"Dirty Dancing" as Reagan-era Cinema and "Reaganite Entertainment"

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 five blog articles about the book and its articles:

Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture

Is Dirty Dancing a Musical?

Straightness and Dirtiness in Dirty Dancing

Generic Hybridity in Dirty Dancing

Dirty Dancing as a Teenage Rite-of-Passage Film

Now I will review another of the book's articles -- "Dirty Dancing as Reagan-era Cinema and 'Reaganite Entertainment'", written by Cynthia Baron and Mark Bernard.

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Cynthia Baron

The book identifies Cynthia Baron as follows:

Cynthia Baron is associate professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at Bowling Green State University. She is also an affiliated faculty member in the graduate American Culture Studies Program.

She is co-author of Reframing Screen Performance and co-editor of More Than a Method. She is co-author of The Politics of Food in Film (forthcoming) and author of Denzel Washington (forthcoming).

Recent publications include chapters in New Constellations: Movie Stars of the 1960s, The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film, and Genre and Performance. She is the editor of The Projector: A Journal on Film, Media, and Culture.

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Mark Bernard

The book identifies Mark Bernard as follows:

Mark Bernard is Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina. His research interests include media industries, horror film, and food in film.

His work appears in upcoming anthologies Cult Film Stardom: Offbeat Attractions and Processes of Cultification and Murders and Acquisitions: Representations of the Serial Killer in Popular Culture. He is co-author (with Cynthia Baron and Diane E. Canon) of the forthcoming book The Politics of Food and Film. He is currently at work on a manuscript titled Selling the Splat Pack: The DVD Revolution and the American Horror Film.

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Before I address Baron's and Bernard's article, I will address the general idea of "Reaganite cinema" and its relationship to Dirty Dancing. In this blog I already have published two articles on the subject.

Dirty Dancing in the Era of Reaganite Cinema

Dirty Dancing Was Ronald Reagan's Revenge

Ronald Reagan was the US President from 1981 to 1989, and then his Vice President, George H. W. Bush became the US President from 1989 to 1993. So the 12-year period from 1981 to 1993 can be called the Reagan Era. Analyzing movies in relation to that era is a valid exercise.

The movie Dirty Dancing was released in 1987 -- in the middle of that 1981-1993 period. The movie's screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein was upset when Regan became President, because she feared that he eventually would appoint federal judges who might overturn the US Supreme Court's controversial 1973 decision to legalize first-trimester abortions. That fear motivated Bergstein to include the abortion issue in the movie script that she was preparing to write.

Also, Bergstein resented Reagan's rejection of political liberalism. Therefore her script portrayed the idealism that had captivated many young people during the Kennedy presidency. The movie's narrator -- speaking fro the Reagan Era -- looks back fondly at that idealistic Kennedy Era.

Aside from Dirty Dancing, other movies released during the Reagan Era resonate with that era. For example, the US military gained much popular respect during the Regan Era, and some movies portrayed the military very popular. Examples would be An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) and Top Gun(1986).

The Reagan Era was characterized by great public support for the Presidency. When Reagan ran for re-election in 1984 and then Bush ran for election in 1988, they won in landslides.

Reagan's re-election in 1984
(red states voted for Reagan)

Bush's election in 1988
(red states voted for Bush)

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When literary scholars analyze movies in relation to the Reagan Era, I can appreciate essays that are politically temperate. When, however, scholars write in a manner that is extremely partisan and even insulting to non-leftists, then they are not persuading me -- a Republican who remembers the Reagan Era fondly.

Most academics who write scholarly articles about movies are politically very liberal. They view the Reagan Era as a political dark age. They are employed in university departments that are political mono-cultures. Leftist group-think is pervasive.

The only way to get hired, promoted and tenured is to preach that American society has marginalized various social groups -- women, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, and so forth.

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Now I will address Baron's and Bernard's article. They do not call themselves Marxists in the book, but their article is written with a Marxist perspective. Their article's first pages include the following examples of their rhetoric.

We see her [Baby's] coy smiles and his [Johnny's] lip-synching ... as a display of courtship rituals, not as a sign of his continued deference to her superior class status.

Hollywood's ... "industrial policy" blocks depictions that criticize the free market system, show collective action in a positive light, or treat racism, poverty, or unemployment in realistic ways.

Johnny embodies the contradictions one finds in Hollywood narratives about working-class characters invested in class mobility.

Hollywood's audiences know that style and fashion will be the vehicles for the working-class character's efforts to transcend his social position.

Those anti-union and anti-working-class sentiments are integral features of the Reagan era. Reagan's presidency represented the first time since the 1920s that direct attacks on labor emanated from the White House and a period when unions were deliberately made the scapegoat of an economy that increasingly seemed unable to perform acceptably at home or abroad

Dirty Dancing ... used the conventions of the musical to envelop young, downwardly mobile (male) audiences in the fantasy of class transcendence through style and leisure activities, including ballroom dancing. That fantasy would have been especially attractive, of course, during Reagan's administration, which was an era of high unemployment, inflation, and escalating "middle-class" poverty.

I am interrupting these examples here in order to show three charts of the economy during the Reagan Presidency. (Click on the images to enlarge them.)

Now here are some more examples of Baron's and Bernard's Marxist rhetoric.

Dirty Dancingserved as a strong reminder to middle- and working-class audiences that, in Reagan's America, people in the upper-class were to be seen as "higher beings who deserve more".

... Johnny has thoroughly internalized the Reagan era’s division between upper and lower castes. For instance ... he tells Baby: “the reason people treat me like I’m nothin’ is because I’m nothin’.”

Johnny’s sense pf worthlessness causes him to expend intense physical labor. While dance is a way for him to break out of the “cultural circle of class oppression,” it is important to note that dance is itself a form of manual labor; moreover, the discipline required to succeed as a dancer and dance instructor “is also an internalization of guilt” over his working-class status.

Johnny’s view that he was “balancing on shit” is indicative of American workers’ sense of helplessness during the Reagan years.

As Johnny exemplifies, American workers “internalized views” that served business interests; they accepted “a perception of themselves … detrimental to their own interest.” Having been fired for crossing the class boundary and with no prospect of work in his fixture, Johnny will still” never be sorry!’ By being Baby’s dance instructor, he has gotten a glimpse of what it would be like to be something other than working-class. If Dirty Dancing had followed the logic implicit.

Now I am going to skip nine pages -- similarly filled with Marxist rhetoric -- to the article's second-to-the-last page, from which I will quote at length.

Dirty Dancing is emblematic of Reaganite entertainment for many reasons. Released in August 1987. in the wake of the Tax Reform Act passed in October 1986 (which again reduced the taxes for top incomes and raised the rate on the lowest incomes), the Iran-Contra scandal that became visible in November 1986, the sayings and loans bailouts that began in 1986, and just a few months before the stock market crash in October 1987, the film blithely tells the viewer to not worry about these troublesome events and instead escape into a Neverland structured by ritual and repetition. ....

While the film ostensibly explores the social and economic differences that threaten the union of the couple, there is no class conflict because Johnny’s beliefs and behaviors are in sync with Baby’s and Dr. Houseman’s from the beginning. In Dirty Dancing, disturbances and problems are magically resolved before they can ruin the fun. ...

Reflecting its production context, Dirty Dancing places Johnny, the working-class dance instructor, in a hopeless and helpless situation. While he might aspire to become Baby’s “dance partner,” his fixed, lower status makes him ill-suited to inherit Dr. Houseman’s august place in the fairy-tale world. Revealing itself to be a distinctly Reagan- era film, Dirty Dancing shows that America’s mutable class barriers had, in the 1980s, transformed into a caste system where dominant factions reasserted their position that a person’s subservient (class and/or racial) identity could and should be determined by birth.

Taking an analytic stance that both narrows and expands that focus, one can also see that Dirty Dancing’s use of Hollywood formulas places it squarely among ... examples of Reaganite entertainment. Dirty Dancing’s narrative resolution is not ironic, like some films in classical Hollywood cinema, but instead insular and sugar-coated. Its entertainment and distraction value is so ephemeral that audiences find themselves returning again and again to this and/or other Reaganite entertainment films.

.... the film and Reaganite entertainment as a whole need not be seen as aberrations, but are perhaps best understood as the result of the Hollywood industry’s century-long position that references to “problems” in the outside world are not good for business. ... Dirty Dancing and the many iterations of Reaganite entertainment exemplify the kind of motion picture product that eventually results from industrial practices designed to create wide markets for nondurable goods and thus ensure maximum profit for the private sector. ...

Marxist rhetoric of this kind does not engage me intellectually. I like living in free-market economies, because they are innovative and dynamic. I do not want to live in a stagnant society and be brain-washed with Marxist dogma.

However, people who do appreciate Marxist literary analysis might like Baron's and Bernard's article.

I did not find the article, however, published on the Internet. As far as I know, it is available to read only in the book.