(Many are now answering "yes" to all of those questions, but that's another mater) Animal House encourages excessive drinking, women as sex objects, rock 'n' roll as a way of life, and the party as a state of grace. It says that anything goes, as long as it goes with style. Style is the key element, because otherwise, what distinguishes you from the riffraff?

Getting shitfaced drunk and riding around campus naked on a motorcycle is cool because it shows style. Getting shitfaced and puking in the jacuzzi isn't cool, because it doesn't. Your fraternity brother's main reason for existence is to witness your exploits with style. You must have witnesses or what's the point? It's as important to regale your comrades with verifiable tales of stylish exploits as it is to have them. In fact the reason behind the deeds may, in fact, be to have something about which to tell stories.

Animal House is a litmus test of affinity for the rock 'n' roll sensibility. Either you have it:

"it finds some kind of precarious balance between insanity and accuracy, between cheerfully wretched excess and an ability to reproduce the most revealing nuances of human behavior." Roger Ebert's Movie Home Companion.

Mick Martin and Marsha Porter's Video Movie Guide - "If you're into rock 'n' roll, partying and general craziness, this picture is for you. We gave it a 95, because it has a good beat and you can dance to it." (Now that's a review.)

or you don't:

Leonard Maltin's TV Movies and Video Guide, "Spoof of early 1960s college life is only sporadically funny, depends largely on Belushi's mugging as frat-house animal",

Harold Schechter's The New Gods, Psyche and Symbol Popular Art, "the film, is clearly a low-budget production and often amateurish ... the crudeness, the primitivity of the film - its choppy editing, cheap look and narrative incoherencies serve to convey the essence ... as does the puerility of the humor, which consists entirely of very broad slapstick and childish, vulgar jokes."

Halliwell's Film and Video Guide - "A ragbag of college gags, of interest only to those who have had the experience."

So Animal House's success as one of the most lucrative comedies of all time ($140 million in North American theaters) shouldn't have come as such a surprise: the movie divided the world into those with the rock 'n' roll sensibility and those without it. And it still does.

Please see a discussion of the film soundtrack here.