DIRTY DANCING
1987
Starring: Jennifer Grey, Patrick Swayze, Jerry Orbach
Dir.: Emile Ardolino
Plot: The dance-card-carrying Communist Manifesto
Key line: ‘Baby. Corner. Don’t make me say it.’
You know those montage scenes in old movies where a writer hammers out a few lines, rips the paper out of the typewriter, throws it into a wastepaper basket in sheer frustration . . . and then starts again?Well, whatever the laptop computer equivalent of that is, Dirty Dancing’s got me doing it.
At first, it was going to be kicked off by an essay on why women like this movie so much. Then I realised that this was based on a great many sexist assumptions about women, so . . . wastebasket.
Once I’d reminded myself that I own a penis, I thought I might try writing about the entire movie from a male perspective. I mean, I’m a relatively heterosexual man – married, kid, love football, The Clash, gangsta rap and movies in which short Italian-American men ask you to say ’ello to their leedle friends – and I adore this über-chick flick, so that seems sensible.We could start with the post-coital scene where Baby (Grey) asks Johnny (Swayze) about his sexual conquests, and the guy takes the oldest seduction trick in the book to the kind of virtuoso extreme which would win first-prize and air-punching approval at the annual Iron John Man’s Man Beaver Hunt dinner and dance. He unloads a bunch of stuff about how rich, hot older women just throw themselves at him, and how no red-blooded male could possibly turn it all down. And when the girl looks all hurt and says it’s OK, she understands, because he’s using them, he . . . now get this, lads, ’cos this is priceless . . . opens his eyes wide in panic, looks all abused and misunderstood, and says: ‘No. They used me.’ And then he actually moistens his eyes at the painful memory of having to fuck all those women. What can any girl do? She gives him a look that says, ‘I really am the only woman who understands you, aren’t I?’ and jumps the guy’s bones. And the Beaver Hunt Lifetime Achievement Award goes to . . .
But taking that tack implies that the Dirty Dancing phenomenon is entirely bound up with tiresome gender war. And, while many of us might occasionally disconnect our occipital lobes completely and marvel at the oeuvres of Sandra Bullock and Danny Dyer, no one is going to make them iconic. Dirty Dancing has grossed $222 million and counting on an initial production budget of $4 million. It was the first film to sell a million copies on video. It spawned two multi-platinum soundtrack albums, a successful prequel and a stage show. It’s such a universal cult among Western women that it is occasionally referred to as ‘the chick Star Wars’. It did all this despite being shot by a choreographer who had never directed a movie before and the fact that its romantic leads hated each other’s guts in real life.
You know the ‘Hungry Eyes’ bit, where Swayze keeps stroking Grey’s arm and waist and she keeps bursting into laughter, and Swayze looks angry and glances off-camera in exasperation? That wasn’t carefully scripted spontaneity. He kept stroking, she kept giggling because it tickled, and he wanted to strangle her because the two had taken an instant dislike to each other on the set of Red Dawn (see here) and Grey had nearly quit the movie when she’d learned that Swayze had been cast. She wanted Billy Zane. But the boy couldn’t dance.
And yeah . . . both the number-crunchings and the gossip about Swayze and Grey were potential starting points, too. Wastebasket.
And then I went off on one about Jennifer Grey’s nose. It deserves a loving tribute, because, like poor Patrick Swayze and Emile Ardolino, it’s dead. The biggest shock on the DVD of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (see here) involves watching the Making Of doc, and this moderately attractive but unremarkable woman starts talking who you figure made the tea or gripped the key, whatever a key grip is, and the name Jennifer Grey flashes up. The weirdness isn’t the plastic surgery. In Hollywood? Say it ain’t so! It’s the fact that this is really good plastic surgery, whereby the woman’s face looks so natural that you wonder why Joan Rivers or Pete Burns ever had to exist. It’s not some horrible butcher job. But Jennifer Grey now bears no resemblance, at all, to the girl in those ’80s films. None. Totally different person.
But that’s the point. She was once Barbra Streisand’s obvious heiress, the world’s favourite Jewish princess. She now looks like any pleasant WASP in the street.
The temptation here is to conclude that killing her USP was some kind of self-hating Jewish thing. But projecting that upon someone I’ve never met feels kinda racist. Besides, she’s the daughter of the great Joel Grey, who became a sort of proxy anti-Nazi legend with his astonishing performance in Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (he also has a great Bad Guy cameo in Season Five of Buffy, but I digress). Whatever Grey Jr’s reasons, she admitted that her appearance changed so radically that it was ‘like being in a witness protection programme or being invisible’. Invisible girls aren’t stars. Her acting career evaporated and she was last seen, with something approaching irony, winning the 2010 season of America’s Dancing With The Stars celeb dancing contest.
Generations of women don’t fall in love with a movie en masse unless they strongly relate to its female protagonist. The nose was crucial because, even though Grey is luminously beautiful in Dirty Dancing, it’s a beauty that looks natural, unforced, unthreatening . . . and attainable. Anyone can look at her one obvious imperfection, and imagine that, in the right circumstance, in the perfect moment . . . they too can be luminously beautiful and pull Patrick Swayze (or insert your own stud-muffin; I realise he wasn’t everyone’s cup of beef ) too. How can anyone so fail to see that their ‘worst’ feature was the thing that every fan adored? As career suicides go, that rhinoplasty rates pretty high.
I like the nose. Hell, I love the nose. But I finally decided to start with something else. It comes from a scene that won’t rate too high among DD fan faves, but will resonate among fans of the Mad Men TV show. Because these two very different screen winners share one crucial thing in common. It’s a book called The Fountainhead.
Baby has discovered that working-class dance instructor Penny has been knocked up by middle-class Robby, who is only waiting tables at the Kellerman’s dance holiday camp in the Catskills to make some spare money before going to an Ivy League college. Baby, being kind of a busybody, goes to Robby to try and persuade him that a rich brat like him could at least give the devastated Penny the money for an abortion. The cad is not playing. ‘Some people count, and some people don’t’, he smirks. He then gives Baby a battered copy of The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand by way of explanation.
The Fountainhead was a huge American cult best-seller in the late ’50s and early ’60s, and was one of the key texts that the beats and hippies were rebelling against. It is a novel about an architect named Howard Roark who lives his life with an uncompromising adherence to the principle of individualism over collectivism. Roark wants to pursue his architectural vision of gleaming modernist buildings, and would rather starve than give financiers or ordinary people what they want . . . or, rather, what they think they want, because, compared to his intellect and will, the masses are mere ants who actually have no idea what they want until men like him give it to them. Roark is a Nietzschean Übermensch who bends society to his skyscraper will, and also the reason why evil architects start popping up in ’60s movies like Beat Girl (see here).
The most controversial passages of The Fountainhead concern Roark’s rape of Dominique, and the powerfully eroticised vision of a strong man conquering a woman in the same way that he conquers everything else . . . and the woman loving it. The book was made into a film starring Gary Cooper, and it has a startling final shot, as Cooper/Roark poses, hands on hips, on the roof of his enormous phallic building, and we shoot up an elevator to meet him, literally shooting up his colossal penis and into the sky to worship a man who proudly straddles the entire world. Hitler would have loved it.
Incidentally, Ayn Rand was a woman.
From the moment screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein opted to put that
book in the hands of the movie’s Bad Guy, she was not simply writing about getting off with the cute boy at the holiday disco. She is taking Rand’s hotch-potch conservative philosophical theory of Objectivism to task, and trying to gently inform the viewer about why America was not better before 1963, the year in which Dirty Dancing is set. One interesting little factlet about teen movies is that the four most commercially profitable films in this book are set between 1955 and 1963, the semi-mythical era when kids in their teens became teenagers, rock ’n’ roll was invented, whites learned to dance like blacks, the clothes and hairstyles were deathlessly cool and everyone had a thrilling and rebellious time without need of booze and drugs, because digging those jungle rhythms in the pre-civil rights era was more rebellious than felching a crack dealer on the living-room rug while Mum and Dad are watching Heartbeat. But American Graffiti and Back To The Future both insist that life was better before the onset of ’60s radicalism and liberalism, and Grease is too busy dancing and laughing to really care. Dirty Dancing loves the ’50s music, but, otherwise, it depicts a world, in the shape of the ludicrous Kellerman’s resort, riddled with class and race divisions, hypocrisy, exploitation and back-street abortions, which is all sorted out, in the end, by a Jewish liberal idealist who teaches everyone who comes near her the value of social mobility, sexual freedom, personal sacrifice, racially mixed physical expression through dancing, and, as everyone dances together at the movie’s end, and she and Johnny are simply absorbed into the group, the triumph of collectivism over the individual. When Johnny gets up onstage and announces his love for Baby, he doesn’t evoke anything so shallow as her beauty or as wishy-washy as her loving nature. He’s pulled her out of the corner – and her father’s well-meaning but overly patriarchal influence – because she ‘taught me that there are people willing to stand up for other people no matter what it costs them. Someone who’s taught me about the kind of person I wanna be.’ The girl isn’t a hot babe who dances a bit. She’s fucking Gandhi!
So maybe that iconic shot, when Johnny raises Baby high above his head on the dance floor, and the lights hit her, and the room cheers and whoops, and it delivers a great little metaphor about how a woman can only trust a man with her heart if she can trust him with her body . . . you could also look at it as the union between working-class authenticity and middle-class liberal idealism, supporting each other as they stride purposefully into the 1960s establishing civil rights, gay rights, human rights . . . and a woman’s right to choose. You could. Or maybe just I could. I really like this movie.
But if we go back to that ‘what women want’ thing, I don’t think it’s too much of a leap to suggest that Dirty Dancing is a winning rarity . . . a female wish-fulfilment romance with a foundation in populist feminism. In fact, it’s Where The Boys Are (see here) for the ‘women can have it all’ generation. Apart from the obvious pro-choice anger of the abortion sub-plot, there is a wonderfully sly moment among the all-dancing joys of the final act. Baby says, at the beginning of the movie, that it’s impossible to find a man who matches up to her own father (Orbach). And the bond is so strong it has the unhealthy side effect of sidelining her mother from vital decisions. Dad lends Baby money without consulting Mom. Dad jumps to conclusions without even talking to Mom. And Baby colludes in the patriarchy by being completely uninterested in Mom, to the point where she is a bit-part character. Moreover, Baby’s sister is a both a rival to Baby and a comic character, doing terrible songs onstage, competing with Baby for her father’s affections.
So we get to the end, and, even as Johnny is making his impassioned speech about Baby’s qualities and whisking her onto the dance floor, Dad is still all glowery and pondering whether to go a bit Fountainhead and take back ownership of his prize possession. But Mom, finally, intervenes, and gently insists he butt out. And, as Baby dances and Dad sees her as the young woman she is rather than the baby he thought she was, Mom turns to him, smiles, and says, ‘I think she gets this from me.’ It’s such a clever line, undercutting Dad’s chauvinism with knowing humour, and suggesting a back-story between the Housemans that implies that there’s more to this traditional relationship than we’ve seen.
So these are some of the reasons why I love Dirty Dancing. Yes . . . the music’s cheesy. The romantic plot is corny. The film-making simplistic and the dancing probably not as good as it thinks it is. But then, that last point is probably why it kicked off a new wave of mass enthusiasm for learning to dance. (Strictly Ballroom? Great movie. But it’s a remake of Dirty Dancing with the irony turned on.) Unlike those old Astaire and Kelly moves, you watch these dances and believe, with a little training and some laying off the junk food, that you could do it too.
Okay . . . the Communist Manifesto crack was overdoing it a bit. But . . . made you look. Because I really want the haters to watch Dirty Dancing again. Go with it. And if you really don’t feel anything when Baby gets her man, you’re just trying too hard not to.
HEATHERS
1989
Starring: Winona Ryder, Christian Slater, Shannen Doherty, Lisanne Falk
Dir.: Michael Lehmann
Plot: The film that wanted to take out John Hughes.
Key line: ‘I love my dead gay son!’
Dear Diary,
My teen angst bullshit has a body count.
Betty Finn was a true friend. But I sold her out for a bunch of Swatch dogs and Diet Cokeheads. There were three of them, and their names were Heather, and they made me play croquet, for deeply symbolic reasons I never understood. Then I saw Him in the school cafeteria. He had the beauty of James Dean, the voice of Jack Nicholson and the mannerisms of that old guy in the flasher mac out of Columbo. Who does that guy in the coat think he is anyways . . . Bo Diddley?
Anyways, the boy’s name was J.D. and he gave me shower nozzle masturbation material for weeks.
So we got freaky on the crocquet pitch and I told him my teen angst bullshit about the Heathers. Heather One ruled the school and was a primo beeyatch. I once asked her why we can’t speak to different kinds of people at school and she replied, ‘Fuck me gently with a chainsaw! Do I look like Mother Teresa?’
Now, it’s one thing to want somebody out of your life. It’s another thing to serve them a wake-up cup full of liquid drainer. But that’s what J.D. (J.D. – I’ve just realised that stands for juvenile delinquent! If only I’d picked up on that!) did. Heather One went down face-first through the glass coffee table. I said, ‘Oh my God! I can’t believe it. I just killed my best friend!’ J.D. said, ‘And your worst enemy.’ I said, ‘Same difference’. I’m sardonic, even in a crisis.
You’re wondering why I didn’t talk to my parents. I tried and all my Dad could say was, ‘I don’t patronise bunny rabbits.’ He’s such a pillow case. ‘Great pâté’, I said to Mom, ‘but I gotta motor if I’m gonna be ready for that funeral.’
But before I’d had time to process that mindfuck J.D. was shooting these two dumbass jocks who push cows over in their spare time and planting mineral water on their bodies to prove they were homos. We live in Ohio.
Next day at school, it’s all, ‘Did you hear? School’s cancelled today because Kurt and Ram killed themselves in a repressed homosexual suicide pact.’ I mean, sure . . . Kurt and Ram had nothing to offer the school but date rapes and AIDS jokes. But before we know it that idiot hippie teacher Pauline has encouraged the school and the local media to group-hug over the tragedy of teen suicide, and offing yourself has become school’s coolest fashion statement. Mother of shit!
By now, Heather Two has become Heather One by default and is regaling me with shit like, ‘Veronica, why are you pulling my dick?’ Yeah . . . call me when the shuttle lands. J.D. figures she has to go. But then he figures we all have to go. He’s, like, waiting ’til I burn my hand with the in-car lighter and sparking his cigarettes off my molten flesh. What’s your damage? Are we going to prom or to hell?
Now I tell you: I’ve seen a lotta bullshit. Angel dust. Switchblades. Sexually perver
se photography exhibitions involving tennis rackets. We live in Ohio. But J.D. planting a bomb in the high school basement was like bulimia . . . just so ’87. So I shot him and he strapped the bomb to himself, which allowed me a cute pay-off where I lit my cigarette off his incinerated remains. So kiss my aerobicised ass.
I blame not Heather. But rather a society that tells its youth that the answers can be found in the MTV video games. The name of that righteous dude that can solve their problems? It’s Jesus Christ. And he’s in the book. After all, the only place where different social types can genuinely get along with each other is in heaven. It’ll be very.
SOCIETY
1989
Starring: Billy Warlock, Devin Devasquez, Ben Slack, Evan Richards, Patrice Jennings, Ben Mayerson
Dir.: Brian Yuzna
Plot: So this is why Margaret Thatcher kept insisting that there’s no such thing as society . . .
Key line: ‘We’re one big happy family. Apart from a little incest and psychosis.’
We’ve watched a typically dumb-looking ’80s kid have two nightmares, and seen something, running underneath the credits, that could well be either utterly disgusting or pure porn if we could only make out exactly what it is, before we are introduced to the Perfect Life Of Bill Whitney. Bill, played by Billy Warlock, is rich, clever, sporty, popular and even shorter and squatter than Emilio Estevez. He wasn’t just born with a silver spoon in his pouty mouth, but the entire 38-piece dining set. So why does he feel so out of place among his peers that even his family give him nightmares?
The answer given to us in Brian Yuzna’s teen-body-horror satire was so what ’80s America didn’t want to laugh at that it took three years of European success before anyone would even release Society in its own home country. It is, if you will, the anti-Back To The Future: an anti-Reagan class-war low-budget gore-fest based on a thought that the majority of people have allowed to pass through the dark recesses of their minds from time to time, like, maybe, just after we hear of a huge bonus payment to a corporate banker while we struggle to survive a recession entirely caused by the short-term greed of corporate bankers. To paraphrase: as flies to wanton boys are we to The Rich. They kill us for their sport and then have freaky sex orgies in the blood of our entrails.
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