Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) Read Online Free
to ribbons. But that force is in me because of these movies. Thanks to them, the true eighties force will always be strong with us.
Dirty Dancing :
Abortions Happen and That’s Just Fine
Few movies have been as underrated and misunderstood as 1987’s Dirty Dancing . I first saw it when I was ten and I’m afraid that far from appreciating that I was bearing witness to one of the great feminist films of all time, I was so excited to be watching a movie that had the word ‘Dirty’ in the title that I spent the whole film waiting for it to finish so I could call my friend Lauren to brag about this achievement.
‘Well, I just saw Can’t Buy Me Love , twice,’ said Lauren balefully, referring to the Patrick Dempsey teen romcom, ‘and two viewings of Can’t Buy Me Love is worth one Dirty Dancing .’
Out of politeness, I agreed, but we both knew that was totally not true ( Can’t Buy Me Love doesn’t have a single sex scene so, like, come on). But just to make sure, I then watched Dirty Dancing two more times in a row so that Lauren would definitely not be able to catch up with my coolness. And just to prove how cool I was, I then called Lauren again to tell her that, too.
Adult critics and audiences at the time were just as blind as ten-year-old me when it came to seeing the feminism in Dirty Dancing (although presumably most of them didn’t immediately brag to their frenemies about having just seen the movie). Partly this comes down to sexism. Partly it’s a reflection of how times have changed in the past thirty years. And mainly it’s because the film’s writer, Eleanor Bergstein, rightly thought the best way to deliver a social message was ‘to present in a pleasurable way so that the moral lessons would sneak up on people’. But for a long time I was so distracted by the pleasure – specifically, the soundtrack, the sex, the Swayze – that the moral lessons didn’t sneak up at all. For years I didn’t realise I was watching one of the great feminist tracts of the 1980s, easily up there with Susan Faludi’s feminist study of the eighties, Backlash . But then, Faludi’s book doesn’t come with a half-naked Patrick Swayze, so it is easier to recognise it as a contribution to the fight against misogyny.
By the mid-eighties, both Flashdance and Footloose had been released and studios were desperate for another teen movie that featured dancing and came with a great commercial soundtrack. But one movie they definitely did not want was Dirty Dancing .
‘I cannot be clear enough about this: everybody thought Dirty Dancing was just a piece of teenage junk,’ says the charmingly chatty Bergstein. ‘Nobody wanted to make it. Nobody. I would send out the script to studios along with a tape of the soundtrack that I’d made to go with it, that was just recordings of my old 45s from the 1960s, and executives would call me and say, “Oh yeah, Eleanor, we’re not going to make the movie, but could you send me another cassette? I wore out the last one.” But not even that convinced them of the movie’s potential.’
MGM briefly took on the script at the encouragement of several female executives (the men there all hated it), but then dropped it. Not a single other studio would consider it. Eventually a small independent production company looked at it, saw it as an easy quick buck and offered to make it for $4 million, about a fifth of the average cost of a movie at the time. Bergstein and her producer, Linda Gottlieb, accepted.
Bergstein had already had one screenplay produced, the undeservedly forgotten 1980 film It’s My Turn in which Jill Clayburgh plays a mathematics professor who has an affair with an athlete played by Michael Douglas. The inspiration for that came from Bergstein’s observations of female mathematics students at Princeton, where her husband was and still is a professor, and the condescension they had to endure from men, including accusations that their boyfriends did all their
Dirty Dancing :
Abortions Happen and That’s Just Fine
Few movies have been as underrated and misunderstood as 1987’s Dirty Dancing . I first saw it when I was ten and I’m afraid that far from appreciating that I was bearing witness to one of the great feminist films of all time, I was so excited to be watching a movie that had the word ‘Dirty’ in the title that I spent the whole film waiting for it to finish so I could call my friend Lauren to brag about this achievement.
‘Well, I just saw Can’t Buy Me Love , twice,’ said Lauren balefully, referring to the Patrick Dempsey teen romcom, ‘and two viewings of Can’t Buy Me Love is worth one Dirty Dancing .’
Out of politeness, I agreed, but we both knew that was totally not true ( Can’t Buy Me Love doesn’t have a single sex scene so, like, come on). But just to make sure, I then watched Dirty Dancing two more times in a row so that Lauren would definitely not be able to catch up with my coolness. And just to prove how cool I was, I then called Lauren again to tell her that, too.
Adult critics and audiences at the time were just as blind as ten-year-old me when it came to seeing the feminism in Dirty Dancing (although presumably most of them didn’t immediately brag to their frenemies about having just seen the movie). Partly this comes down to sexism. Partly it’s a reflection of how times have changed in the past thirty years. And mainly it’s because the film’s writer, Eleanor Bergstein, rightly thought the best way to deliver a social message was ‘to present in a pleasurable way so that the moral lessons would sneak up on people’. But for a long time I was so distracted by the pleasure – specifically, the soundtrack, the sex, the Swayze – that the moral lessons didn’t sneak up at all. For years I didn’t realise I was watching one of the great feminist tracts of the 1980s, easily up there with Susan Faludi’s feminist study of the eighties, Backlash . But then, Faludi’s book doesn’t come with a half-naked Patrick Swayze, so it is easier to recognise it as a contribution to the fight against misogyny.
By the mid-eighties, both Flashdance and Footloose had been released and studios were desperate for another teen movie that featured dancing and came with a great commercial soundtrack. But one movie they definitely did not want was Dirty Dancing .
‘I cannot be clear enough about this: everybody thought Dirty Dancing was just a piece of teenage junk,’ says the charmingly chatty Bergstein. ‘Nobody wanted to make it. Nobody. I would send out the script to studios along with a tape of the soundtrack that I’d made to go with it, that was just recordings of my old 45s from the 1960s, and executives would call me and say, “Oh yeah, Eleanor, we’re not going to make the movie, but could you send me another cassette? I wore out the last one.” But not even that convinced them of the movie’s potential.’
MGM briefly took on the script at the encouragement of several female executives (the men there all hated it), but then dropped it. Not a single other studio would consider it. Eventually a small independent production company looked at it, saw it as an easy quick buck and offered to make it for $4 million, about a fifth of the average cost of a movie at the time. Bergstein and her producer, Linda Gottlieb, accepted.
Bergstein had already had one screenplay produced, the undeservedly forgotten 1980 film It’s My Turn in which Jill Clayburgh plays a mathematics professor who has an affair with an athlete played by Michael Douglas. The inspiration for that came from Bergstein’s observations of female mathematics students at Princeton, where her husband was and still is a professor, and the condescension they had to endure from men, including accusations that their boyfriends did all their
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