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 Page B

Dancing is to have sex with Johnny, and the film is very, very clear about that. It’s no surprise that at MGM none of the men liked the script, or that it was ultimately produced by a woman, because Dirty Dancing is very much a film about female sexuality. In particular, the physicality of female sexuality, and all the excitement and messiness that entails. It’s Baby who makes all the moves on Johnny when she turns up at his cabin at night and then, as he stands stock-still in helpless befuddlement, she takes the lead again by asking him to dance. As they dance, her hands pour over his half-naked body, taking real pleasure in his skin, and the camera zooms in on her hand sliding down to feel his bottom. The whole film is told from Baby’s point of view, which is why there are so many adoring shots of Johnny with his top off and barely any similarly lustful ones of her. There are occasional close-up shots of her pelvis in what is arguably the greatest 1980s montage scene of all, when Johnny is teaching her how to dance while ‘Hungry Eyes’ plays on the soundtrack, but these feel more like a visual nudge about Baby’s sexual excitement than the film panting over Grey’s slim hips. Instead, it’s the man who is objectified by the camera and the woman who gets turned on, in a manner not seen again until Brad Pitt frolicked with a hairdryer for Geena Davis in 1991’s Thelma & Louise , and hardly seen at all now.
    ‘The whole film is told through the female gaze, if I can use that jargon, because I wanted to make a movie about what it’s like, as a young woman, moving into the physical world, which means the sexual world,’ says Bergstein. ‘So you get those shots of Jennifer looking up with her big eyes and then about a hundred shots of Patrick. I remember when we were in the editing suite and people were saying, “Why do you have all those shots of Patrick?” I’d say, “It’s because that’s what she sees. The film is through the female gaze and most movies are not.”’
    Johnny is no cipher – and no one other than Swayze, the son of a cowboy and ballet dancer, could have captured Johnny’s feminised masculinity – but other eighties teen films such as Pretty in Pink and Say Anything at least offered male characters who young straight male audiences might empathise with. Johnny, however, is a character for the girls. Dirty Dancing is wholly a film for female audiences, and, lo, male critics gave it terrible reviews. Roger Ebert dismissed it as ‘relentlessly predictable’ and Time magazine’s Richard Schickel was similarly dismissive. The New Yorker ’s Pauline Kael, on the other hand, wrote that the film left her ‘giggling happily’. The Philly Inquirer ’s film critic Carrie Rickey wrote decades later: ‘[The New York Times ’s then film critic] Vincent Canby agreed with me that, as with Desperately Seeking Susan , the critical resistance to Dirty Dancing might have been because it was a female-centered story.’ It is nothing new for a woman’s movie – or book, or TV show – to be dismissed by male film critics as frothy nothingness. fn4 What is more striking is that so many aspects of the film that seem extraordinary now were so overlooked at the time.
    Not only does Baby want sex with Johnny, but she loves having sex with Johnny, and the film emphasises this with the not exactly subtle analogy the film draws between dancing and sex. Her face shines with happiness on the mornings after, her dancing improving as she gains in sexual confidence. Baby’s rejection of her father for the sexy staff at Kellerman’s Hotel is as symbolic as that of Rose’s abandonment of her wealthy life for the Irish jigging working classes in 1997’s Titanic (the poor: there to provide a buttoned-up wealthy girl’s sexual awakening. And such good dancers, too!). It’s only by losing her virginity that Baby sees the fallibility of her parents and sheds her Baby-ness to become Frances, and the film