This blog discusses the movie Dirty Dancing, which was released in 1987 and starred Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze. The articles discuss:
* literary aspects, such as characterization, motivation, interactions;
* the music and dances;
* the production of the movie;
* critical reactions.
The Sheldrake performance is tomorrow (not "in two days").
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Page 44
This scene with the locked car was supposed to show that Johnny knows how to pick a lock. Baby does not understand that Johnny needs a stiff wire in order to do so, and so she ignorantly brings him a wooden hanger.
Baby hesitates to go get a clothes hanger, because "it's not like her to take orders".
Johnny calls Baby "Doll".
Johnny is from South Philadelphia.
Johnny uses a tire iron (not a log) to break the car's window. He has been able to open the car's trunk even though he could not open the car's door.
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Page 45
During the car ride, the soundtrack plays the song "Tell Him" by the Exciters (or else some new song).
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Page 46
Johnny uses a whip to illustrate a dance movement. The final dance begins with Johnny "whipping" -- i.e. "coiling" -- Baby outward and then inward.
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Page 47
Johnny tells Baby that "girls are chicken shit".
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Page 48
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The kind of hanger that Johnny needed
to pick his car's lock.
The kind of hanger that Baby brought to Johnny
Johnny "whipping" -- i.e. "coiling" -- Baby outward
Johnny "whipping" -- i.e. "coiling" -- Baby inward
The book The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture, published in 2013, edited by Yannis Tzioumakis and Siân Lincoln, is a collection of scholarly essays about the movie.
The cover of the book
"The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture"
I already have published ten blog articles about the book and its articles:
Now I will review another of the book's articles -- "'There Are a Lot of Things About Me That Aren't What You Thought': The Politics of Dirty Dancing", written by Oliver Gruner.
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Oliver Gruner
The book identifies Oliver Gruner as follows:
Oliver Gruner teaches film and visual culture at London Metropolitan University and the University of Portsmouth. His research interests include cultural memory of the 196os, the historical film and film reception. His work has been published in various journals and edited collections.
I summarize Gruner's article as follows.
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The 1986 movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off included a scene between Jennifer Grey and Charlie Sheen.
Each of those two actors starred in their following movies. Grey starred in Dirty Dancing (released in August 1987), and Sheen starred in Platoon (released in December 1986).
In the initial reviews and discussions of the two movies, Platoon was treated as an important political movie, whereas Dirty Dancing was treated as an amusing romance. Platoon portrayed men's concerns, whereas Dirty Dancing portrayed only women's concerns.
While Dirty Dancing's politics have received some attention, there is little evidence of its having stimulated the same intense historical dialogue as the other, male-centered films. In its representation of a young person's political and personal transformation against a 1960s backdrop, Dirty Dancing was in many ways a Platoon for women. ...
Commentators' refusal to treat private relationships and female memories of the 1960s with the same reverence accorded to their male counterparts ensured that Dirty Dancing would be predominantly understood as a feel-good movie lacking in social or political value.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, several movies depicted events of the 1960s and were considered to be politically important:
Mississippi Burning (1988)
Born on the Fourth of July (1989)
JFK (1991)
Malcolm X (1992)
Forrest Gump (1994)
As the years and decades have passed, however, Dirty Dancing has enjoyed lasting and growing appreciation as an important political movie. In particular, the abortion issue addressed by the movie has remained an important political issue.
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Ronald Reagan's upset victory in the 1980 Presidential election was considered by many to be a repudiation of liberal politics of the late 1960s and 1970s. Reagan defended the USA's participation in the Vietnam War and called for increased respect and funding for the US military.
Women's liberation became a particularly contentious issue. Conservative organizations such as the Moral Majority and the Heritage Foundation railed against feminism for destroying "traditional" family values and for contributing to the emergence of what Ronald Reagan and his political allies were fond of calling the "permissive society." What others saw as women's positive political and personal gains, achieved partly as a result of feminist activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, were attacked for having taken women out of their "natural" environment: the home.
It has also been argued that popular culture was complicit in this onslaught against feminist gains. In the most well-known examination of this backlash, Susan Faludi shows how Eighties newspapers, magazines, films, and television programs as a corrupting fore, one that led to a society full of career-obsessed, cold-hearted, infertile, emotionally crippled monsters.
In 1987, the year of Dirty Dancing's release, Glenn Close played a character that Faludi argues to be the defining symbol of the conservative backlash; all the negative stereotypes the backlash had associated with women's independence coalesced in Fatal Attraction's ruthless and psychologically unhinged female stalker, Alex Forrest.
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During Jimmy Carter's presidency -- when liberals seemed to be ascendant -- Eleanor Bergstein wrote the screenplay for her first movie, It's My Turn. This movie was released in October 1980, the month before Reagan upset Carter in the presidential election. That movie "focused on a female mathematics professor and the struggles she faced in balancing her job and her love life.
During the 1970s there had been two main strands of "New Women's film".
* Films about independent women portrayed women who were striving "to negotiate work and personal life without the support of a long-term spouse. Examples are Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) and An Unmarried Woman (1978).
* Films about female relationships portrayed the politics and psychology of all-female alliances. Examples are Julia (1977) and Girlfriends (1978).
Bergstein's first movie It's My Turn fit into the first strand. However, her first novel, Advancing Paul Newman, fit into the second strand.
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Bergstein developed her second movie, Dirty Dancing, as a defense of the liberalism that had been repudiated in the 1980 election. The movie takes place in 1963, the final year of President John Kennedy, who nicknamed his program "The New Frontier". The movie's heroine, 17-year-old Baby Houseman, is inspired by Kennedy, intends to join his Peace Corps and generally acts in Kennedy's liberal-minded spirit.
By acting in this spirit, Baby triumphs at the story's end, and later an older Baby looks back, from 1987, at those events as "the time of my life". The older Baby is looking back fondly not only to her own personal story but more generally to that liberal period, which was full of inspiration, optimism and reformation.
Johnny wants Baby to fail because he wants to humiliate her.
Baby is practicing alone on "the arcade" outside the hotel's dining room.
While Baby is practicing, Neil approaches her, carrying a plate full of food.
Baby enters the restaurant and sits down at the family's table.
Baby lies that she has been at the swimming pool. The original script included swimming-pool scenes.
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Page 40
Baby asks Neil to lie to her parents about her whereabouts.
Neil agrees to lie to her parents. He says that her parents will be happy that she is with him, because he is "the catch of the county".
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Page 41
The dance montage continues.
Johnny still wants Baby to fail as a dancer. However, Baby is a wonderfully natural dancer, with great will and determination. She learns to dance a mambo with the radiance of a truly gifted amateur.
A scene -- Scene 40 -- is omitted from the original script.
Then, there is Scene 41, where the family is in a room while it's raining.
Lisa finds that her lipstick is smeared on her merry-widow corset with a push-up bra.
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Page 42
Lisa has blamed the hotel maid for spoiling her lipstick and corset. Baby counters Lisa's accusation against the maid. Lisa insinuates that Baby is defending the maid only because the maid is an ethnic minority (i.e. Negro).
Marjorie wants Baby and Lisa to be friends. Marjorie always had wanted to have a sister to be her friend.
Baby leaves the room, saying she intends to play charades in the hotel lobby. (In the final movie, Baby goes to Johnny's cabin, but in this script she still has not become sexual with Johnny.)
Lisa declares that she does not believe that Baby is going to play charades in the lobby. Their father defends Baby, saying that Baby does not lie.
On August 22, 2017, the 30th anniversary of the movie Dirty Dancing, I published on this blog an article titled 1963 - 1987. In part of that article, I wrote about similarities between that movie and the television series The Donna Reed Show. The part began as follows:
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During the years 1958-1966, there was a television series called The Donna Reed Show about a model American family. The father, Dr. Alex Stone, was a doctor, and the mother, Donna (played by the actress Donna Reed), was a housewife. The daughter, Mary, grew from 14 to 22 during the series, so she turned 19 during 1963. The son, Jeff, grew up from 11 to 19 during the series, so he turned 16 years old during 1963.
The Stone family of "The Donna Reed Show"
in about 1963
The Stone family was quite similar to the Houseman family. Both fathers were doctors, and both mothers were housewives. In 1963 the Stone children were 19 and 16 years old, and the Houseman children were 19 and 17 years old.
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Today when I published here an article titled Romantic Nostalgia and the Early 1960s. I recalled my 2017 article about The Donna Reed Show. Subsequently I looked for some videos about that show and came across some YouTube videos done by essayist Lacey Lynn. She praises the culture that was portrayed by that show and others of that period. Here are a few of her videos.
The book The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture, published in 2013, edited by Yannis Tzioumakis and Siân Lincoln, is a collection of scholarly essays about the movie.
The cover of the book
"The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture"
I already have published nine blog articles about the book and its articles:
Now I will review another of the book's articles -- "(I've Had) The Time of My Life":Romantic Nostalgia and the Early 1960s", written by Bill Osgerby.
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Bill Osgerby
The book identifies Bill Osgerby as follows:
Bill Osgerby is professor in media, culture and communications at London Metropolitan University. His research focuses on twentieth century British and American cultural history.
His books include Youth in Britain Since 1945 (Blackwell, 1998), Playboys in Paradise: Youth, Masculinity and Leisure-Style in Modern America (Berg/New York University Press, 2001), Youth Media (Routledge, 2004), and a co-edited anthology; Action TV: Tough-Guys, Smooth Operators and Foxy Chicks (Routledge, 2001).
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Osgerby's article explains why stories that took place in the 1950s and early and 1960s were remarkably popular during the 1970s and 1980s. The movies included the following.
American Graffiti (1973)
Animal House (1978)
Big Wednesday (1978)
Grease (1978)
More American Graffiti (1979)
The Wanderers (1979)
Grease 2 (1982)
Porky's (1982)
Baby, It's You(1983)
Stand By Me (1986)
Dirty Dancing (1987)
Such stories included also the television series Happy Days, broadcast from 1974 to 1984.
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These stories usually are categorized into the coming-of-age genre, called also the rite-of-passage genre.
Such films often depict the protagonist's experience of trauma as the catalyst for his or her development and the acquisition of greater maturity, which is equated with greater understanding of past events, and a new capacity to face the future. ...
There is also an underlying conservatism to the nostalgic teen movie. .... Such films are framed by a restrospective and potentially conservative adult perspective. ...
The use of a nostalgic voiceover -- a feature common to retrospective rite-of-passage movies -- serves to situate events in the past and emphasize a subjective, adult point of view.
In regard to such "conservatism", Osgerby provides female critics' observations about such movies' female protagonists. One such critic is Sarah Hentges, author of the book Pictures of Girlhood: Modern Female Adolescence on Film.
In her account of Hollywood's representations of girlhood, Sarah Hentges argues that many of the mythologies of coming-of-age movies work to reinforce structures work to reinforce structures of power and privilege. In mainstream cinema, she argues, coming-of-age for young women invariably equates not simply to finding oneself or overcoming adversity, but more often "conforming to adult standards or dominant mainstream expectations."
Another such critic is Christine Sprengler, author of the book Screening Nostalgia: Populux Props and Technicolor Aesthetics in Contemporary American Film.
Christine Sprengler suggests this period [1950s and early 1960s] occupies a privileged positoin in American popular culture. .... It is "The Fifties", Sprengler contends, that have become enshrined across the American media as a mythic "golden age" ....
The era was characterized by high levels of economic growth and a consumer boom, but the global tensions of the Cold War, shifting gender and generational identities, and the rise of Civil Rights activism contributed to a climate of social stress and apprehension. .... "The Fifties have been recreated as a moment of optimism and security, a time when America celebrated confidence in the future, the excitement of the present, and the ability of the average family to share in the bounty of a prosperous time. ...
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, young people were portrayed (celebrated even) as an invigorating and inspiring social force .... With the growing profitability of the teen market, the media and consumer industries fȇted young people as never before ... [introducing] archetypes of well-behaved, well-meaning middle-class teenagers ....
Nostalgic films at once celebrate this myth and lament its passing. They hark back to a time of innocent hopes, a time when teenage culture stood for excitement, fun, and progress.
Within that pattern, the movie Dirty Dancing features fun-loving, innovative young people.
Dirty Dancing ... trades in similar images suggesting an idealized teenage lifestyle of carefree kicks. Recurring contrasts, for example, are drawn between teh torid exhilaration of the parties held by the young resort staff and the lackluster entertainment preferred by the aging guests. -- wig shows, genteel putting competitions, and merengue classes in the gazebo.
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Osgerby points out that such movies were created in the 1970s and 1980s by people who personally experienced the earlier period and now remembered it fondly.
The adults of the 1970s and 1980s had themselves been part of the "mythic" teenage generation and could wistfully look back to the halcyon days of their youth. And, as Sprengler observes, their longings were well served, "thanks in part to their own efforts in film, television, manufacturing and publishing -- efforts which made the visual landscape of their childhood available to to others.
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Osgerby quotes general criticism of "the nostalgic film ... as intrinsically reactionary in the way it represented the past through superficial stereotypes rather than engaging with history in any meaningful way." Against such criticism of that genre, however, Osgerby defends the particular case of Dirty Dancing.
Dirty Dancing is complex and conflicted, and much more than a mere glossy, "stylistic connotation" of the summer of 1963. ....
Dirty Dancing is a rite-of-passage teen film tht both celebrates and mourns the myths of the early 1960s. But its use of nostalgia and historical allusion amount to more than ... a depthless "imitation of dead styles". ....
Dirty Dancing can be seen as a a site of expressive processes of appropriation, bricolage, and intertexuality in which the sounds and the styles of the past are reconfigured and mobilized in ways that have cultural resonance for the present.
Indeed, this partly accounts for the film's continuing popularity. Dirty Dancing is not a simple, superficial mimic of the summer of 1963; instead, its synthesis of diverse visual and aural aesthetics gives it multiple layers of meaning that have allowed it to circulate through successive cultural and political contexts, becoming a locus for the formation and expression of a wide variety of ideals, identities, and pleasures.
I liked Osgerby's article.
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I did not find Osgerby's article on the Internet. As far as I know, it is available to read only in the book.
The book The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture, published in 2013, edited by Yannis Tzioumakis and Siân Lincoln, is a collection of scholarly essays about the movie.
The cover of the book
"The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture"
I already have published eight blog articles about the book and its articles:
Now I will review another of the book's articles -- "Dirty Dancing: Feminism, Post Feminism and Neo-Feminism", written by Hilary Radner.
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Hilary Radner
The book identifies Hilary Radner as follows:
Hilary Radner is professor of film and media studies in the Department of History and Art History, University of Otago. Her research focuses on understanding the representations of gender and identity in contemporary visual culture, particularly in terms of how these evolve over time in relation to second wave feminism.
Recent publications include: Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks, and Consumer Culture (Routledge) as author and New Zealand Cinema: Interpreting the Past (Intellect/U. of Chicago) and Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Cinema (Routledge) as co-editor.
Current projects include co-editing A Companion to Contemporary French Film for Blackwell Publishing, a manuscript on regulating the emotions after second wave feminism in the Hollywood romantic melodrama, and a further project on the woman’s film in New Zealand cinema.
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I interpret Radner's article as follows:
The Dirty Dancing story takes place in 1963 and is told from the perspective of 1987, when the movie was released. The 24-year interval -- 1963 to 1987 -- was a period "in which gender roles were most publicly interrogated." The 1987 movie audience is watching a young woman who largely accepts traditional gender roles without the intellectual benefit of the severe criticism that would happen a few years after the story. Therefore Baby is relatively naive and therefore can be excused for her still "prudish proto-feminism".
For the audience of the 1987 movie, female "self-realization and self-fulfillment, in particular sexual fulfillment, are unexamined rights" -- are taken for granted. For that audience, Baby "avoids the stigma of feminism itself as well as the sustained interrogation of heterosexuality that inflected much of 1970s feminist thought".
Compared to other young women in 1963, Baby was relatively outspoken, egalitarian and progressive. She should not be criticize because she does not act like outraged feminists attending radical-feminist consciousness-raising meetings in the early 1980.
Baby's mind is opened in 1963 not by feminist criticism, but rather "by Johnny and his friends, who know something about life that has as yet escaped her -- represented by their ability (and her inability) to dance."
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The largest part of the article explains how Baby's dance experience simulates her feminist consciousness.
The key to understanding the conversion that Frances Houseman undergoes lies in the idea of “living in the physical world” .... The centrality of Frances’ ... experience of the body as crucial to the film’s conclusion ....
Academic feminists like [Iris Marion] Young .... sought to understand the specificity of feminine experience and its embodiment. Iris Marion Young’s purpose is to describe “in a provisional way some of the basic modalities of feminine body comportment, manner of moving and relation in space."
Radner had been impressed by an article that Young wrote, titled "Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology Feminine Body Comportment, Motility and Spatiality".
The limitations of Frances’ dancing are signaled in various ways in the course of the film, testifying to a particular modality of experiencing the body and signifying her status as “girlish” .... She must initially throw herself into the air in certain and precise anticipation that his arms await her. She must project her body into both space and time. When she and Johnny perform together in a routine in which she stands in for Penny, Johnny’s habitual partner, Frances is unable to perform the lift.
The failed lift corresponds to an important aspect of the restrictions in movement that Young sees as characterizing feminine bodily experience in everyday, ordinary activities. She notes: “Feminine existence appears to posit an existential enclosure between herself and the space surrounding her, in such a way that the space that belongs to her and is available to her grasp and manipulation is constricted and the space beyond is not available to her movement.” Young further specifies: “The timidity, immobility, and uncertainty that frequently characterize feminine movement project a limited space for the feminine “I can.”
Though Frances worked hard to learn how to dance, this was not sufficient; her failure to perform the lift was not a result of her lack of technique, but of her inability to “act.” Subsequently, however, she does act on her desire for Johnny. She invites him to dance, which
leads to her first sexual experience. One of the film’s major turning points, then, depends on the fact that Frances acts on her desire. When she is able to assume responsibility for her desire, she then also begins to change her relations to what Young calls “the modalities of feminine bodily existence” and moves toward the realization of her self as independent (expressed in the film’s conclusion). ....
Young explains that as women we are not prepared to “move out to master a world that belongs to us, a world constituted by our own intentions.” In successfully performing her lift, Frances overcomes a set of social conditions stipulating that a girl “learns actively to hamper her movements?” ....
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Radner, referring to Simone de Beauvoir's book The Second Sex, writes that many a women suffers ...
... a conflict between a desire for independence and a desire to fulfill herself as a "sexed human being" .... She [de Beauvoir] means the economically and professionally successful woman, torn between femininity and autonomy.
In their final dance sequence, Frances and Johnny represent the idea of a perfect heterosexual union, in which the problems that arise out of the inequalities between men's and women's conditions are resolved.
Professional female dancers are not, however, ordinary professional women. Female dancers succeed because of their femininity and thus differ from, for example, female accountants.
Baby succeeds at the movie's ending, because she dances with Johnny in a feminine manner, not because she manages an anti-poverty program in Southeast Asia. Her relationship with Johnny is based primarily on her learning to gracefully follow his lead as the male dancer.
Radner writes:
The choice, then, to develop Baby's character and "coming of age" through her apprenticeship as a dancer has a number of consequences. Dance allows the film to stage a fantasy resolution in which both Johnny and Frances learn from each other and “lead” each other in new directions. Johnny teaches Frances to dance, but she encourages him to value himself, because she values him, and to stand up for himself and for her.
Because, however, this utopianism is expressed through dance, and thus can only receive its full expression through art and performance, it remains a fantasy, one that sits safely within a set of conventions that allows artists and women special privileges. ...
The [romantic] genre requires that the lovers achieve that eternal romantic union, but the premise of their relationship by its very nature (their differences) makes this implausible. ....
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Radner indicates that the film appeals to a modern movie audience that largely has gone past the severe feminist criticism that was pronounced during the interval between 1963 and 1987.
Dirty Dancing avoids second-wave feminism in order to align itself with a view proposed by popular feminine culture — what I call neo-feminism. Writers such as Helen Gurley Brown ... offered a vision of femininity ... in which sexual fulfillment, a woman’s status as a “sexed” being, became an important aspect of her identity. The reclaiming of Dirty Dancing as feminist by fans today, then, highlights the near ubiquity of neo-feminism in contemporary culture as a stand-in for feminism itself. ...
Dirty Dancing offers a vision of feminism for which no apology is necessary and, in a certain sense, makes feminists of the many women who have enjoyed the film, creating an inclusive definition of the term. ... The feminism of Dirty Dancing avoids the call to arms associated with the reformists of the second wave. .... Neo-feminism as incarnated by Baby/Frances can be achieved through the work of individuals on themselves and thus is best understood as a program for self-improvement ....
Dirty Dancing encourages women to embrace a philosophy that promotes "good looks," a toned body, and erotic expertise as the primary tools whereby the impediments of gender and class may be overcome in neo-liberal society. ....
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I did not find Radner's article on the Internet. As far as I know, it is available to read only in the book.
Thursday evenings the hotel conducted bingo games for the hotel guests. Therefore on Thursday evenings Penny Johnson and Johnny Castle were able to sneak over to the Sheldrake Hotel to earn some extra money by performing there.
On Thursday, August 22, 1963, Penny and Johnny performed at the Sheldrake and confirmed that they would perform again there on the following Thursday, August 29.
During the afternoon of Friday, August 23, however, Billy Kostecki informed Penny and Johnny that she could get an abortion, but the only available date was Thursday, August 29. Billy's information presented two problems for Penny and Johnny:
1) The abortion would cost $250, which Penny and Johnny did not have.
2) The abortion would take place on the day of their next Sheldrake performance.
Therefore, Penny went to the kitchen to catch him there before he finished his work shift. She wanted to inform him that she might abort his child. She hoped that Robbie would either offer to help her pay for the abortion or else promise to marry her if she gave birth to his child.
Neither Johnny nor Billy knew that Penny went to the kitchen to talk to Robbie. Penny was supposed to be dancing with hotel guests in the gazebo.
Penny did catch Robbie in the kitchen. He told her he would talk with her right after his work shift, so she waited for him. Eventually he finished his shift and did talk with her, but only briefly. When she told him about her pregnancy and abortion plan, he did not want to spend much time discussing the situation with her.
Robbie told Penny that she might have become pregnant from some other man. Robbie said he did not have time to talk with Penny right now, because he was supposed to meet someone else.
Robbie was supposed to meet Lisa Houseman at the golf course. Robbie had broken up with and moved on from Penny weeks ago. Now Robbie was interested in Lisa.
Right now was not a good time for Robbie to talk with Penny, and so he cut their conversation short and left her alone in the kitchen and headed for the golf course.
Left alone in the kitchen, Penny collapsed emotionally. She dreaded the abortion. She suffered a panic attack. She began crying and could not stop.
She hid in a corner under a sink and wept. She could not compose herself enough to go to the gazebo to dance with the guests.
Neil's intention to go on a Freedom Ride receives much more attention in this script than in the final movie.
Robert Kennedy (not President John Kennedy) is pictured on the contribution box. At that time, Robert Kennedy was the US Attorney General. Also pictured is Manny Cosner (Max Kellerman). What was Eleanor Bergstein thinking?
Baby's parents have asked her where she was during the previous evening. Baby has said that she just went for a walk -- not mentioning the "dirty dancing" party.
Marjorie still is encouraging Baby to have a summer romance with Neil.
The script makes a much bigger deal about racial relations than the final movie does. Bergstein wanted the movie's setting to include a swimming pool, but the resorts that were available as filming locations did not have suitable swimming pools. Although there is no swimming pool in this script, a character still is called "a pool boy".
A Black hesitating -- because of segregated swimming pools of that time -- to enter a swimming pool might have made some sense. However, a Black hesitating to enter a lake does not make sense.
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Page 24
The hotel's male employees ogle female guests wearing swim suits. Neil too is ogling.
Penny says to Baby: I'd like to push your face in.
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Page 26
Marjorie and Vivian were classmates at Hunter College, located in Manhattan. (Hunter College was a women-only college until 1946.)
So, Vivian is about Marjorie's age -- "fortyish".
As a college student, Marjorie was politically active -- "carrying petitions".
Vivian's husband Moe works in a footwear business.
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Page 27
Page 28
Page 29
Johnny says to Baby: You girls read a different Bible. The Jewish guests do not read the Christian Bible.
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Page 30
Rico too is in the scene in which Penny's pregnancy is discussed. Rico is Johnny's colleague who mentioned that Entertainment Staff guys sometimes got oral sex from female guests in the woods.
Penny says that Johnny does not earn enough (to pay for an abortion). Johnny is embarrassed by that fact.
Page 31
Rico is pleased to see Baby. He is looking forward to getting a blow-job from her in the woods.
Baby knows that Robbie has money, because she had heard Robbie brag to Lisa that he had almost enough to buy a car.
A couple of days ago I reviewed a scholarly article about Anachronistic Music in Dirty Dancing. Since then, I have thought some more about the anachronism of the song "Time of My Life" in the movie's final dance scene.
Although the movie takes place in 1963, the song did not exist until the 1980s. Therefore the song is anachronistic; the song existed only after the story's historical time.
How can such a song choice for the movie be justified?
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An anachronistic song can be justified practically and commercially.
* The producers might pay less for the rights of a new song.
* The producers can adapt a new song to the movie's dialogue and action.
* Movie audiences might like some new songs in addition to period songs.
* A popular new song might drive sales of the soundtrack album.
* An actor can be compensated by including one of his songs
(I am sure that Patrick Swayze's song "She's Like the Wind" is in the movie as partial compensation for his acting in the movie. Furthermore, I think he earned more money from that song than he earned from acting in the movie.)
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Now I will provide also an artistic justification for the anachronistic song "Time of My Life" in the movie's final dance scene.
The final scene is Baby's fantasy come true. Johnny has departed forever. However, he returns miraculously and performs a sensational dance with her.
Although Baby did not imagine Johnny's return, she might have fantasized -- as she sat with her parents and watched the talent show -- that he would return. And then he did return! His return was like a miracle!!
The last scene is quite fantastic in the sense that it involved Baby's mental fantasy and also in the sense that it was unrealistic, miraculous.
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I have written an article titled Space-Time Portals in the Movie Dirty Dancing. There I suggested that Johnny's leap from the stage was a leap through a space-time portal, which is framed by the stage in the background. In a sense, Johnny is leaping from the 1963 stage into the 1987 movie theater.
Johnny jumping through a space-time portal
Johnny is leaping from a time when the song "Time of My Life" did not exist into a time when the song did exist. He is leaping from the time of Baby's life into the time of the movie audience's life.
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Not only does Baby's fantasy come true when Johnny returns. In addition, the fantasy of the movie audience's female viewers comes true. As they watched the movie for the first time, they too fantasized that Johnny would return. In my recent review of an article titled "Dirty Dancing as a Teenage Rite-of-Passage Film", I quoted the author Siân Lincoln's memory of watching the move for the first time when she was 13 years old.
[The movie had been] a hot topic on the school playground for months, and we were so excited to be finally watching it. I even bought a new nightdress for the occasion. ...
I instantly fell in love with it, not least because of the presence of Patrick Swayze who, for me, played the "bad boy" role perfectly. (and whom I found so physically attractive). But I also loved the music, the clothing, the film's retro aesthetic, and of course the love story between Johnny and Baby.
I distinctly remember us girls practically screaming when at the end of the film Johnny comes back to dance with Baby and he utters the immortal line "nobody puts Baby in a corner."
I'm not sure how many times we rewound that scene that night, but it was plenty.
Those teenage girls were "practically screaming" because Johnny's return was so desired and miraculous. The fantasy of those girls too came true.
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The last scene is so fantastic that the story's basic realism is distorted. Therefore the song that is featured in that last scene does not have to belong to that place and time. Rather, the song can belong even to the movie audience's place and time. The song can be wonderfully anachronistic.
