The Politics of "Dirty Dancing" -- Part 1

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:

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

"(I've Had) The Time of My Life": Romantic Nostalgia and the Early 1960s

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.

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This article will be continued in a Part 2.