Summary
Bluto lies on the ground bemoaning that he just sent "seven years of college down the drain!" The other brothers look upset as they realize they have to leave Faber. Suddenly, Otter comes in, badly beaten up, and sits down on a ragged couch. When the guys tell Otter they've all been kicked out of school, he can hardly believe it.
All of a sudden, Bluto stands up and makes an impassioned plea to his brothers that they should try and fight their expulsion, saying, "Nothing is over until we decide it is!" He runs out of the house expecting them all to follow, but everyone remains seated and defeated. Coming back in the room, he implores his brothers to make the best of their situation and fight back. Otter stands and agrees with Bluto, insisting that they need to fight back, saying, "I think this situation requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part." Boon and D-Day stand, then everyone else stands and rushes out of the room to fight back.
We see D-Day and Bluto destroying Flounder's brother's car as part of the plan as triumphant music plays.
Pinto goes to Carmine's daughter's house and throws pebbles at her window to no avail. Eventually, he throws one hard enough, but it completely shatters the window. She sticks her head out the window, but thinks his name is Tommy when she sees him. He asks if she wants to go for a walk, and they go to the football field to have sex. Lying on the field, Pinto tells Carmine's daughter that he's a virgin. Giggling, she tells him that she's a virgin too, and that she's actually only 13 years old. His eyes widen in horror.
At the homecoming parade, Wormer and his wife ride in the back of a car waving at the crowds assembled. In the midst of the crowd, Robert Hoover takes a seat on top of a mailbox, in a trench coat and dark sunglasses, holding a mysterious bag. When Katy greets him and asks him where Boon is, Hoover tells her that they got expelled and that she ought to leave the parade. Meanwhile, at a store, Flounder asks the clerk for 10,000 marbles.
As Carmine, his wife, Dean Wormer, and his wife take the stand, Wormer blows a whistle and the parade begins. After signaling to one another, the Delta brothers set their prank in motion, sending a decorated car towards the parade. A series of floats go past, and Neidermeyer leads a group of gun-wielding students in formation. Surreptitiously, Hoover sidesteps his way along the perimeter of the parade, and another of the brothers grabs the baton being twirled by the twirler at the front and begins leading the parade in a new direction.
The parade makes its way down an alleyway towards a dead end. The marching band charges towards the wall, which stalls the parade, and Hoover attaches a chain to a passing float, which causes it to come crashing to a sudden halt and break apart, taking down a nearby telephone pole.
All of a sudden, the Delta float, which says "Eat Me" on the side of it, comes barreling down the street, crashing into another float and throwing it off course. Hoping to counteract the chaos caused by the Delta float, Neidermeyer orders his troops to charge the float, but Flounder unleashes his box full of marbles into their path, causing them to fall down. A fire starts and all hell breaks loose, with floats coming apart and storefronts getting shattered. The Delta brothers dismantle the exterior of their float to reveal the car propelling it within, a black car with flames and skulls labeled, "Deathmobile."
Bluto and Otter emerge from the Deathmobile, as Boon and the others drive the car directly towards the bleachers on which Wormer and his associates are standing, sending it crashing to the group. In the aftermath, with Wormer is lying on the ground, Hoover goes up to him and asks for him to give the gang one more chance. A supertitle tells us that Hoover grows up to become an attorney. Carmine's daughter runs up to her parents with Pinto in tow and introduces him as "the boy who molested me last month" and uses this as a reason they ought to get married. A supertitle tells us that Larry becomes an editor for National Lampoon.
Otter comes up behind Greg and punches him in the face, and a supertitle tells us that Greg becomes a Nixon White House aide, and is "raped in prison." Other supertitles tell us that Otter becomes a gynecologist in Beverly Hills, Neidermeyer gets killed in Vietnam by his own troops, Flounder becomes a "sensitivity trainer," D-Day goes missing, Boon and Katy get married and then divorced five years later. Bluto drives away with Mandy and a supertitle tells us that they eventually get married and he becomes a senator.
Analysis
The Delta's brothers' greatest asset is not their brains or their fighting spirit, but their grasp of the fundamental stupidity of life, their ability to out-stupid the competition. When everyone's spirit is sunk by the news that they have been expelled, the stupidest among them, Bluto, makes a stupid speech to jolt them out of their complacent misery. Eventually, he convinces Otter, who agrees that they need to make a "really futile and stupid gesture" in order to get back at their oppressors, and the boys are filled with a fighting spirit once again. In Animal House the biggest animal wins, and the stupider the plan, the more successful it is.
Many of the jokes in the film play out as every straight guy's worst nightmare. Pinto's seduction of Carmine's daughter is continually ruined, first by her blackout drunkenness, and then by the revelation that she is actually 13 years old. Just as Pinto gets excited that he is finally going to lose his virginity to a beautiful woman, he discovers that she is not a beautiful woman at all, but a minor. The comedy of this scenario rests on our seeing that Pinto is constantly working himself up into an erotic state only to be undermined by forces outside of his control.
One of the defenses that might be made of Animal House is that no subject matter is off-limits when it comes to its satire. Critics that might resist its political incorrectness would be hard-pressed to make a case that political correctness was ever the filmmaker's goal. Every character and scenario is fodder for a potentially offensive gag, and the film—like its characters—seems to thrive on its own irreverence. Nowhere is this more evident than at the homecoming parade, where the brothers' staging of an elaborate prank looks more like a terrorist plot or an assassination attempt than anything else.
The ending of the film is a chaotic one, and true to form, does not take the subject matter particularly seriously. The brothers of the Delta fraternity get back at their naysayers by staging a particularly outrageous takeover of the homecoming parade, turning the whole event into a messy free-for-all. Nothing very specific happens, but the Delta brothers take over leadership of the parade and generally spread mischief, the best revenge they can have on their rule-abiding and uptight dissenters.
We do not learn what the fates of the Delta brothers are in the short term, but supertitles illuminate their longterm destinies. These are mostly humorous taglines that add to the satire. For instance, Bluto, the student who has been in college for seven years and seems to barely be able to form a sentence, becomes a senator and marries Mandy, the beautiful sorority girl. A supertitle above an image of Katy and Boon kissing tells us that they get married, before another one appears telling us they divorce five years later. These ridiculous prophecies serve to tie up loose ends of a story that was never aiming to be particularly tightly tied, and assure the viewer that Animal House was not made for those who like to invest in a realistic drama.
