What is the fascination with movies about substance use disorder in college fraternities and sororities? Do the movies reflect real life, or is real life trying to reflect these movies? Either way, it looks as if we should consider changing the way we depict Greek life (fraternity and sorority life) in the movies.
There are quite a few movies that link Greek life and substance use disorder. In May 2016, the film Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising hit movie theatres. This movie is a sequel to the 2014 movie Neighbors. Both movies feature college students making questionable choices, including using illegal drugs.
The Neighbors movies aren’t the only movies featuring such behavior by college students, of course. There’s a long tradition of such college movies. In National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), several characters drink a great deal of alcohol, while characters in Revenge of the Nerds (1984) smoke marijuana joints. The movies show how these substances change the behavior of the characters who are using them.
In real life, using such substances can produce more than massive toga parties or goofy behavior. Every year, it seems that we hear about college students who die from alcohol intoxication after attending a college party or drinking numerous shots for their twenty-first birthdays. A number of sexual assaults have been linked to alcohol and/or drugs used intentionally or unintentionally, such as GHB or Rohypnol (roofies).
Intoxication can also cause problems that are less serious but still troubling. Fraternity members under the influence of drugs and alcohol have destroyed property and created general messes for their universities and others.
Are the movies creating these problems directly? No. They aren’t obviously telling people to be destructive. But on another level, these movies are kind of glamorizing (or at least minimizing) drug and alcohol use.
They’re also exaggerating it. While some fraternity and sorority members do abuse such substances, many do not. There are alcohol-free fraternities. In addition, most sorority houses in the United States follow long-standing rules that forbid their members to serve alcohol in their sorority houses.
Sorority members say that this alcohol-free rule stems from the fact that many of their members are under the legal drinking age. That’s a good point. After all, most people tend to start college as teenagers, which is under the legal drinking age of twenty-one. Excessive drinking is not just a physical problem (students’ health) or an institutional problem (problems for colleges and universities). It can also be a legal one. A legal problem that can be easy to avoid.
