Dirty Dancing
is a feminist film. A surprise success that nobody wanted to do. A public phenomenon reviled by the intellectual elite. But everyone already knows that, because the cultural conversation has been claiming
Dirty Dancing for
a decade
and squeezing it from so many points of view that, to commemorate its re-release in Spanish cinemas on August 26, the only thing that remains to be said about it is that too much has already been said about her. But here's one more:
Dirty Dancing
is a perfect product to define the current state of culture.
Up to 43 studios turned down the project when its producers, Linda Gottlieb and Eleanor Bergstein (also a screenwriter), tried to find funding. Eventually the video company Vestron Pictures agreed to produce it for five million dollars and not one more (the shoot is full of anecdotes about how they managed to cut costs). But when it was released, in August 1987, the story of Baby Houseman (Jennifer Gray), a girl who in the last summer of her adolescence learns to move her hips with the dancer Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze), it became the film. highest grossing independent to that time with more than 200 million raised. Its soundtrack sold 32 million copies, spent five months at No. 1 in the United States, and spawned a successful concert tour.The VHS tape was the first in history to sell a million copies and that cost almost 80 euros. And precisely thanks to the video, in addition to his constant passes on television,
Dirty Dancing
established itself as a classic of popular cinema, of Sunday afternoons and, especially, of the maligned
cinema for girls
.
And that seemed its definitive place, until in the last decade it has been established in the cinematographic canon.
The first turning point for
Dirty Dancing's
prestige
came in 2009 with the death of Patrick Swayze.
Two days later, journalist Melissa McEwan proclaimed in
The Guardian
that
Dirty Dancing
it was "a feminist masterpiece." McEwan recalled how when he saw her at the cinema, when he was 13 years old, he felt “for the first time that a film was a personal gift” to her and that it offered “a subversive narrative against all things” that she used to listen to. The article applauded the audacity with which the script addresses a key moment in the step to maturity, when you realize that your father has instilled in you values that he does not apply to himself, and also claimed Baby as a girl with principles that she was not afraid to stand up to men. "I sat in the movies and watched Baby Houseman enthusiastically choose to have sex outside of marriage, enjoy it, have no regrets, and not suffer tragic consequences of karma." In addition to being a solid and argued analysis,McEwan valued the film through a thesis that she built through her own personal relationship with the play.
Actors Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Gray in a dance scene from the movie Dirty Dancing, 1987.Matt Green / Getty Images
At the end of the 2000s, the pop culture website
Buzzfeed
revolutionized the consumption of information on the internet both in format ("7 reasons for", "9 moments that", "14 examples of") and in object of analysis: the line
Buzzfeed
editorial
consisted of taking a movie / series / gadget from the past that everyone linked to their childhood and treating it as if having enjoyed it in childhood was something exceptional.
Every day a new favorite movie had its birthday and when in 2012
Dirty Dancing
reached its 25th anniversary, the Internet celebrated it with a batch of articles that listed all the qualities for which “
Dirty Dancing
it's better than people remember ”. The intention, of course, was not to convince the skeptics, but that the millions of fans of the film click on the link to rejoice in what they already thought.
In 2015, the British journalist Hadley Freeman edited
Life Moves Pretty Fast (
published in Spain by Blackie Books with the title
The Time of My Life
and the subtitle “An essay on how 80s cinema taught us to be braver, more feminist and more human ”). It fit in with the spirit of the new
online
cultural journalism
:
unprejudiced, anti-elitist, revisionist with the works of the past, and vindictive of what has so often been despised as "low culture." Freeman's generation had grown up with the video store and now took over the cultural conversation.
"Few movies have been as undervalued and misunderstood as
Dirty Dancing,
" said Freeman, who regretted that no one had understood the feminism of the film at the time. The author applauded how, while still being a sexy, summery and playful film, she dared to address in an adult way the class system, machismo and moral conflicts such as abortion: the screenwriter made sure that the plot of Penny, the Johnny's friend who wants to have an abortion was so integrated into the plot that the studio couldn't eliminate her.
"I defended a cinema considered
minor
because it was for the masses and I did it through a discourse that we have all used later: those films that you grew up with and that you adore hid a powerful and inspiring message," explains journalist Raquel Piñeiro.
“For years,
Dirty Dancing
was considered a second-rate cultural object for being a female, musical and adolescent film.
But the very idea of what we understand by
quality
is historically marked by a very masculine look.
Dirty Dancing
will always be at a disadvantage against
The Crystal Jungle
. "
Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze) and Baby Houseman (Jennifer Gray) in Dirty Dancing.Archive Photos / Getty Images
As Elisa McCausland points out in her
Pop Culture Trenches
podcast
, the vindication of popular culture has built a specter against which to defend itself: high culture and the intellectual elite. However, high culture and the intellectual elite have never been so irrelevant as now: Mario Vargas Llosa dedicated an entire book (
The civilization of the spectacle
) to lament this progressive loss of transcendence.
McCausland points to the 2007 economic crisis as the trigger. While the economy collapsed, the people felt that high culture had failed in its double function: it neither knew how to question the system nor was it serving as a social elevator. For decades parents instilled in their children the notion that cultivating themselves would help them have a better life, but the 2007 crisis proved that this was not true. All this crisis of values led to a refuge where time does not pass, changes do not occur and uncertainty does not exist: nostalgia.
By the time
Dirty Dancing
turned 30, in 2017, the internet turned to celebration. Many of the articles, from feminist websites to publications of film criticism or general media, proclaimed it without hot cloths a masterpiece. This wave propelled her to occupy her brand new status for posterity: the key film in the sentimental education of the generation of women who, once adults, would lead the #MeToo movement. One of the most read articles in Spain was that of Piñeiro for
Vanity Fair
.
“It is very satisfying to analyze
Dirty Dancing
because there is a lot to get from and it also resists review very well with a current look "recalls the journalist today," Applying a gender reading not only did not ruin the memory we had of her, as is the case with most films of the eighties , but elevated it ”.
Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze) and Baby Houseman (Jennifer Gray) in an erotic scene from Dirty Dancing.Matt Green / Getty Images
Dirty Dancing
was simply perfect to play that symbolic role of "generational classic of the new feminism." She had been looked down on all her life, which gives a certain epic to her establishment in the cultural pantheon. She was the victim of macho and intellectual prejudice and, ultimately, suffered the same condescension that women suffer. In addition, both Melissa McEwan and Hadley Freeman and the rest of the revisionists recognized the sentimental factor in their analyzes and even pointed out the power of a phrase as cheesy as "I will not let anyone corner Baby."
Dirty Dancing
served to reaffirm the identity of women as consumers of culture (and, by extension, their identity in general) after years of being ridiculed. No one has ever called "guilty pleasure"
The Goonies
.
Bret Easton Ellis affirms, in his
White
essay
, that cultural works are only valued according to their ideology, so that art matters less than ever.
Internet inaugurated the era of the emotional (not everyone has intellectual concerns, but everyone has emotions), in which the sentimental and personal response always seems more valuable than the intellectual and collective.
But these feelings have ended up imposing a didactic responsibility on popular culture: the works are not talked about based on their artistic merits, but on whether we agree with them or not.
Cultural criticism borders on moral criticism.
According to Piñeiro, it is one more step from postmodernity. “Before you had the object of study. Then came the analysis that proposed 'this is an object of study that is aware that it is'. And now the author has become part of the analysis and the analyzed work. The same thing has happened in cultural criticism: works are analyzed through the self. Today we are very aware that truth and objectivity do not exist and we no longer hide the narrator's or analyst's personal filter but instead use it. In the case of
Dirty Dancing
, as it is such an important film on an emotional and sexual level for a whole generation of women, it makes much more sense, ”says the journalist.
Actors Jennifer Gray and Patrick Swayze attend a Vestron Pictures after-party screening of Dirty Dancing, 1987. Bettmann / Bettmann Archive
Does that make it a classic?
Will his legacy survive the next generation, no longer emotionally attached to Baby and Johnny?
And if the cultural conversation someday stops focusing on the values, the message and the discourse of the works, will
Dirty Dancing
return
to that corner of “nice movie” that it inhabited during its first 20 years of life?
Or is it his inscription in the definitive cinematographic canon?
“A good macho comedy is no worse for being macho. It's a good movie that apart from being macho ”analyzes Piñeiro,“
Dirty Dancing
has always been just as good, only now it's more interesting. It's good because it works perfectly, it paces like clockwork, you understand the characters perfectly and it puts a twist on stereotypes. It is very well told, for example when it comes to developing the real villains, which are the wealthy men. The heroine is very credible and very little seen. Patrick had a lot of personal charisma. And the sexiness, the songs, and the fun are overwhelming in every scene. But above all,
Dirty Dancing
it has that magic of movies that connects with audiences in a special way.
It is an inexplicable factor that cannot be analyzed no matter how hard it is examined.
It has always been one of those films that are above whether they are good or bad, whether they age well or badly, whether they have a message or not.
And will continue to be".
Two months ago Blackie Books launched the pocket edition of Hadley Freeman's book in Spain.
The original subtitle ("An essay on how the cinema of the eighties taught us to be braver, more feminist and more human") became simply "How the cinema of the eighties taught us to be feminists."
And the cover, before there was a drawing of the final scene, where Swayze raises Gray, it became purple, a color code to identify feminist literature in bookstores.
In the illustration, it is Baby who lifts Johnny up.
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