30 years ago, ‘PCU’ showed the timelessness of anti-woke sentiment

The 1994 comedy demonstrates that every op-ed about college kids going way, way too far, is based on very old ideas.

Have you heard that college kids today are just the worst and have gone way too far with their leftist politics and their tendency to always be offended?  

You’ll likely hear that every single day on Fox News and throughout most of the rest of the conservative media, whether it’s centrism-coded places like Bari Weiss’ website or the further-right fever swamps of Breitbart and the Daily Wire.

But you’ll hear something similar from plenty of places in the liberal media too; few topics are dealt with more frequently on the New York Times op-ed page or in The Atlantic as the scourge of out-of-control college kids. You’ve likely also heard about this pressing problem from every last touring comedian who’s ever bombed at a college gig. 

That’s the prevailing attitude now. But it was also the attitude ten years ago, 20 years ago, 25 years ago (when I was in college)… and 30 years ago, when a Hollywood movie called PCU was produced, that made all the same arguments that should sound very familiar today. Hell, older people in the 1960s probably felt much the same way about the original hippies, many of whom are now pushing 80. 

You could say PCU was ahead of its time- or that that time never went away at all.

PCU hit theaters in April of 1994, although it took some time to find its audience on cable and eventually DVD. The film was directed by Hart Bochner, best known as an actor in a long list of movies between the 1980s and 2000s, most notably his part as Ellis, the doomed Donald Trump, Jr.-lookalike cokehead in Die Hard.