Romantic Nostalgia and the Early 1960s

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:

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

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

Anachronistic Music in Dirty Dancing

Dressing and Undressing in Dirty Dancing: Consumption, Gender, and Visual Culture in the 1980s

Dirty Dancing: Feminism, Postfeminism and Neo-Feminism

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.