80s Week: Reconsidering "Dirty Dancing"
[rebelmouse-image 24749859 original_size="500x367" expand=1]Confession time: I've spent most of the past couple of decades hating "Dirty Dancing". Let's face it---it's a go-nowhere movie with a cheesy and incongruous 80s ending tacked on. The news songs that were written for the soundtrack sound really awful next to the classic early rock and roll featured in the film. And are we really supposed to believe that Patrick Swayze's character, who pulls off moves he clearly learned in ballet, is just some schmuck who picked up ballroom dancing on the job and now works in the lowest rung of professional dancers? My main objection to the movie, however, was that it was the most favorite film of roughly every girl my age in my tween years, which meant I watched it roughly one million times. Every slumber party, every time you hung out at someone's house after school, every weekend that you had a dollar and wanted to go see a movie at the dollar theater. Above all other things, I was sick of it.
In writing this post, I want to make one thing very clear up front: I do not like the movie "Dirty Dancing". How could you, really? It engages in stereotypes about sexually liberated working class people (versus repressed upper middle class people), it flirts with being a musical but doesn't commit, and it has that cliched 80s wish fulfillment ending where everyone who has been oppressing our hero/heroine realized their mistakes and makes it up to them by gathering around and applauding. Worst of all, it pairs classic mid-century pop music with the worst sort of 80s pap, some of which is sung by Patrick Swayze. It's a timid, stupid film. Which is why it's all the more interesting that it does make one move that seems risky, especially by today's standards: it portrays abortion honestly. It's remarkable, really, because the script is so implausible, but in the realm of portrayals of abortion, the one in "Dirty Dancing" is bafflingly at the top of the list of most realistic portrayals. The woman who gets the abortion is a good person and she contextualizes it in terms of can't---can't be pregnant, can't have a baby, it's just can't. Getting money for it and getting the time off of work are the biggest issues for her. And when it goes wrong, we very clearly see the social assumptions behind abortion bans, and they have nothing to do with "life"---Baby's father, who is a doctor (and the unsubtle stand-in for our sexually repressed society), is aggravated at the licentious behavior he believes led up to this moment and blames the nearest young man for the predicament in a show of paternalism. That's it in a nutshell. Abortion bans are about a paternalistic, condescending attitude about women's agency and a general uneasiness about sex. "Dirty Dancing" is one of the least subtle movies ever made, and that's part of the abortion storyline. But at least it's honest, which is so rare in movies and shows that portray abortion that it ends up standing out as a brave storytelling choice.