IMMORTAL GREEKS. Jon Landis' reflections on Animal House in the New York Times are slightly surprising. I've long disliked Landis -- whenever I saw him on TV during his trial for supervising the stunt in the 1983 Twilight Zone movie that killed Vic Morrow and a couple of kids, he always had this shitty what's-the-big-deal grin on his face. But he did direct Animal House, and that buys considerable slack. And he said some good stuff in the Times:

• He went out of his way to credit Doug Kenney, Chris Miller, and Harold Ramis for writing the picture. The first two, particularly, don't get enough credit for their National Lampoon work, and the NYT namecheck is a nice gesture.
  
• He said he was trying to make in Animal House his own version of the old-fashioned college pictures with Rudy Vallee and Jack Oakie. That's a good reference, shows scholarship, and may direct some heretofore clueless Blutarsky fan toward silent comedy. (Landis included Buster Keaton here, too, and must have been thinking of the film College, one of my personal favorites.)
  
• Landis has an insight that hadn't even occured to me over many years of loving Animal House. He says:
  

  Why do people romanticize the military and romanticize college? You're 18, and you're out of the house. There's a great line in Animal House: 'We can do anything we want. We're college students!' In addition to everything else, the movie somehow captures that sense of youthful exuberance and excitement, of being out there in the world.

  
  This adds to my enjoyment of this film, and serves as a useful reminder that, to a large extent, the adventures of Bluto, Flounder, Pinto et alia are not only (or even primarily) antiestablishment nose-thumbing, but constitute an ingenious conflation of the bildungsroman and picaresque traditions. Which is to say, maybe the boys of Delta House remain popular (whereas the boys of Van Wilder and other, similar entertaiments never became so) because they resonate with the eternal. We may not all be frat boys, but we all know the attraction of getting out of the house, and of killing Niedermeyer's horse. Figuratively speaking, of course.