‘I’d rather be an anarchist than a professional’: Why the brilliant but troubled John Belushi continues to fascinate us

In the years between bringing down President Nixon with All the President’s Men and chronicling the presidency of Donald Trump in his new book Rage, investigative journalist Bob Woodward wrote a book about the comedy star, John Belushi (1949-1982).  

Why? Belushi appeared in only seven movies, none of them classics. His on-screen persona was on the obnoxious side. His off-screen behaviour was erratic and self-destructive in the extreme. Nonetheless, close to 40 years after the comedian, aged only 33, took his fatal “speedball”, a cocktail of cocaine and heroin, he continues to fascinate writers and filmmakers as well as the public at large. He is like a gross-out version of James Dean. He may not have died pretty but he certainly died young. In his short life, he led an impressive trail of anecdote and destruction behind him. Many believe he was a comic genius. 

“I’d rather be an anarchist than a professional,” Belushi proclaims in the trailer for Belushi, a new Showtime documentary from RJ Cutler, the filmmaker behind fashion documentary The September Issue and hit country and western soap opera, Nashville, premiering later this month. This trailer reminds us of what a big star Belushi once was. When he was 30, his latest film, The Blues Brothers (1980), was top of the box office charts; he was part of one of America’s most popular TV shows, Saturday Night Live, and his outrageous frat comedy, National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), was breaking records on video. Everybody, from earnest broadsheet journalists like Woodward, to Hollywood big shots like Steven Spielberg, who cast Belushi in his movie 1941 (1979), was drawn to him. 

You can also understand why students like Belushi. He appeals to the neolithic part of the adolescent male brain. Watching his films now, they still make you chuckle, even when you feel they shouldn’t. In Animal House, he is a menace but a lovable and irrepressible one.  His character, John “Bluto” Blutarsky is the biggest slob in the Delta house, the worst behaved of all the fraternities at Faber College. He looks up cheerleaders’ skirts. He is first seen in the film accidentally urinating on some freshmen’s shoes. Director John Landis told him to play Bluto as a “cross between Harpo Marx and the cookie monster”. That’s exactly what Belushi did. In spite of his appalling behaviour, the character remains sympathetic and even child-like. 

Certain scenes in Animal House would be too creepy, predatory, and sexist for a mainstream comedy today. Take the moment he climbs up a ladder so he can peer through a top floor window at one of the sorority women getting undressed. Flute music plays as he gawps in ecstatic wonder through the glass. She unhooks her bra and slowly pulls down her underwear. His excitement is such that it causes the ladder to topple backwards. This is the kind of voyeuristic slapstick that British audiences of the time would have expected to find in a bad episode of The Benny Hill Show but Belushi plays the peeping tom with unlikely charm. 

Audiences reportedly threw popcorn in delight during another of the film’s set-pieces in which Bluto, in a diner, is seen stuffing his face with burgers. Greasy morsels are spilling on to his chin. The preppy young students sharing the table, including one played by a very young Kevin Bacon, are revolted by him. “See if you can guess what I am now,” he taunts them, pushing what appears to be an entire ball of mozzarella or a huge scoop of mashed potato into his mouth. He then slams his hands into his own bulging cheeks causing the half-chewed food to explode outward in hundreds of gooey white fragments. ”I’m a zit,” he explains as if he has just squeezed the pus out of a human-sized boil. Again, it’s very base but very funny. 

Belushi has relatively few lines but steals the movie. He is equally proficient at the slapstick and at the verbal comedy. Late on, he gives a rousing speech to his fraternity colleagues when they are faced with expulsion. “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbour – hell no!” he roars, getting his history tangled up. “It ain’t over now. When the going gets tough…. the tough get going.” Belushi knows just when to pause for maximum comic effect. 

The title of Woodward’s book about Belushi is revealing: Wired. Reviewers continually use the same language about the star. “He (Belushi) looks as if he were plugged into an electric socket,” The New York Times’ s Mel Gussow wrote of the comedian’s performance as the limb-twitching, hoarse-voiced British rock singer, Joe Cocker, in the 1973 musical revue, National Lampoon’s Lemmings. “His face gives the permanent impression of demented anger lurking barely beneath the surface,” Rolling Stone wrote in a 1978 profile of Belushi. He was called the “most electric” actor of his generation. There were continual references elsewhere to Belushi’s manic edge and energy. 

Outsiders can’t help but marvel at how Belushi sustained his career when he was indulging in such vast quantities of cocaine, quaaludes, and whatever else was to hand. It would be a mistake, though, to view the star’s story as yet another cautionary tale about a talented performer making it to the top and then destroying himself through his drug-taking. In Belushi’s case, the drugs propelled him upward. The more successful he became, the more he needed them. The child of Albanian immigrants, he had been born into humble circumstances and was living his warped version of the American dream. A talented high school football player, he was, in his own way, very disciplined. He was also ambitious. When his movie career blossomed in the late 1970s, he would start the week on location, making films like Animal House and Jack Nicholson’s western, Goin’ South. Then he would fly back to New York to rehearse and star in Saturday Night Live at weekends. That’s a gruelling schedule that would have destroyed a less committed actor. 

The more popular Belushi became, the more dependent he became on the drugs in order to live up to the expectations fast building up around him. ”Giving or selling drugs to John was a kind of game, like feeding popcorn to the seals at the zoo; give him a little and he would perform, be crazy and outrageous; a little more and he’d stay up all night, outdancing, outdoing, outlasting everyone around him,” Woodward wrote of Belushi’s behaviour at the time he was preparing to star alongside his friend and Saturday Night Live colleague, Dan Aykroyd, in The Blues Brothers. 

Chicago-based critic Roger Ebert, who had known Belushi for a number of years, had similar observations. “I remember John from the early 1970s, in Old Town, where, to put it cruelly, you’d put drinks into him like quarters into a jukebox, and he’d entertain everyone in the room.” 

Belushi himself explained his drug use as a reaction to “the pressure, the demands, the hours. You need drugs to deal with everything this business puts on you. It’s hard to be on for everyone all the time”. 

Whether the drugs were Belushi’s way of escape from the stress of performing or a means of pushing himself to new heights on stage and screen, they destroyed him. The murky circumstances of his death are chronicled at length in Shawn Levy’s book The Castle at Sunset, about the goings-on at legendary Los Angeles hotel, the Chateau Marmont. Levy portrays Belushi in February and March 1982, in the days leading up to his death, as “a waste site, a mess”, a man at the end of his tether. Cathy Smith, the groupie and drug dealer who injected Belushi with the fatal “speedball”, later served 15 months in prison for manslaughter for her part in the affair. 

It’s striking how much older and more careworn Belushi appears in The Blues Brothers than in Animal House, released only two years before. This wasn’t his final movie but it’s the one that everybody remembers him in. Forty years on, it stands up remarkably well. The plot is wafer-thin. Jake (Belushi), just released from prison, and his brother Elwood (Aykroyd), put together their old band in a bid to raise $5,000 to stop the Catholic orphanage where they grew up from being closed down for non-payment of property taxes. 

This was a famously troubled production. It soared over budget, partly because of Belushi’s prodigious drug use and erratic behaviour. Nonetheless, it’s a wildly energetic and entertaining affair, full of rip-roaring car chases and flamboyant musical interludes featuring legendary blues and soul artists. Belushi underplays beautifully. Whether being shot at by his estranged former girlfriend (Carrie Fisher) or having bottles hurled at him by rednecks at a country and western bar or performing unlikely feats of acrobatics to the accompaniment of a James Brown song, he wears the same deadpan expression throughout. Even so, when he and Aykroyd are performing the theme song from TV western show Rawhide or driving their souped-up police car head-on at a rally of American Nazis, Belushi looks to be enjoying himself. Who wouldn’t, amid such delirious mayhem? 

Dour, downbeat Woodward-style accounts of Belushi’s life and times fail to acknowledge the pleasure he still brings to audiences. If you’re searching for a defining image of the troubled star, it’s surely far better to think of the musician in the dark suit, hat, and sunglasses on a mission from God to save the orphanage than of the dishevelled figure whose life ended in such pathetic fashion at the Chateau Marmont. 

RJ Cutler’s documentary ‘Belushi’ is a world premiere as the opening film of the Chicago International Film Festival, 14-25 October. ‘The Blues Brothers’ and ‘Animal House’ are available on VOD