"Doc" Daniel Says "Dirty Time Wasting"

Dr. V. B. "Doc" Daniel is a general practitioner who runs a 24-hour medical clinic in a rural community known as Pelt Valley, about ten minutes as the crow flies north of Carver Point, Georgia. He "alleviates work-related stress through the appreciation and study of the greatest of all art forms: the cinema." Here are excerpts from his opinion of Dirty Dancing:

.... Dirty Dancing is, was, and will always be one of the stupidest movies to ever drip out of Hollywood's backside. It is, was, and always will be a soundtrack album in search of a movie. .... Let me show you how many ways this movie offends me and the precious artform we call "cinema".

* A period piece that features 80s music in it?

* The lead character in the movie is named "Baby." ....

* It tries to make a superfluous Pro-choice statement in a '50s flick. ...

* Why is Baby's father giving that dork money for med school? Where was he when I had my scholarship revoked for drinking tequila in Pathology class?

* In the heart-wrenching finale, Johnny says that he's created the dance moves for himself and Baby. So how do 40 other dancers fall in step to the entire routine when he prances into the aisle? ...

* Just when we thought they were gone ... pedal-pushers and Keds sneakers!

* Back to that finale - Johnny put a 45 rpm record on, and it plays for the next eight minutes. What gives, this the flipside of Inna-Gadda-Da Vita or American Pie?

* Newman.

Does it seem like I know way too much about this movie, for someone who despises it so much? Bullseye. Know why? 'Cause I was between wives in 1987, and I was dating. Anyone that was dating in 1987 went to see Dirty Dancing. And, I know I am not alone when I say that, if you were a dating guy in 1987, you got dragged to see Dirty Dancing way too many times, at the then-unheard of price of $3.50 per ticket.

And then it hit video, and everybody bought it and watched it over and over and over. And then it hit HBO, and, because it was rated PG-13, they could show it morning, noon, and night, 7-24-365. And they keep draggin' it back out when they have 90 minutes to burn. And so on and so on and so on. ....

The Love Lie in Dirty Dancing

A kill-joy analysis of Dirty Dancing by David LeVine of Warm Wisdom Press.

If you remember, in Dirty Dancing, 17-year-old Baby Houseman is vacationing in the Catskills with her family. Bored to tears by the activities, she comes upon a dancing party and is immediately struck by Johnny Castle, the dance instructor. She ends up becoming the pinch hitter in a dance routine and as Johnny teaches her to dance, they "fall in love" and risk his job and her relationship with her family to, as one reviewer put it, "show that their love is worth fighting for."

This sounds wonderful. To find such a deep, meaningful relationship that within two weeks of dancing with each other you're ready to sacrifice so much for one another? Wow. Add to that the fact that he is a very handsome, talented and single man, while she's a perky and strong-willed 17-year-old. What could be bad? (Except the fact that he could've gotten thrown into jail because she was a minor!)

Welcome to the Hollywood Lie, what I call the Dirty Dancing Lie: Love just "happens."

The producers behind the movie would have us believe that in order to find a meaningful relationship, you don't have to have anything in common. No common background, no common goals, no common principles. You don't have to know anything about each other. Love is an exciting, thrilling experience that just comes along.

The only problem is that life doesn't work that way.

In order for a meaningful relationship to flourish, you need to have common goals. You need to know that the two of you are moving in the same direction if you want to truly share a happy life together. If you don't, you can both be wonderful people but it's not going to work. Love doesn't change the core being of a person. And even though it may sound romantic, you don't want the other person to sacrifice their goals for yours, because that's a recipe for big trouble down the line. You want your goals to be compatible so that you can work together towards something that's important to both of you.

Now, obviously, that doesn't mean that you have to be clones of each other. What it does mean, though, is that if his dream is of being a dancer, and hers is of joining the Peace Corps and changing the world, then that marriage can only work on the big screen, in make believe. Which is why in a survey done among fans of Dirty Dancing, one fan wrote that if there would have been a sequel in which Johnny and Baby would have gotten married, they would have also gotten divorced, because they were really so different.

Remember the theme song? "I've Had the Time of my Life"... The idea that you can have the time of your entire life with a person you just met is a very appealing one to us folks who have grown up in the "instant" generation. But in order for a lasting, loving relationship to flourish with a soul mate, you need to get to know each other well, and discover whether or not the two of you have similar ideals and worldviews.

If you really want to share a level of commitment in which the two of you are willing to sacrifice so much, it has to be based on a lot more than being able to gaze into each others' eyes. You have to be able to gaze in the same direction together. That's the true foundation of a relationship and a marriage in which you'll stand up for each other, no matter what, and be able to say, "Nobody puts my husband/my wife in a corner."

Now you know why that's the most famous line in the movie. Because deep in their hearts, that's what everyone wants - a relationship filled with such love and commitment that come what may, you're willing to stand by and support each other. And the truth is that you can have it. But contrary to the "love happens" lie, it's not going to be with someone you just looked at, had "Hungry Eyes" and fell in love with. It will be with someone you've gotten to know slowly, who wants the same things out of life as you do and wants to achieve them together with you. You know what that's called? It's called growing in love. And ultimately, that's the person with whom you're really going to have the time of your life.

And it'll last a lot longer than two weeks in the summer.

Vincent Canby About Dance Aspects

When Dirty Dancing opened, The New York Times' movie reviewer Vincent Canby wrote a review , published on August 21, 1987, that was mostly favorable. He dismissed the story as silly, even "awful," but praised the movie as a good step forward in developing the genre of dance movies.

In their time, almost all forms of popular American music and dancing, from the foxtrot and the tango through rock-and-roll and all of its variations, have scandalized the members of an older generation, whose own sexuality had earlier been liberated by tamer means. As music, lyrics and dance steps have become more and more sexually explicit, fathers and mothers from coast to coast have felt alienated, and worried that pop music was leading their children straight to hell. …

This culture generation gap has produced its own Hollywood genre. Most of these films have been quickies on the order of Don't Knock the Rock (1957) and Twist Around the Clock (1962), but there have occasionally been more ambitious if not much better films (Herbert Ross's Footloose, 1984). Though music is the subject of each film, sex is the subtext. In the final reel, generations reconcile; initially stuffy oldsters end up rocking, rolling or twisting the night away, showing the young that, though creaky of joint and infirm of body, they can still do "it." ….

Johnny, a young man from the wrong side of the tracks, exemplifies the freedom expressed through a new and as yet socially unacceptable form of dancing. This "dirty dancing," a phrase used only in the film's title, features a lot of steamy body contact and pelvic thrusts, which unleash emotions supposedly left withered by mambos and cha-cha-chas.

Taking a formula that is itself creaky of joint and infirm of body, Eleanor Bergstein, the writer, and Emile Ardolino, the director, have made an engaging pop-movie romance of somewhat more substance than one usually finds in summer movies designed for the young.

I suspect that one's responses to Dirty Dancing, to its period details, even to its state of mind, will depend on the associations one brings into the theater. What is undeniable, however, is a basic decency of feeling, shaped, in part, by the film's obligations to its optimistic genre.

Baby, as written by Miss Bergstein and played by Miss Grey (Ferris Bueller's Day Off), is no bubble-brained teen-ager, but a bright, inquisitive young woman who's on her way to being her own person. .... Baby's liberation comes through her forbidden association with the womanizing Johnny Castle, after his partner, Penny (Cynthia Rhodes), becomes pregnant and Baby agrees to substitute for her in a mambo demonstration at another hotel.

There's a really quite awful subplot about Penny's abortion, financed by money that Baby has borrowed from her conventionally liberal doctor-father, and about the arrogant young Ivy League fellow who is responsible for Penny's condition.

Given the limitations of his role, that of a poor but handsome sex-object abused by the rich women at Kellerman's Mountain House, Mr. Swayze is also good. He's even convincing when he must admit, in one of the film's lesser moments, that ''the reason people treat me like nothing is because I am nothing.'' He's at his best - as is the movie - when he's dancing.

The movie makes a lot of good use of period music, to which some not very evocative new songs have been added. The dancing itself, especially the dirty dancing, choreographed by Kenny Ortega, looks very contemporary, or, at least, as contemporary as Saturday Night Fever, but it has a drive and a pulse that give the film real excitement.

Though the film takes place in 1963, just a year after the twist was all the rage, the twist itself seems already to have come and gone at Kellerman's Mountain House. …

These anachronisms aren't especially important, except that Miss Bergstein has been so specific about the film's period. She seems to want Dirty Dancing to be seen as a fond goodbye to a comfortable, liberal American way of life before the country was radicalized by the assassination of President Kennedy and by the increasingly bitter anti-Vietnam War movement. That's loading a small movie with rather more than it can carry without a lot of highly detailed program notes.

Dirty Dancing works best when it's most direct and unpretentious. It has the kind of sweet simplicity that somehow always eludes John Hughes (Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off). Mr. Ardolino, whose background is in theater and in television dance films, doesn't clutter the film with extraneous, sentimental detail, nor even with too much colorful (and familiar) detail about life in your usual Catskill resort hotel.

I don't know Canby's personal opinion about the legalization of abortion, but certainly most people who do oppose such legalization would agree with him that the abortion subplot was "awful." On the other hand, people who advocated such legalization would praise that same subplot as a brave social commentary.

Young people who watch the movie for the first time now perhaps do not realize that the people who watched the movie when it came out in 1987 were watching a story that took place 24 years previously, in 1963. American culture had changed enough in those 24 years that the movie already was perceived to be a "period piece" about a previous social era. The changes included greater public frankness about the issue of abortion.

On the other hand, the first audiences perceived the movie to be a celebration of the already somewhat forgotten music and dancing of that earlier era.