Dirty Dancing Analysis: The 1978 Movie "Girlfriends"

In an earlier titled Re-Watching Eleanor Bergstein's Earlier Movie It's My Turn, I told how Eleanor Bergstein was persuaded to become a sceenwriter by a film-maker named Claudia Weill. My article included the following passage.

When Bergstein's novel [Advancing Paul Newman] was published in 1973, it was read by a young, aspiring movie director named Claudia Weill. She was born in 1947, so in 1973 she was about 26 years old (while Bergstein was 35). In 1973 Weill was trying to develop a movie, which eventually would be released in 1978 under the title Girlfriends. In 1973 Weill still was looking for a screenwriter. Weill loved Bergstein's novel and so tried to recruit her to write the projected movie's screenplay. Bergstein refused, saying she already was too busy writing her next novel.

For the next four years, through the mid-1970s, Weill continued to propose a collaboration with Bergstein. After Weill's movie Girlfriends was released in 1978 and achieved some critical and commercial success, Weill obtained a funding promise of about $200,000 for her next movie project. On that basis, Bergstein now agreed to collaborate with Weill. The result was the movie It's My Turn, which was released in 1980.

Weill's movie Girlfriends is about two Jewish girlfriends. One girlfriend marries happily and gives birth to a child. The other girlfriend, an artistic photographer, experiences a series of romantic failures, including an affair with a married rabbi. The single girlfriend is jealous of the married girlfriend's married happiness, and the married girlfriend is jealous of the single girlfriend's freedom. The two women drift apart. Eventually they meet again, and the married woman reveals that she has just had an abortion because she does not want to be tied down further by a second child. Thus the movie ends.

Recently the movie Girlfriends was shown on the TCM cable-television channel. I recorded it and then watched it today. I liked the movie very much. There were several moments where I laughed out loud at the movie's humor.

YouTube has only a couple of video clips from the movie. Here is one that shows the main character, Susan Weinblatt, played by the actress Melanie Mayron. (During 1987-1989 Mayron starred in the popular television series Thirtysomething.)

The other, longer YouTube video clip is here. The Wikipedia article about the movie is here.

=======

Now that I myself have watched Girlfriends, I will summarize the movie's story differently. The story is mostly about the Susan Weinblatt character, who is struggling to make a living as a free-lance photographer in New York City. Her main source of income is photographing Jewish ceremonies -- weddings, bar mitzvahs, etc. She is not religious, but she becomes friendly with the rabbi who arranges these paying jobs for her.

She is sexually straight and becomes involved with a young man who seems to be a college instructor. She rejects an approach for a lesbian encounter. However, the story is mostly about her platonic relationships with various young women, a few of which become her apartment mates.

One such girlfriend is the character Anne Munroe, played by the actress Anita Skinner. Anne has been Susan's friend for a long time. At the beginning of the movie they are sharing an apartment. Anne is trying to become a professional writer, but she soon marries a young man who has a good career that enables a financially comfortable lifestyle, which includes European vacations. Anne gives birth to a child and enjoys raising it. She is happy to become pregnant a second time, but then she decides to abort it secretly, because she figures that raising the second child would prevent her from developing a writing career.

This relationship between Susan and Anne is a much smaller part of the story, however, than I had thought. Anne is only one of several people in Susan's life and is not much more important than the other people.

The movie is largely about Susan alone, struggling to make a living as a free-lance photographer. The movie succeeds because Susan is an interesting character who is acted and portrayed well. The character Susan is based on Weill, so the movie is rather autobiographical.

I would not characterize Girlfriends as largely a "feminist" movie. It is critical and cynical about all the characters, female and male. No character -- especially Susan -- suffers unfairly or is admirable. Every character succeeds or fails based on his or her own personal decisions and talents.

I characterize Girlfriends as a struggling-artist movie. Susan has decided to make her living as a free-lance photographer and so she suffers financial and personal consequences. A few people help her in her efforts, and they include men. Susan generally likes men. There are no male villains i-- except an obnoxious taxi driver in a brief scene -- n the movie.

======

Eleanor Bergstein did not participate in the Girlfriends movie project. The Girlfriends script was written for director Claudia Weill by screenwriter Vicki Polon. For some reason Weill and Polon did not continue their collaboration after Girlfriends. Therefore Weill persuaded Bergstein to write the script for Weill's following movie, which turned out to be It's My Turn. For details about the collaboration between Weill and Bergstein, read my previous article.

The Weill-Bergstein collaboration ended badly, because It's My Turn was a lousy movie and a box-office flop. The movie was peddled to the public as a feminist story about a woman dealing with personal problems as she tried to advance professionally in the all-male career field of higher mathematics.

I have come to the opinion that the movie It's My Turn is an unintentional portrayal of a woman who suffers from a manic-depressive disorder. From that perspective, the movie is superb, but practically nobody has watched and appreciated the movie from that perspective.

I speculate that when Eleanor Bergstein wrote the screenplay for It's My Turn, she was strongly influenced by her reading about the life of the poet Sylvia Plath, who wrote the novel The Bell Jar and then committed suicide. Plath's novel was published on January 14, 1963, and she killed herself four weeks later, on February 11, 1963. I wrote a series of articles titled Eleanor Bergstein and Sylvia Plath.

======

Weill is important in Bergstein's life because Weill persuaded Bergstein to become a screenwriter.

In addition, I think that Bergstein liked Weill's movie Girlfriends and was influenced positively by it. Dirty Dancing too is a movie about struggling artists -- the professional dancers working at Kellerman's Mountain House. In my previous article My Sociological Criticism of Dirty Dancing, I explained that the main social conflict is between the unconventional, struggling artists and the conventional Houseman family.

I think also that the girlfriend relationship between Susan and Anne in Girlfriends was a model for the girlfriend relationship between Penny and Vivian in the first stage of construction of the Dirty Dancing story. Read my previous article My Speculation About the Construction of the Story.

======

The following video clip shows Claudia Weill talking about her movie Girlfriends. She calls Eleanor Bergstein by the name Eleanor Goldman.