Thanks to VCR’s people in the eighties for the first time were able to watch their favorite movies over and over again from the comfort of their own homes. I happen to be among the first generation to grow up with this feature and there is one movie that I specifically remember being ridiculously popular with girls my age. I remember my sister, her friends and all of my friend’s sisters and their friends watching this movie on a seemingly endless loop. Dirty Dancing was essentially crack to women born between 1978 and 1985. During my sisters multiyear viewing of Dirty Dancing I do not think that I ever actually sat down and watched the whole thing all the way threw so a few months ago I went back to actually and objectively try to see what all the fuss was about. I did not like Dirty Dancing, I did not like it at all, I would in fact argue that the far stronger dance movie of the eighties is Footloose, another movie that I watched for the first time maybe a year ago.
At their cores both of these films are coming of age stories. Baby (Jennifer Grey) is a smart, idealistic, thoughtful young woman who believes in justice and equality but doesn’t understand the ins and outs of social order and class. When she sees injustice, she is they type of girl who rushes in head first to fight the system, ironically the only great injustice taking place at the upper class Jewish vacation resort is that the entertainment staff is told not to fuck any of daughters of the guests. Baby will not stand for such inequality; she won’t stand for it for one second. Ultimately this movie is about a rich girl who needs to screw Patrick Swayze in order to achieve social justice.
I argue that Footloose’s Ren (Kevin Bacon) is the far more relatable and sympathetic of the two protagonists. Ren is basically a normal guy whose life gets flipped upside down after his father leaves the family forcing him and his mother to move from Chicago to the middle of small town America to live with his aunt’s family while mom tries to find work. Ren, like most teenagers is not especially smart or talented, he wants to get by at his new school without getting tortured and hopefully make a few friends in the process. Dancing is an outlet for Ren and when he learns that the ultraconservative totalitarian local government has stolen the freedom to dance from its people he finds a cause that is truly meaningful to him and worth fighting for.
Considering the audience (6-12 year old girls) a disturbingly large amount of Dirty Dancing is devoted to a girl getting an abortion, in fact the entire plot and all of the conflict within the movie revolves around this abortion in one way or another. Baby first learns to dance with Johnny (Patrick Swayze) because the “knocked up” girl needs to get the abortion and then when the abortion goes wrong Baby enlists the help of her father to fix the botched procedure, setting up the main conflict for the rest of the film.
Footloose also features the sexual indiscretions of a teenage girl, Ariel (Lori Singer) the love interest sleeps around but her behavior is used to deepen our understanding of the character and the world in which she inhabits. The reason that dancing is banned in this town is because there was a car accident after a dance in which several of the towns best students died, one of the students in the wreck was Ariel’s brother. The town overreacted to the tragedy by banning dancing while Ariel deals with her grief by screwing losers and generally acting out.
Baby’s father is actually the only reasonable character in all of Dirty Dancing but everyone else is to fucking dumb to see it. After fixing the botched abortion the Father asks “who is responsible for this girl?” to which Johnny replies “I am”, this (very reasonably) leads him to believe that Johnny screwed this girl and got her the ally abortion. When he discovers that Baby is sleeping with this guy too he is understandably upset and no one bothers to tell him that Johnny was not the father of the fetus until the scumbag real father lets it slip at the end.
In Footloose John Lithgow plays the preacher father of Ariel who spearheaded the anti-dancing legislation. What I especially like about this character is that he is far more nuanced than the filmmakers could have made him. The reverend is a father who lost a son and reacted strongly at the time but is now beginning to see the flaws in his oppressive belief structure. He is a reasonable man who is trying to do the right thing for his family and his town rather than a zealot stereotype.
The final dance routine in Dirty Dancing is OK and the famous final move is set up well but the problem I have with the seen is a problem that I have with the whole movie, it is set in the early sixties and yet eighties song keep popping up intermixed with the R&B classics. The world in which they inhabit does not make sense. Like in Back to the Future when Michael J Fox plays Johnny Be Good people love it but when he breaks into a Van Halen they freak out. They are playing music from twenty five years in the future and no one notices the strange new rhythms.
The final dance seen in Footloose however is absolutely transcendent. Throughout the film, high school kids are fighting for their right to dance and it has finally happened, one would think that a lifetime without dance would not a great dancer make but you would be wrong!!! These kids are so overjoyed with that fact that they can finally dance that they actually turn into the world’s greatest dancers and it is awesome. Plus the Kenny Loggins song absolutely rules, seriously is there anything that gets you jumping more at a wedding than Footloose?
The thing that is especially heartbreaking about Dirty Dancing is what will inevitably happen after the movie ends. Ultimately the same class structures that Baby rebels against by sleeping with Swayze will keep them apart. She is still going to college and he will end up working a blue collar job after a few more years of dance instruction. Baby has actuality used Johnny just like all of the other rich ladies had and is going to throw him out just the same, they might write for a bit but she will end up with one of the guys from Harvard and he will end up the play thing of some rich widow or with the blond who got the abortion.
In the end Dirty Dancing is arrogant enough to assert that the power of dance can bring all races, religions, ages and classes together while the kids in Footloose just want to dance.
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