible. But do we really have to explain that one should not pose as the boyfriend of a recently deceased woman in an attempt to score with her roommate? Or that Bluto’s voyeurism is pathetic and creepy? The only moral one should take from Animal House is Dean Wormer’s observation that “fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”
The cynicism that the movie depicts is the cynicism that is in the world. I don’t think Animal House endorses the idea that a man like John Blutarski could go on to have a successful political career or that the nihilists of Delta House escaped any serious consequences from their behavior as undergraduates. Director Landis and writers Harold Ramis, Douglas Kenney and Chris Miller simply observed that this was the case. Lots of entitled behavior gets excused in this country, the guilty are not always brought to justice.
•••
I did not grow into myself in high school. I made good grades and I played sports—baseball, basketball and golf. I dated some—I went to all the dances and to parties— but not in any serious, purpose-driven way. I did not perceive myself as “cute” or “handsome” or particularly desirable. I knew that at some point my life would begin in earnest and I was anxious both for and because of that, but in high school I was just a child. I didn’t feel traumatized by the experience, I didn’t feel much at all.
I hung out with my friends, a group that included some girls, mostly girls who dated or wanted to date my buddies. I was happy to be their confidant, to hear their breifs and keep their secrets. It wasn’t until years later that I hear the phrase “friend zone” but that is the bin into which a lot of them sorted me.
And, in retrospect, I do not regret that. I don’t regret that I never knocked up a teenager or broke any schoolgirl hearts. The Animal House character I related to most closely was Larry “Pinto” Kroger (Tom Hulce), a Delta House pledge who embodies the archetype of the awkward, somewhat naive college freshman navigating the chaotic world of fraternity life. As a sophisticated moviegoer, I can tell you I was not alone; Pinto is one of the film’s primary points of identification for the audience, particularly for those new to college or feeling out of their depth in social situations.
Pinto’s big scene comes when he invites a young supermarket clerk named Clorette (Sarah Holcombe) to the Deltas’s toga party. When she actually shows up, they go up to the fraternity peresident. ’s bedrooms upstairs and begin to entusiastically make out. But as Clorette is removing her (tissue-stuffed) bra, she passes out drunk and vulnerable.
A “devil” (Hulce dressed in a cheap satin Satan costume) materializes on Pinto’s right shoulder, urging him to “fuck her brains out. Suck her tits. Squeeze her buns. You know she wants it.” This is countered by an angle (Hulce again) on his left shoulder who reprimands him: “For shame! Lawrence, I’m surprised at you!”
“Aw, don’t listen to that jack-off,” the devil retorts. “Look at those gazongas. You’ll never get a better chance.”
“ If you lay one finger on that poor sweet helpless girl, you’ll despise yourself forever.”
Pinto hesistates and it’s clear he’s going to do the right thing.
“I’m proud of you, Lawrence,” the angel announces.
The devil takes his leave, but not before taking a parting shot: “You homo.”
Cut to “Pinto” pushing Clorette in a shopping cart to her family home, which has a helpful sign designating it as the home of the town’s apparently mob-connected mayor. He rings the doorbell and runs off into the night, leaving her to answer to her parents. Near the end of the We later discover Clorette is only thirteen years old.
While the scene is played for laugh (and often cited as one of the reasons the film could not be made today) it is not a far-fetched scenario, and
Larry “Pinto” Kroger is, in many ways, the most grounded and realistic character in Animal House. Largely based on writer Chris Miller’s experiences at Dartmouth, Pinto embodies the uncertainty and awkwardness of early adulthood, contrasting sharply with the exaggerated caricatures of Otter, Boon, and Bluto. While audiences may wish to identify with Otter’s slick charm or Bluto’s chaotic bravado, most of us were far more like Pinto: earnest, inexperienced, and quietly grappling with moral dilemmas as we stumble through formative years.
Pinto’s relatability anchors the film’s humor and absurdity in something recognizable and human. His moments of indecision and awkwardness reflect the internal conflicts many of us face, particularly when navigating new social and ethical terrains in college. His big scene with Clorette—flawed as it may be by today’s standards—highlights the film’s self-awareness. It underscores that Animal House was never merely about celebrating bad behavior but also about acknowledging the struggles of young men trying to figure out who they are.
For all its wildness, Animal House endures not because it glorifies debauchery, but because it captures a messy, exaggerated, yet occasionally sincere slice of college life. Pinto reminds us that growth often comes not through bold, swaggering action, but through quiet, sometimes reluctant choices that reveal our character. In the end, we may laugh at Otter’s antics or Bluto’s absurdities, but it’s Pinto who stays with us—a reminder of our own awkward, striving, and imperfect selves.
I was more like Pinto when I was in college than I was like the other men of Delta House. For a long time I thought that was embarrassing. Now, while I don’t believe anyone deserves a medal for behaving decent, I’m glad I was like that.
•••
Between the ages of eight and twenty-one I spent a lot of time in locker rooms, on buses, and in the company of teammates and coaches, in testosterone-rich environments. Had I been more talented or more coachable, I might have spent even more years running, jumping, and chasing balls of various shapes and sizes across courts and fields. I was nothing special, but it’s still a big part of my identity. I have a limp, an oft-broken nose, and a certain physical (over)confidence that can sometimes get me into trouble.
I know I shouldn’t romanticize my time as an athlete. It taught me lessons, but those lessons might have been better learned in other ways, through other endeavors. We all go through stuff, and most of us eventually find the limits of our abilities and the fissures in our character; sports is simply one clean way to learn hard truths about ourselves. To be honest, chasing down the limits of my athletic potential probably delayed my entry into adulthood, which is not necessarily a bad thing but one that caused me some anxiety when I was younger.
My teammates and myself were not, for the most part, Boy Scouts. (Most of those who were literal Boy Scouts were as rude and rowdy as the rest of us.) We were young men primed with testosterone who had heard rumors of a sexual revolution; we did not always behave as gentlemen. We were frustrated and immature and not above crude remarks and insensitive behaviors. I’m sure some of us were bullies.
I don’t think I was.
This was not because I was any better than my friends but because I wanted to be universally liked. I was sensitive about other people’s feelings for purely selfish reasons. Had I had more self-confidence, more of what is these days celebrated as “swagger,” I might have tapped into some inner reservoir of cruelty. That I cannot remember ever purposefully doing so (I hurt what people I hurt by accident) means only that I was more self-aware and guarded than my friends. They played rougher than I dared to and I envied them their easy teasing and rough play. Even as part of a team I always felt a little apart, a sensation I know suspect is not uncommon among young people but at the time made me feel not exactly lonely but alien, a stranger to my tribe.
But my teammates weren’t criminals or monsters. Some of them were jerks and some of them were comfortable relating fantasy as fact and a lot more of them were sexually active than their parents probably imagined. But I don’t remember any scandalous allegations. We didn’t sexually abuse each other in locker rooms, and what hazing occurred seems mild and infantile compared to the serious incidents that seem to pop up in the news every few months in the 2000s.
My honest perception is that we were just boys trying to figure out what it meant to be men, armed with little more than bravado and the lousy role models provided by television and the movies. We thought we knew some things about love and sex, though in reality we understood little. For many of us, our relationships with women were defined by awe and fear. Girls our age were generally more competent and reasonable than us, and their attention felt miraculous. Even as a teenager, I marveled that they’d ever take us into their beds, much less into their lives.
I went out in high school, I dated in college, but I didn’t have my first real girlfriend until I was in law school and I handled that situation badly. (We broke up basically because I was scared of being in a relationship; she was a lovely person and I was a child.)
I didn’t have what I consider my first real adult relationship until I was in my mid-20s, and that one flamed out for pragamtic reasons. She found out what kind of money newspaper reporters made and I wanted to spend more time playing basketball and guitar in clubs than she wanted to put up with. At the time I might have said she broke my heart but I didn’t know what that meant yet—I wouldn’t find out that until my first marriage broke up and my soon-to be ex-wife quoted the lyrics of my favorite songwriters, T Bone Burnett, to me:
It’s a funny thing about love
The harder you try to be loved
The less lovable you are….
She might have been right about that; I’m aware that in the 2020s, young people talk about “the ick,” which is what you feel when someone to whom you are attracted does something awkward or clumsy that doesn’t land as endearing but as off-putting. I think my neediness became off-putting, and that there was no coming back from it.
Raymond Carver’s short story “So Much Water So Close to Home” comes to mind. It begins with four men on a fishing trip who discover a woman’s body floating in a stream. Instead of immediately alerting the authorities, they tether the corpse so it won’t drift away and proceed with their weekend of fishing and drinking. When they finally report their find two days later, the damage has already been done to their consciences, relationships, and community.
What’s chilling about Carver’s story is its plausibility. The men aren’t evil. They’re “decent men, family men,” doing what they think is reasonable. They rationalize their actions: The woman was beyond saving, it was too late to hike back, and they had already invested so much in the trip. Their failure isn’t from malice but moral laziness, a refusal to confront their responsibilities.
This story resonates because it exposes the fault lines of masculinity—the expectation to be strong, stoic, and detached, even at the expense of empathy or accountability. It reminds me of another archetype: the stoic, silent, solid man popularized by Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway’s protagonists endure quietly, carrying pain like a badge of honor. There’s a nobility in their stoicism, but also a dangerous implication: Strength lies in silence, and emotional vulnerability is a weakness.
But what happens when this ideal is distorted? When stoicism becomes an excuse for callousness and silence a shield for cowardice? The fishermen in Carver’s story embody this warped masculinity, tying down the body and moving on because confrontation would disrupt their comfort. They are Hemingway’s men gone awry—resilient and resourceful but blind to the moral weight of their actions.
This unexamined masculinity is the same breeding ground that fosters darker phenomena, like incel culture. Short for “involuntary celibates,” incels are men—mostly young, mostly isolated—who gather digitally to lament their failure to meet traditional masculine ideals. They blame women for their loneliness, decrying them as shallow or cruel. Some go further, justifying or committing violence in retaliation for their perceived exclusion.
At first glance, Carver’s fishermen, Hemingway’s stoic protagonists and incels might seem worlds apart. But they share a common thread: a refusal to confront their vulnerabilities and a reliance on outdated ideals of masculinity. The fishermen ignore the body because they don’t want to deal with it. Hemingway’s men retreat to the wilderness to wrestle with their demons in solitude. Incels rage against the world, externalizing their pain rather than facing it. In different ways, all of them are trapped by masculine myth that demands strength without introspection and control without compassion.
The irony is that the “strong, silent type” was never as strong as we imagined. Hemingway’s men are often broken. The fishermen in Carver’s story are indifferent, hoping their inaction will absolve them. And the incel, far from embodying masculinity, is its most tragic caricature—a boy screaming into the void because he cannot reconcile his humanity with the impossible standard he feels he must meet.
Where does that leave us? The answer lies not in rejecting masculinity but in re-imagining it. We don’t need more men who matter-of-factly leave a body in a stream and move on, or who bottle their pain until it consumes them. We need men who are brave enough to face their fears, failures, and responsibilities—not out of a desire to dominate or prove themselves, but out of empathy and accountability. We need men who see vulnerability not as a weakness but as a bridge to connection.
There’s a scene in “The Old Man and the Sea” I sometimes think about. Aging fisherman Santiago has hooked a great marlin but cannot reel it in. For days, he battles the fish, speaking to it not as an adversary but as a worthy companion. “I’ll stay with you until I’m dead,” he tells it. Hemingway frames this struggle as heroic, but the real heroism lies in Santiago’s willingness to acknowledge the fish as something more than an object to conquer. He doesn’t tether it and move on. He stays, he suffers, he learns.
The question Carver asks—what kind of man sees a body in the water and decides to keep fishing?—still matters, not just in literature but in locker rooms and classrooms across the country. We must reject the silent, stoic archetype and embrace a masculinity that values vulnerability, connection, and responsibility to answer it. Because the strength to confront what lies in the stream—pain, fears, or failures—is the only real strength.
I don’t know Bill Clinton, though he was once my neighbor (and later I lived next door to his mother-in-law). But even though he presents as an Otter, I suspect he grew up feeling more like Pinto. I suspect him of basic human decency.
There’s a quiet comfort available in knowing that it’s not the swaggering charmers who truly define the story. It’s the ones who hesitate, reflect, and occasionally, however imperfectly, make the decent choice. Pinto’s small victories remind us that it’s okay to stumble, to second-guess, and to grow through awkwardness. Animal House have inspired a generation of toga parties and questionable decisions, it also left us with a character who stands as a testament to something simpler and truer: that sometimes, it’s the small, unsung choices that define who we are.
Men still do foolish things with their clothes off, sometimes, if they have a chance.
But sometimes, like Pinto, we do the decent thing. We don’t deserve to be lauded for that, but it needs to be acknowledged. Sometimes the angel wins.
Where Kael Now Need? 