The Problematics: ‘Revenge of the Nerds,’ a Comedy That Actually Recommends Rape

The grounds for condemning the 1984 comedy Revenge of the Nerds are so self-evident that it’s almost shocking that streaming services still carry the movie. And yet they do. You can watch it on Hulu right now, as a matter of fact. And, in so doing, can readily discern that the movie condones rape. Recommends it, even.

No matter what you might think of National Lampoon’s Animal House as a cinematic entertainment, the 1978 unexpected blockbuster can absolutely be objectively held accountable for wellspringing. Its success spawned probably hundreds of garbage-raunch teen comedies which depicted all manner of sex-offender behavior and to add insult to insult, framed it all as boys-will-be-boys fun. See the most persistently famous of such films, 1980s Porky’s, which depicts peeping-into-the-girl’s-locker-room as a legit war-between-the-sexes tactic rather than a violation and a criminal offense. 

It took a long time after Animal House for another overtly collegiate romp to catch box-office and cult fire — stuff like Porky’s took things back to high school, and the tradition of spring break, filmmakers found, was a better way to bring off large amounts of female nudity than campus class time did. Revenge of the Nerds turned the trick by contriving a then-contemporary conflict between the future masters of Silicon Valley (only we didn’t know it then) and some dumb jocks.

The movie takes its sides in the opening credits, with a title font approximating computer typeface and a theme song that’s a bit of a Devo rip. (Because Devo used synths, which are musical computers, and moved like robots on stage, and that kind of thing.) Robert Carradine, who’d done some good work as a Serious Actor by this point (he’s superb as a PTSD-riven Vietnam veteran in 1978’s Coming Home, for instance) throws himself into the role of Lewis, a slide-rule master with an overbite and a loud guffaw. Anthony Edwards is Gilbert, the softer, quieter nerd. Their arrival at Adams College is greeted by a derisory chant from the balcony of a jock frat house. Soon that frat house burns to the ground (alcohol related, of course), and the jocks take over freshman hall, kicking out Gilbert and Lewis and setting the stage for various thrusts, parries, recriminations, and ultimately the title revenge.

For a long time the movie is surprisingly tepid. The lead nerds fall in with various others of their social strata, including an Asian, an African-American gay man, an advanced high school student kicked upstairs to college, a guy literally named Poindexter (Timothy Busfield), so on. They gang acquires a house, fixes it up, and scheme to get into the Greek system. The jokes are mild, but build a little icky steam at the house’s first party, at which the kid finds two pairs of large female breasts at eye level and gives an “I’ve got it made” look at the camera (see also Airplane!, in which little Johnnie ogles an adult woman’s derriere as she’s walking up the cabin’s center aisle) and Curtis Armstrong’s “Booger” is seen squeezing the butt cheeks of each of his zaftig dance partners while burying his face in their cleavage. These gents are starved for attention indeed.

Fifty minutes in, things start getting a little rank. Under the pretext of pulling a “panty raid,” the nerds install surveillance cameras in the dorm rooms of various attractive coeds and stay up all night watching these young women in various states of undress.

Now this, of course, is completely illegal.

It gets worse. “Booger” provides running commentary, to wit, “This is bullshit. I want bush. Pan down.” Lewis has installed cameras that can do that remotely, and so he does. “We got bush. We got bush,” “Booger” enthuses. “Hair pie” says Asian Nerd Takeshi, in a deliberately exaggerated accent.

Guys, guys, guys.

Again, as in Porky’s, this is treated by the film (which, now is a good time to point out, was directed by Jeff Kamen from a script by Steve Zacharias and Jeff Buhai and was executive produced by David Obst and Peter Bart) as just a thing that fellows do. 

While Gilbert has contented himself with Nerd Girl Judy (Michelle Meyrick), Lewis has a thing for Pi sorority leader Betty. To the extent that for the college fair he’s selling pie plates with a nude shot of Betty on their bottoms. Which is bad enough. But when Lewis sees Alpha frat boy and Julie paramour Stan in a Darth Vader mask telling Betty she needs to wait until later for nookie, Lewis sees his opportunity. He filches the mask, puts it on, and leads Betty into the funhouse for some sexual intercourse. For which he keeps on the mask.

Of course this is unsustainable. But Lewis has ravished her! “You’ve done things for me” that others, e.g. Stan, “never done before.” This apparently takes the sting out of rape by fraud. “Are all nerds as good are you?” Betty asks. “Yes,” says Lewis. “Because all jocks think about is sports. And all nerds ever think about is sex.”

This of course is a fallacy, but not one worth dwelling on. What is worth dwelling on is that not only does Lewis face neither ethical or legal consequences for rape, he’s consistently rewarded for his actions for the remainder of the movie, and gains Betty as a girlfriend. Crazy, right?

One thing that the journalism about sexual harassment and assault in recent years has demonstrated is that there are a disturbing number of men out there who believe that acts clearly defined as illegal, unethical, and just plain disgusting are excusable on the frequently aforementioned boys-will-be-boys grounds. Our President himself was able to skate over his bragging about committing sexual assault by characterizing confessional prattle as “locker room talk.” Animal House gets a lot of criticism for its party-animal-frat ethos, but despite the hundreds of late-70s/early ’80s real-life toga parties that followed in its wake, that movie wasn’t overtly programmatic. It had a couple of relatively dimensional female characters. And when push came to shove and one of its sexually deprived freshman was presented with the opportunity to have sex with a passed-out female, he declined to do so. (He later had relatively sober and fully consensual sex with her on a football field, or maybe he didn’t, given the scene cuts away as she tells that she’s thirteen.)

Revenge of the Nerds, on the other hand, doesn’t even come close to ambivalence when depicting the above-described actions. It presents the rigging of the cameras a louche at worst, and is completely on board with what it no doubt believes to be Lewis’ “seduction” of Betty. It’s jaw-dropping.

Other points of, um, interest are mainly in the casting. Anthony Edwards went on to become Anthony Edwards: Dead Meat in Top Gun (1987), Mark on ER, and so on. Timothy Busfield went on to become a 30Something. Matt Salinger, one of the mean frat boys, is the son of the guy who wrote about a prep school kid who hated “phonies.” Ted McGinley, the cuckolded Stan, went on to play a hapless husband on Married With Children. The person I was most disappointed to see on re-viewing this movie was young John Goodman, who plays the football coach who actually encourages the nasty Alphas to trash the nerds’ house. And while the movie’s attempt to align the nerds’ struggle with American racial inequality is laughable-in-a-not-good-way, it goes down a little easier because Bernie Casey is playing one of the group’s black allies.

“No one is really gonna be free until nerd persecution ends,” Gilbert vows in a “rousing” speech at the movie’s end. Good grief.

Getting beaten up in high school is bad, on the one hand. But on the other, today’s social media reveals that there are a not insignificant number of people out there who could have benefited from more constructive disapprobation in their teens than whatever it was they actually got. Revenge of the Nerds clarifies this idea in several respects.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny.

Where to stream Revenge Of The Nerds