April 29, 1994
PCU fits nicely into my theory of the summer of ’94 – that it was a time when boomers were looking back while gen-xers were moving in – by sort of melding those two things. The first sound you hear in it is Mike Bloomfield at the Monterey Pop Festival saying something about “this is our generation, man,” and then a song sampling Jimi Hendrix’s voice over modern dance music. It seems to be saying “Look, this is like the ‘60s, only it’s the ’90s!,” and in fact comes from an album called if ’60s were ‘90s.
This is the directorial debut of DIE HARD’s Harry Ellis himself, Hart Bochner, but it’s written by two fresh-out-of-college twentysomethings, Adam Leff & Zak Penn. It’s probly meant to speak to young people, but its attitude is that almost all young people are brain dead idiots… all but a few wild and crazy guys brave enough to scoff at everyone else’s beliefs because they don’t personally care about that kind of stuff so people who do must be faking it.
All fraternity comedies are pretty much based on ANIMAL HOUSE, right? A canonical boomer classic. PCU follows the standard campus comedy storyline: a rowdy fraternity hated by the authorities is going to get kicked out of their building if they don’t raise a bunch of money fast, so they throw a big party. And the modern spin on it is yeah, you have your old idea of fraternities, but it’s different now, it’s harder to get away with that stuff. But we do what we can, on account of we are outrageous party animals like you wouldn’t believe. ’90s style! I have a Hammerbox poster in my dorm room, to name only one example.
The school is called Port Chester University, but we know the PC also stands for politically correct, because can you believe all this political correctness they got on the campuses these days!? It’s a new very current thing to 1994, I heard about how out of control it is from some old man who has a column in my dad’s U.S. News and World Report. If we don’t stop it soon who knows what racist slurs we’ll even be allowed to use openly?
Port Chester banned the Greek system in the ‘60s, so the central characters who live in a building called “The Pit” are not technically a fraternity. They’re just some bros and a couple of sisses who share a building and love to party, man, as well as to rock and roll and rollerblade and skateboard indoors. Basically ninja turtles except not ninjas or turtles.
There’s a dorky point-of-view character, Tom Lawrence (Chris Young, WARLOCK: THE ARMAGEDDON), a “pre-frosh” visiting the campus and assigned to stay with the Pit’s senior (held back?) leader of charismatic douchebaggery Droz (Jeremy Piven, THE PLAYER, JUDGMENT NIGHT). Droz tries to pass him to Gutter (Jon Favreau in only his fourth film, including being an extra in HOFFA), who’s introduced moshing alone in his room, but he’s busy, so Droz tells Tom how “it’s a whole new ballgame, and it’s called PC, politically correct,” and walks him through campus. Every single other student is a cartoonish buffoon yelling political slogans: “save the whales” (an obviously noble crusade that was a cliche to mock in pop culture back then), “gays in the military now” (another no-shit-sherlock kind of cause that somehow was controversial at that time), “free Nelson Mandela” (the joke is that he was already freed, what a dummy this guy would be if he existed, really makes you think). Droz labels others as “cause heads” who move from one cause to the next. If you don’t care about anything it seems like a gotcha to point out someone cares about more than one thing.
The only non-Pit character portrayed as vaguely sentient is Droz’s ex-girlfriend Sam (Sarah Trigger, BILL & TED’S BOGUS JOURNEY), a sweetheart who clearly still likes him and is charmed by his dick jokes but has been peer pressured by “the womynists” into not dating white men. This is thankfully one of the few scenes that comes off as straight up white grievance/homophobic shit, this paranoid fantasy that the lesbians and the PCs are pressuring other women to hate white males. Otherwise, scolding someone into saying “freshperson” instead of “freshman” is the type of scorching hot, take-no-prisoners political satire you’re in for with this movie.
There’s actually a line of dialogue here that I think is funny: “You participated in a phallus-naming?” But it’s part of a caricature of feminists that smacks of “I’ve never talked to them but I’ve seen them around so trust me, I’m in a very good position to make uncharitable assumptions about what they would theoretically be like.” A few minutes later there’s a big “vegan” protest where they’re chanting against, specifically, red meat. Vegans of course don’t eat any animal products, let alone differentiating between different meats, but the filmmakers didn’t even know the basic definitions of the beliefs they felt deserved mocking.
Of course all of the Black people on campus besides Pit member Mulaney (Alex Desert from The Flash and The Heights) walk around together listening to their “leader” (Kevin Thigpen, JUST ANOTHER GIRL ON THE I.R.T.) talk about white devils and accuse people of being in the CIA. And there are jokes like protesters play bongos and the school uses recycled paper. I’m gonna tell Serial Mom on these fuckers for that last one.
One example of how this is not your father’s frat comedy (or at least wasn’t at the time) is that the uptight dean is… hold onto your socks, fellas… a woman! Jessica Walter (GHOST IN THE MACHINE) plays President Garcia-Thompson (is the last name meant to be a dig?) who promotes sensitivity training and multiculturalism and there’s a big joke about how she’s changing the mascot from an offensive Native American stereotype to a whooping crane. Can you believe it? So silly.
Ms. Garcia-Thompson has received many complaints about The Pit, on account of their wacky antics, such as throwing raw meat at the vegan anti-red-meat protest and putting speed bumps on the wheelchair ramp (what the fuck?). Preppy Republican alumnus Rand McPherson (David Spade in the role he was born to play) has been pressuring her to give The Pit back to his not-a-fraternity, which is called Balls and Shaft. If that’s supposed to be a double entendre I’m not clear what the non-dick-related entendre is. The president thinks she can kick The Pit out if they either don’t pay a damage bill on time or reach a certain number of complaints. I respect Walter not going too over-the-top, giving this one note character a little more humanity than you’d expect.
Tom gets chased around by various angry PC mobs he accidentally offends (I’m telling you – out of control!) and he’s about to go home but one Pit member, Katy (Megan Ward, ENCINO MAN), thinks he’s cute and kisses him so he stays and tricks the people chasing him into going to the party.
The part of this movie solely responsible for me renting it when it came out on tape is that Gutter happens to be asked directions by the tour bus for George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars. They decide they’re going to miss their gig but they give him a ride home, and Droz convinces them to perform at the party. I read that the writers wanted Nirvana to be the band in the movie, but then they got too big for it. I can’t imagine they ever would’ve been interested, but that would’ve been so bizarre! Especially since it would’ve had to end with a solemn dedication to Cobain.
Anyway it’s really funny that they wanted the hottest band of the time and instead got some old weirdos who were actually my favorite band in the world. As a fan it was a pretty rewarding representation of them in that era. You get to see a bunch of the band (many of them since passed), they play “Give Up the Funk,” plus a new one called “Stomp” that’s pretty good. Don’t know if it was short-listed for the Oscar or anything. The highlight is that since he was signed to Paisley Park at the time Clinton chose to do a cover of Prince’s “Erotic City.”
I would rank this as the second best George Clinton movie appearance. The best is THE NIGHT AFTER starring Keanu Reeves and Lori Laughlin. The advantage there is that it’s all original songs from a weird period of their discography, and they had Bootsy with them (he generally didn’t perform with George in the ‘90s). Also it’s just really funny for those guys to represent one of the scary things two white kids see when they accidentally end up at an “urban” bar.
Some PCU P-Funk trivia that I don’t remember if I picked up on at the time is that in the scene where Gutter talks to their bus driver that is P-Funk’s actual bus driver. I know this because at the time Clinton had a gimmick that he could turn anyone funky, even their bus driver “Babblin” Louis Kabbabie. So he would come out and perform this rap Clinton wrote for him, and he always brought down the house. I’m sure he was a fine bus driver too (other than getting lost on the way to Hartford).
The thing that’s less accurate is how it seems like all young people are super familiar with and fans of Parliament-Funkadelic. That was not my experience. The idea that the stoner guys are going to the show is kinda believable though.
As far as fitting into the theme of this movie, they are a poor choice, since yes, they sing about dancing and partying, but Clinton was big on having meaning behind it all, and definitely doesn’t subscribe to Drozism. Free your mind and your ass will follow.
In the end Droz saves the day by interrupting the president’s bicentennial event and getting all the other students to chant “WE’RE NOT GONNA PROTEST!” I honestly don’t understand how this story point even works other than that the young people are supposed to be so malleable that they would protest about not protesting (I guess?). Ha ha fuck all the young people except me and a small group of friends who are above it all.
20th Century Fox didn’t get whatever PCU was, and made the absurd decision to cut it to a PG-13 (for the 12 and under crowd hoping to get a preview of what’s going on on campus) and gave it an absolutely dog shit poster featuring art of a guy wearing a pizza box as a graduation cap. (See? Ninja turtles.) Arguably the DVD cover, with Piven photoshopped to have polka-dotted boxer shorts on (because underwear is funny), is an upgrade. The movie flopped at the box office, but got popular enough from playing on Comedy Central all the time that people the right age know of it, and may even love it. There are worse movies, even released around the same time. It’s competently made, with a pretty good cast, but as you can tell I find it most interesting as a history of a particular attitude that has somehow survived with minimal evolution.
The Pit people definitely aren’t meant to be bigots or anything like that. We’re supposed to take Droz’s sexist remarks in that “oh, what a rascal” ‘80s comedy way, and they pointedly have two women and one person of color as members. (No known gays to balance out the stereotyped “Gay Activist” character [Jonathan Wilson].) The primary antagonist, Rand, is explicitly a Republican, and they instigate his downfall by getting him to go on a racist and homophobic rant on a hot mic (over loudspeakers, but somehow he doesn’t notice it’s happening, it’s strange). So we know that makes him a piece of shit but to Droz it’s just a way to turn the PC police against him. So PCU is a preview of that South Park style “both sides are dumb and the only smart thing to do is not care” centrism – or as President Garcia-Thompson puts it, they’re “warped nihilists.”
It occurs to me that Spike Lee’s SCHOOL DAZE (1988), Doug McHenry and George Jackson’s HOUSE PARTY 2 (1991), John Singleton’s HIGHER LEARNING (1995) and the sitcom A Different World (1987-1993) were all about college around this same era, and they all had some jokes about activists on campus being uptight, but overall they portrayed it as admirable for students to be politically engaged, and maybe wrong not to be. To understand why those movies and television would have a different attitude than this one you would have to be familiar with the concept of white privilege, which was not widely discussed in those terms back then, but we know for absolute certain there would be jokes about it in a 2024 remake of PCU.
Screenwriters Leff & Penn based the script on their experiences at Wesleyan University, where they were friends with members of Eclectic Society, a fraternity founded in 1938 that became a co-ed co-op living space in 1970 when the students split with the alumni primarily due to a disagreement about recreational drugs. Other than that the Eclectic Society don’t sound like the group in the movie at all – they follow Quaker-style consensus decision making and have a bunch of arty alumni including the co-founder of the Blue Man Group, the gay rapper Kalifa, the singer and performance artist Amanda Palmer, three members of MGMT, the Afghan-American filmmaker Jem Cohen, and Himanshu Sur of Das Racist. Okay, and also Joss Whedon and Willie Garson. But most of these people would be made fun of by Droz and friends, wouldn’t they?
Maybe it was different when Penn did his own pre-frosh visit and stayed with the real life inspiration for Droz. In a Vice oral history of “the Culture Wars Cult Classic,” Penn says “Almost all of the people in the movie have some basis [in real people].” For example “Gutter is a dumb version of my very smart friend, Marc Flacks, who had dreadlocks and quit the football team to follow his Marxist studies desires.”
But the article also says, “They attended Wesleyan during a tumultuous time that included protests over the school’s investments in Apartheid-era South Africa, a push for more faculty of color, and the firebombing of the president’s office.” Two of those seem like very good things to be involved in! (Here’s a 2018 article from the Wesleyan newspaper with some Black students and professors’ memories of the issues on campus at the time.)
The Vice piece says “Almost 30 years later, many of the ideas that PCU skewered have returned as national debates on wokeness and cancel culture. These subjects have become an obsession in cable news, talk radio, podcasts, social media platforms, and political messaging.” I would put it a different way: this shit is fucking decades old, and the type of people who always get riled up by it still haven’t caught on to that, so the laziest hacks and sleaziest grifters are gonna keep coming back to the topic forever, because it’s easier than doing actual work.
Here’s some information you may not know about college students. Most of them are around 18-22 years old. Many of them are living away from their parents and among their peers for the first time, and have come to this place specifically to learn. So they’re more open to new ideas than most and are inundated with them at a high rate. They will learn from each other, some of them will become newly passionate about activism, some of them will carry these lessons through the rest of their life, most will chill out, for both good and bad.
Among these activist college students there may be some radicals who will say or do some stupid shit. And then they will grow up. It’s part of the process. Droz said and did some stupid shit too, it was just related to beer or boobs instead of stopping a war, so it was never held against the wider movements of beer and boobs. So whether it’s today or 30 years ago, if some huckster’s focus on a particular national or global issue is what some small group of 19 year olds supposedly said about it at a protest on a college campus you will never have any reason to set foot on, it’s likely one of these three things:
1) They think you’re stupid and will believe them that this is something an adult human being who has nothing to do with these people should get all worked up about.
2) They themselves are just very, very stupid, or
3) they are some kind of weird old pervert dudes getting too involved in some drama they saw while creeping around outside of the dorms.
I watched PCU and wrote most of the above weeks ago, before campus protests suddenly became front page news again. Students at colleges all around the country (including Wesleyan) continue to stage protests related to the ongoing annihilation of Gaza, demanding their schools divest from Israel just as Leff and Penn’s peers demanded with a different apartheid.
At some schools the students have gotten concessions, in others they’ve received a ludicrously out of proportion police responses. You could hardly ask for a more vivid portrait of our society’s suicidally foolish priorities than the NYPD’s raid on an occupied Columbia University administration building. We refuse to use our resources to heal or shelter our fellow citizens, or just try to make life good, because I guess it makes us feel tougher or something to overpay a bunch of thugs to dress up in ridiculous sci-fi armor and brutalize people for non-violent civil disobedience-related infractions like being on a lawn or in a building past closing time. As depraved as it is stupid. (Note: Funkadelic has an album called America Eats Its Young.)
Obviously Leff & Penn weren’t thinking of it that seriously, and I don’t think they want to be associated with the bozos who have moved from complaining about “politically correct” to complaining about “woke.” Penn says, “It was an affectionate look at the absurdity of the whole situation… back then, it more felt like this crazy little subculture of a bunch of schools that we just happened to live through.”
So I don’t want to be too harsh. But I will be. When I think about the college age activists who were right about the Vietnam war, and segregation, and women’s rights, and AIDS, and apartheid, and Iraq, and Afghanistan, and police brutality, and Gaza, and many other things, then I think about smarmy Jeremy Piven with his t-shirt tucked in like somebody’s dad snuck onto campus, smirking and wisecracking at some hippie who happens to be right but supposedly for the wrong reasons… I just have no choice but to tell this movie to go fuck itself. Sorry PCU, you’re gonna have to turn in your Rage Against the Machine CD and go take that job at your father’s lobbying firm like you were planning to anyway. As Funkadelic says, take your dead ass home.
legacy: Being in their mid-twenties, and just getting started, Leff & Penn really did become a bridge to the future of Hollywood. They had already sold their first script, INCREDIBLY VIOLENT, which would be drastically rewritten to become THE LAST ACTION HERO. And of course that was a big failure but it was also ahead of its time in its meta-ness, something Penn would do with a little more (financial) success decades later with READY PLAYER ONE and FREE GUY. Leff didn’t last as long, only getting story and executive producer credits on BIO-DOME after this, but Penn became a major player in the evolution of comic book movies. He has story or writing credits on X2, ELEKTRA, X-MEN: THE LAST STAND, THE INCREDIBLE HULK, and (crucially) THE AVENGERS. Remember, at the time it seemed kind of unfair that IRON MAN director and fictional The Pit member Jon Favreau didn’t get to direct THE AVENGERS, but real life Eclectic Society member Joss Whedon did a good job.
signifiers of the time: Gutter wants to go to “Grunge Night.” The soundtrack includes Gruntruck, Mudhoney, The Modern Lovers and Swervedriver. “Afternoon Delight” is used as the ultimate cheesy song to torture people with.
tie ins: Mudhoney did a video for their cover of “Pump It Up” (which plays during the ultimate frisbee scene) where clips from the movie are seen on a TV.
May 6th, 2024 at 7:26 am
“Balls and Shaft” is likely a play on Yale’s “Skull and Bones.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_and_Bones