Baby Houseman is 17 years old and is about to leave her family and to begin to live away, at a college. She is about to begin to look for her life's romantic partner, hoping that he will be similar to her father. She is about to live much more as an adult, being much more responsible for her decisions and for her life's path.
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Wikipedia provides the following list of genres, which includes the Philosophical genre.
Absurdist / Surreal / WhimsicalThe same Wikipedia article elaborates the Philosophical genre as follows:
Action
Adventure
Comedy
Crime
Drama
Fantasy
Historical
Historical Fiction
Horror
Magical Realism
Mystery
Paranoid Fiction
!!! Philosophical !!!
Political
Romance
Saga
Satire
Science Fiction
Social
Speculative
Thriller
Urban
Western
Philosophical fiction is fiction in which a significant proportion of the work is devoted to a discussion of the sort of questions normally addressed in discursive philosophy. These might include the function and role of society, the purpose of life, ethics or morals, the role of art in human lives, and the role of experience or reason in the development of knowledge.The Wikipedia article about the Bildungsroman includes the following passage.
Philosophical fiction works would include the so-called novel of ideas, including a significant proportion of science fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction, and Bildungsroman. The modus operandi seems to be to use a normal story to simply explain difficult and dark parts of human life.
Bildungsroman: A coming-of-age novel presenting the psychological, moral and social shaping of the personality of a character, usually the protagonist. The genre arose during the German Enlightenment.
A Bildungsroman relates the growing up or "coming of age" of a sensitive person who goes in search of answers to life's questions with the expectation that these will result in gaining experience of the world. .... In a Bildungsroman, the goal is maturity, and the protagonist achieves it gradually and with difficulty.======
The genre often features a main conflict between the main character and society. Typically, the values of society are gradually accepted by the protagonist and he/she is ultimately accepted into society — the protagonist's mistakes and disappointments are over. In some works, the protagonist is able to reach out and help others after having achieved maturity. ...
There are many variations and subgenres of Bildungsroman that focus on the growth of an individual. An Entwicklungsroman ("development novel") is a story of general growth rather than self-cultivation. An Erziehungsroman ("education novel") focuses on training and formal schooling, while a Künstlerroman ("artist novel") is about the development of an artist and shows a growth of the self. ...
The term is also more loosely used to describe coming-of-age films and related works in other genres.
The main philosophical thread that runs through the movie Dirty Dancing is Baby's conversations with her father about the importance of fairness in life. In the movie's first minutes, she is mocked for wanting "to save the world" and even wanting to send her dinner left-overs to poor people in Southeast Asia.
After Baby's father learns about Penny Johnson's abortion, he forbids Baby "to have anything to do with those people". She rejects and disobeys her father's order, because it is not fair. After all, he does not know any of "those people" and does not understand their situation.
The movie's philosophical climax is Baby's monologue, criticizing her father's faulty fairness.
You told me everyone was alike and deserved a fair break. But you meant everyone who is like you. You told me you wanted me to change the world, to make it better, but you meant by becoming a lawyer or an economist and marrying someone from Harvard.The movie ends with Baby's father recognizing and admitting that he indeed had been unfair to Johnny Castle in regard to the abortion.
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Another philosophical thread about fairness involves Baby's perception of the relationship between Neil Kellerman and Johnny Castle. Neil is younger and less talented than Johnny, but Neil is Johnny's boss because Neil was born into a family fortune.
Although Johnny is older and more talented, his fear of losing his employment causes him to defer without objection to Neil's decisions -- even about dancing, where Johnny is the expert. Baby's effort to encourage Johnny to express his objections to Neil turns out to be more difficult than she expects. Baby learns that making people live more fairly is quite complicated and difficult.
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The movie includes also an encounter between Baby and Robbie Gould, where she angrily refuses to read a philosophical book that he recommends to her. See my previous article titled Robbie Gould's Philosophy.
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I will continue this series in Part 2.
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