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| The cover of the book "The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture" |
Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular CultureNow I will review another of the book's articles -- "'It's a Feeling; A Heartbeat': Nostalgia, Music, and Affect in Dirty Dancing", written by Claire Molloy.
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
"There Are a Lot of Things About Me That Aren't What You Thought": The Politics of Dirty Dancing
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| Claire Molloy (Parkinson) |
Claire Molloy holds the chair in film, television, and digital media at Edge Hill University. She is the author of Memento (EUP, 2010) and Popular Media and Animals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and co-editor of the collections Beyond Human: From Animality to Transhumanism (Continuum, 2012) and American Independent Cinema: Indie, indiewood and beyond (Routledge, 2012).I summarize the article as follows.
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A remarkable aspect of the movie Dirty Dancing is that it commonly is watched by a fan repeatedly over a long period of time. The movie, which features music, stimulates feelings of personal nostalgia.
Dirty Dancing is now both a 1960s and 1980s nostalgia movie. The film offers viewers who first saw Dirty Dancing in their adolescence pleasures derived from personal nostalgia ....Viewers who were old enough to remember the early 1960s feel nostalgia when they hear the movie's period songs. Younger viewers too feel nostalgia whenever they hear even the movie's newest songs. Songs created for the 1987 movie -- "Time of My Life" and "Hungry Eyes" -- had played on the radio and had became popular hits before the movie began playing in movie theaters. Since the movie's popularity now has continued for more than three decades, all of the movie's have become "golden oldies" that evoke nostalgic feelings.
... re-watching a film ... can trigger a flood of impressions that illuminate moments from one's history with unexpected vividness. ....
What, then of a film such as Dirty Dancing, which combines popular songs (which in themselves can evoke personal memories) with the pleasures derived from the emotional familiarity of re-experiencing a romance narrative? Music clearly plays a key role in the production of nostalgia for a mythical and idealized past ....
The movie has acquired some characteristics of a "cult film". The movie and its various symbols are treasured. The movie is shown in public celebrations. Bits of dialogue are recited like scripture. Devoted fans recruit and initiate new fans.
Initiation ... is particularly salient to a discussion of Dirty Dancing, where repeated viewing occurs in the context of intergenerational transfer of cultural capital, with one generation introducing the next to the film. ...The movie Dirty Dancing and its music evoke emotions extraordinarily.
Initiation to the text [to the movie] is regarded as an important bonding experience between parent and child. .... Fans who were also parents said that they had to watch the film again for the specific reason of sharing the experience with their child or because repeat viewing was now being initiated by their child.
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The movie takes place at the end of a cultural era that extended from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. In retrospect, that cultural era is commonly considered to be a "golden age" of wide-spread prosperity, happy conformity and fun-loving entertainment amidst the adolescence of the USA's Baby Boom.
Society's feelings of security during that era correspond to a young adolescent's feelings of security as he still enjoys the final part of his protected childhood.
The period setting, 1963, re-imagined as a transformative moment in history, provides a compelling backdrop for the coming-of-age story.In Dirty Dancing, the sexual awareness that signals the loss of Baby Houseman's childhood and her resulting passage into adulthood structures the narrative trajectory, and Baby's transformation is metonymically connected to the loss of the political and social certainties of the time.The movie's youthful perspective is emphasized by the movie's main songs. The younger characters' music is distinct from the older characters' music.
By the end of the film, "Baby" is granted an adult identity as "Frances" Houseman; middle-class life and social status have been exposed as dull, hollow aspirations; the older generation is revealed to be out of touch with, even confused by, cultural changes they cannot comprehend; and the loss of fain in 1950s paternalism is paralleled by the breakdown of Baby's relationship with her father.
The [young] characters look toward an imminent and uncertain future and find some degree of assurance in the music of the time ....The article compares the nostalgia effect of the songs of Dirty Dancing with the nostalgia effect of three other nostalgia movies -- Saturday Night Fever (1977), Grease (1978) and Flashdance (1983). For all four movies, this effect was encouraged and shaped by soundtrack albums and promotional campaigns.
Cultural differences in music and dance are aligned with social differences. Baby is a Jewish, middle-class girls, the daughter of a doctor with an already-mapped-out future; Johnny is the dance instructor who lives form job to job. Thus, while the wealthy, repressed parents do the mambo and take ballroom dancing instructions, in darkened rooms late at night grinding dance movements are performed to the strains of rhythm-and-blues ....
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The montage showing the first dance lessons that Baby receives from Johnny illuminates her coming-of-age.
The [coming-of-age] process ... can be usefully illustrated in two connected dance instruction montages in the film.======
During the first sequence, we see Johnny Castle’s black leather, Cuban-heeled shoes and Baby Houseman’s white lace-up canvas plimsolls, tightly-framed. The energetic driving instrumental "Wipe Out" by the Surfaris structures this first montage in which Johnny teaches Baby to dance. His voiceover instructs the audience and Baby that, "The steps aren’t enough. Feel the music."
The scene cuts to a long shot of Baby, who has shed her inhibitions and begins to dance with abandonment and mock sensuality on the foot bridge. She dances out of frame, "Wipe Out" fades, and the sequence cuts to Johnny telling Baby: "It’s not on the one. It’s not the mambo. It’s a feeling a heartbeat." Holding her hand to his chest, he tells Baby to close her eyes and to feel the beat of his heart.
At the same time, the instrumental opening to "Hungry Eyes" signals the change in the emotional register of the film. The song foreshadows the intimacy to come and reshapes the relationship between Baby and Johnny, while the montage of shots describes Baby’s progression from awkward, naive girl to sexually aware woman.
In the "heartbeat" scene, the tutor/pupil relationship shifts from dance instruction to sexual initiation. Johnny’s direction to "feel the music" has been interpreted by Baby through her exaggerated display of provocative movements on the footbridge. Her immature understanding of sexuality is now given an emotional context, a license to "feel," and the rhythm of the music and its corporeal expression through dance is equated to the beat of Johnny’s heart. The "heart beat" scene connects the two montage sections, which condense Baby’s dance instruction and sexual awakening and bridge the historically accurate "Wipe Out" with the contemporaneous "Hungry Eyes."
The abrupt fade-out that occurs partway through the third drum solo break of "Wipe Out" signals the equally rapid change of mood from Baby’s frustration and subsequent abandonment of her reserved demeanor, which are unified by the percussive emphasis of the track, to "Hungry Eyes," a slow rock ballad, the lyrics of which then also direct the new emotional tone. "Hungry Eyes" accompanies the serious, in tense, hard work of the dance training, as well as underlining Baby’s sexual awareness and the burgeoning eroticism of her relationship with Johnny.
However, the shift in tempo and mood from childhood, identified with "Wipe Out," to the maturity signaled by "Hungry Eyes," is eased by the stress placed on rhythm through the dialogue in the linking scene where Johnny describes the beat of his heart as "gu-gun, gu-gun," and both he and Baby tap it out in time. This cues the (albeit extremely short) drum intro to "Hungry Eyes": the instrumental opening over which Johnny then proceeds to count, and he and Baby begin to move in time to the rhythm.
The article's conclusion includes the following passages.
Dirty Dancing blends the visual and sonic styles of the 1960s and the 1980s as much as it fuses the morality of both eras. The film’s treatment of Penny’s abortion, Baby and Johnny’s relationship, Johnny’s numerous sexual encounters with married women (which are only spoken about and never witnessed), and the salacious moves of dirty dancing are suspended somewhere between a strict, albeit 1950s moral code imposed by narrative necessity and a later, liberal moral climate.======
In the same way, the cultural references of the different eras mingle, and 1980s hairstyles, music, and clothes are woven into the visual and sonic fabric of the film’s mise-en-scène. The pastness Dirty Dancing re-creates is ... that of the postmodern nostalgia film, which combines the surfaces (the atmospheric and stylistic contours of different eras), recycles past cinematic styles, and plunders older film plots as pastiche. ...
At the time of its release, the 1960s and l980s music used in Dirty Dancing functioned to evoke personal recollections, nostalgia, and identifications for different audiences. The core audience — the first “home video” generation — who were teenagers in the 1980s did not view Dirty Dancing as reactivating previous experiences evoked by the film’s setting; instead, the period songs evoked “a fiction of a shared past.” ...
The music of an imagined, shared past (the songs from the 1960s) is entwined with the recollections of an actual, experienced past (the 1980s) in a revised form of nostalgia that differentiates the “film as nostalgia” in the context of repeat viewings ....
I did not find the article on the Internet. As far as I know, the article is available to read only in the book.
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