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The website One Poll reports that Dirty Dancing is #3 on the list of movies that have been watched repeatedly (#1 is Grease, and #2 is Back to the Future.) Just among women, Dirty Dancing is #2 (#1 is Grease, and #3 is Love Actually.)
The website FiveThirtyEight reports that Dirty Dancing is #6 on the list of movies watched repeatedly by women. The preceding five movies are (#1 to #5) The Wizard of Oz, The Sound of Music, Gone With the Wind, Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings. For men, however, the movie Dirty Dancing is not on the list of the Top 25.
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Derek Thompson, the author of the book Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction, has written an article, published in The Atlantic magazine, titled On Repeat: Why People Watch Movies and Shows Over and Over. The article includes the following passages:
Going back to the same pop-culture fare for seconds, thirds, and thirtieths isn't so abnormal. .... Musicologists estimate that for every hour of music-listening in the typical person's lifetime, 54 minutes are spent with songs we've already heard.
Forget the next big thing. We're all suckers for the last big thing.
Pop culture is a relentless machine of newness and manufactured surprise. We queue around the block for new comic-book-movie installments and crash HBO Go to watch season finales. And yet, I have spent 100 hours of my life watching a movie [Dumb and Dumber] I could perform verbatim in my living room.
Why do we spend so much time with stories whose endings we already know? ....
When Cristel Antonia Russell and Sidney Levy interviewed people who had re-read a book, re-watched a movie, or revisited a sentimental site ... [they] found that people sought out familiar entertainment for specific reasons — to recapture a lost feeling, for example, or to appreciate the passage of time.
Summing up their research, here are four reasons why so many people prefer their entertainment stuck on repeat.
The Simple Reason
The least complicated reason why people re-watch a movie is that ... well, they really like that movie!
Familiar fare requires less mental energy to process, and when something is easy to think about, we tend to consider it good. .... Interviewees re-watched episodes of Battlestar Galactica and Seinfeld to remind themselves what happened and pick up on smaller details that they could appreciate once they caught up to the overall plot. ...
Psychologists have found that repetition breeds affection. Familiar fare requires less mental energy to process, and when something is easy to think about, we tend to consider it good. A movie we've seen seven times before is blissfully easy to process.
The scientific term for this is "mere exposure effect," meaning that we like something more merely because we've been previously exposed to it. So there is evidence not only that we replay songs that we like, but also that — up to a certain point! — we like songs the more often that we play them.
The Nostalgic Reason
The same way that it's nice to watch familiar movies merely because they are familiar, it can be nice to remember the past merely because it's the past. ...
Clay Routledge, a psychologist who studies nostalgia at North Dakota State University, says there are two strains of this cultural affliction: historical (a nostalgia for the past, in general) and autobiographical (nostalgia for an individual's past, specifically). Sometimes, we watch an old movie to extract a fondness about the way things were. Often, we are more self-interested than that. In one of Routledge's studies, subjects exposed to popular songs and and lyrics from their younger days were more likely to report feeling “loved” and that “life is worth living."
We like repeating pop culture experiences because they help us remember the past, and the act of remembering the past feels good. ... It's using entertainment as a time machine to revisit a lost memory.
The Therapeutic Reason
Using nostalgia as a kind of therapy isn't uncommon. ... One of the nice things about old movies is that they can't surprise us. We know how they end, and we know how we'll feel when they end. This makes the re-consumption of entertainment a bit like “emotional regulation," Russell and Levy write.
New books, movies, and TV shows can deliver spectacular thrills, but they can also waste our time and disappoint us. Old movies never disappoint us: We get older, they stay the same age. Returning to familiar entertainment is, to be perfectly stiff about this sort of thing, emotionally efficient. We'll get exactly the emotional payoff we're looking for — no surprises.
The Existential Reason
"The dynamic linkages between one’s past, present, and future experiences through the re-consumption of an object allow existential understanding,” Russell and Levy write. “Reengaging with the same object, even just once, allows a reworking of experiences as consumers consider their own particular enjoyments and understandings of choices they have made.”
This isn't mere nostalgia or therapy. It's pop culture as palimpsest—an old memory, overlaid with new perspective.
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Since the development of the Internet in the last couple of decades, fans of a particular movie, such as Dirty Dancing, have been increasingly able to distribute images, video clips, music, crafts and motifs of their beloved movie. Examples of the Internet platforms include Pinterest, YouTube, Etsy and Deviant Art.
Thus, the impact of Dirty Dancing on our culture has been magnified beyond mere watching of the movie.
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The song "Time of My Life" has become a frequent part of wedding celebrations.
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In the movie, the song referred merely to a romantic fling, about two-weeks long, between Baby Houseman and Johnny Castle. Since the song has become part of wedding celebrations, however, it now refers to the entire period of time from then moment when a couple became romantic until the moment when the couple became married. The period is now commonly understood to be "the time of my life".
The song even has become the third-most requested song for funerals, according to a survey conducted by England's Bereavement Register. (#1 was "Goodbye, My Lover" and #2 was "Angels".)
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All the movie's other songs have become very famous. Many of the movie's songs already were golden oldies, and a couple of the songs were new. No matter which, they all have became very famous.
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The movie Dirty Dancing certainly affected opinions about abortion. The following graph of opinions found by the Gallup company indicates that during the years 1987-1992 -- the five years following the release of Dirty Dancing -- there was a significant increase in the portion of the population who thought that abortion should be legal in all circumstances. (Click on the image to enlarge it.)
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| Gallup findings of opinions about legalization of abortion |
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The success of Dirty Dancing affected the movie industry's attitude toward the production of independent films. The Sag-Indie website, which promotes independent films, includes a webpage titled Movies You Probably Forgot Were Indies.Four of the listed movies were released during the years 1987-1990 -- Dirty Dancing (1987), The Brave Little Toaster (1987), House Party (1990) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990). These four movies enjoyed great commercial success despite being produced cheaply outside large movie-production companies.
The Wikipedia article on Independent Film points out that the production of independent films increased significantly in the the first half of the 1990s.
The 1990s saw the rise and success of independent films not only through the film festival circuit but at the box office ... Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in 1990 from New Line Cinema grossed over $100 million in the United States making it the most successful indie film in box-office history to that point.Although that Wikipedia article did not mention Dirty Dancing, this 1987 extremely profitable independent movie surely was a major consideration in much larger financial investments in independent movies through the first half of the 1990s.
Miramax Films had a string of hits with Sex, Lies, and Videotape, My Left Foot: The Story of Christy Brown, and Clerks, putting Miramax and New Line Cinema in the sights of big companies looking to cash in on the success of independent studios.
In 1993, Disney bought Miramax for $60 million. Turner Broadcasting, in a billion-dollar deal, acquired New Line Cinema, Fine Line Features, and Castle Rock Entertainment in 1994. The acquisitions proved to be a good move for Turner Broadcasting as New Line released The Mask and Dumb and Dumber, Castle Rock released The Shawshank Redemption, and Miramax released Pulp Fiction, all in 1994.
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I have published a follow-up article about the period 1963 - 1987.
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