Generic Hybridity in "Dirty Dancing"

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 three 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

Now I will review another of the book's articles -- "Bringing Up Baby: Generic Hybridity in Dirty Dancing", written by Tamar Jeffers McDonald.

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Tamar Jeffers McDonald

The book identifies Ms. Jeffers McDonald as follows:

Tamar Jeffers McDonald is a senior lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Kent, UK. She read English at Somerville College, Oxford., before turning to Film Studies and being awarded her Masters at the University of Westminster and her PhD by the University of Warwick.

Her current research interests include film costume; genre studies, especially romantic comedy; the gothic and melodrama; and stardom, especially the star figure of Doris Day, the subject of her next monograph, Doris Day Confidential: Hollywood Sex and Stardom (2013). Recent publications include two monographs, Romantic Comedy: boy Meets Girl Meets Genre (Wallflower Press, 2007) and Hollywood Catwalk: Exploring Costume in Mainstream Film (I.B. Tauris, 2010). An edited collection, Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film, was published by Wayne State University Press in February 2010.

Jeffers McDonald's expression generic hybridity means (my definition) a mixture of genres. She argues that the movie Dirty Dancing comprises elements of various genres. The movie is a mixture -- a hybridity -- of genres and cannot be categorized definitely into any one particular genre. The article mentions the following genres:

* Backstage musical

* Love story

* Dance picture

* Musical

* Nostalgia (historical) film

* Romantic drama

* Comedy

* Teen pic

* Juvenile delinquent movie

* Swashbuckler

* Romantic comedy

Jeffers McDonald writes in her article's conclusion that the movie became widely popular because it was a hybridity of many, differing genres:

... What does Dirty Dancing gain by its promiscuous borrowings [of genres]? Perhaps Dirty Dancing is successful because it has something for everyone. Audiences can be fairly well-assured that somewhere amongst all its generic plunder there will be something in the film to please most viewers, whether it is the dancing, the romance, the comedy, the nostalgia, or any one of the other elements co-opted and skillfully integrated in to the narrative mix.

In offering something for everyone, the film backs up the theory advanced by genre theorists ... that a text that proliferates genres also proliferates audiences. ...

I think that a scholarly article about the genre of the movie Dirty Dancing should categorize the movie into a particular genre. Then the article could point out elements of other genres that appear additionally.

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I myself categorize Dirty Dancing within the coming-of-age genre. Jeffers McDonald does not even mention that genre. The closest that she comes to that genre is her discussion of "a nostalgia movie".

While Dirty Dancing may seem on the surface a simple love story, further attention sows that it also possesses attributes of a dance picture, even a musical, despite the fact that the performers do not sing. When closely examined, the film can actually be seen to draw on conventions, tropes and iconography from a remarkably large number of other genres. ...

The opening of Dirty Dancing seems to establish the film's generic allegiance in an immediate and straightforward way. With apparent transparency, it sets the film firmly within the bounds of the nostalgia film, which presents a fond look back at bygone, personal events. The voiceover, the retro car, music, and fashions, the traditional familial relationships, and the golden-lit cinematography, all assert that this will be a dip back into the heroine's past.

Jeffers McDonald compares Dirty Dancing to a couple of other nostalgia films -- American Graffiti and The Big Chill. She elaborates on her nostalgia genre, but I will not discuss her elaboration here.

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I liked her discussion of the swashbuckler component of the movie's genre mixture (hybridity).

Even the swashbuckler genre is given a nod when Johnny and Baby are training outdoors and Johnny shows off his excellent balance on a tree branch that has fallen across a river.

.... Let's look more closely at that brief evocation of the swashbuckler for clues. When Johnny balances on the branch before coaxing Baby out to jin him in another dance sequence, he poses for an instant as if holding a sword or fencing foil. The gesture made by his wrist a he extends his arm indicates that this posing is not accidental but meant to evoke the flourish of a swordsman offering a challenge or preparing for a bout.

Johnny Castle the swashbuckler
(This photo is not included in the article.)

.... It also evokes Robin Hood, the heroic, handsome, altruistic class warrior who, though born into nobility, sided with the common people, "robbing the rich to give to the poor." Johnny, who feels the inequities of being lower-class in a supposedly classless society, is ennobled through his comparison to Robin Hood ....

There is also the hint in this fleeting moment that previous sparring between Johnny and Baby -- as with that between Little John and Robin on their fist meeting in the famous log-bridge battle -- is just a hiccup on the way to becoming inseparable.

Here is a snapshot of the relevant scene in a Robin Hood movie.

Robin Hood and Little John jousting on a bridge
(This illustration is not in the article.)

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More than half of the article discusses the movie's inclusion of a romantic-comedy character who is called "the wrong partner".

The film's principle co-option from romantic comedy is the employment of an archetypical character [genre expert] Steve Neale calls "the wrong partner". Neal defines the wrong partner as someone who the central character must outgrow and forego, and who is usually in place at the start of the narrative. ....

Neal goes further, however, to suggest that the wrong partner is not merely wrong emotionally but also represents some quality or abition in the central character that needs eradication. ...

The wrong partners for Baby are Neil Kellerman and mostly Jake Houseman. When the story begins, Baby is looking for a partner like her father, but she finds a different kind of partner.

The employment of the wrong partner trope from romantic comedy seems to be the film's most audacious steal ....By setting up Baby's father as this archetypical character, a person who, in the heterosexual romance storyline, is generally seen as wrong but not taboo, the film comments on what it really meant to be daddy's girl in early 1960s America and how hard Baby has to struggle to achieve sexual maturity in this era.

The film realigns Baby's desires so that she may become socially transgressive by choosing her own, lower-class lover, because in doing so she abandons her more sexually taboo position as Daddy's wrong partner.

Dirty Dancing thus uses this rom-com [romantic comedy] convention to underline the dangerously intense feelings that could be generated by the traditional American family nexus. ...

More than half the article is an elaboration of this idea that Baby's initial admiration of her father -- and her desire to marry a similar man -- is an example of "the wrong partner" in the romantic-comedy genre.

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I did not agree with the article's thesis (as I understand the thesis) that Dirty Dancing is such a generic hybridity (mixture of genres) that the movie cannot be categorized into one particular genre. I myself categorize the move into the coming-of-age genre.

I do not categorize Dirty Dancing as a romantic comedy. I intend to write a separate article arguing that Dirty Dancing is not a romantic comedy.

Furthermore, I do not think that Baby's relationship with her father is a compelling example of "the wrong partner" archetype in romantic comedies. In Dirty Dancing the only "wrong partner" is Neil Kellerman.

The fact that Baby initially wants to marry a man like her father is not "transgressive" or "taboo", and her father is not "the wrong partner" as that genre expression is understood properly.