Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (4 page)

She is just as determined when it comes to getting what she wants in her own life, and what she wants in
Dirty 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.
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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 applauds this. (As did audiences: Baby and Johnny’s sex scenes were the formative erotic experience for an entire generation; there is still a large part of me that believes I haven’t actually had sex yet because none of my sexual encounters has started by a lip-synching ‘Love is Strange’, although God knows not through lack of trying on my part.)

‘Baby risks everything for integrity and love, and she doesn’t pay the price,’ says Bergstein. ‘Most movies make girls pay the price.’

Girls in eighties teen movies love sex, and suffer few consequences for it. In the now deservedly little seen
Valley Girl
(only worth seeing, really, for Nicolas Cage’s waistcoat and to hear Modern English’s ‘I Melt With You’ on the soundtrack), the teenage girls discuss sex lustfully with one another. In
Mystic Pizza
, Jojo (Lili Taylor) sneaks into bathrooms every spare minute with her fiancé (Vincent D’Onofrio) and they end up happily married, while Daisy (Julia Roberts) seduces her wealthy boyfriend and the two apparently end up contentedly, if improbably, together. (Of the
Mystic Pizza
trio, only Kat – Annabeth Gish – has a bad sexual experience in that she realises afterwards that her lover will never leave his wife. But this plot twist strikes me as more of a comment on the man specifically rather than on sex in general, as Kat seems far more upset by the former than the latter.) In
Say Anything
, Diane (Ione Skye) seems completely unbothered after losing her virginity to Lloyd (John Cusack) in his car. Lloyd, by contrast, is utterly shattered by the encounter and can only pull himself together by listening to a Peter Gabriel ballad, poor sod.
^fn5

This fairly basic truism – teenage girls enjoy sex – is a lesson gleaned far more rarely from films today. Today, a girl in a teen film who has sex – or even just wants to have sex – risks being ravaged by her boyfriend and eaten from within by a vampire baby (Bella in
Twilight
). At the very least, a girl who has sex is certainly emotionally damaged (
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
) and will be universally shamed (
Easy A
). Good, smart, sane girls don’t have sex, or at least are extremely reluctant to do so and only submit under sufferance because the boys want it so badly (Dionne in
Clueless
, Vicky in
American Pie
). It’s a weird harking back to one of the biggest teen films of the seventies,
Halloween
, in which any teenage girl who has sex is promptly dispatched by a dungaree-wearing psycho. Now, instead, they are destroyed from within. A teen film today can show teens having sex – as long as it’s in a raunchy comedy and the sex is presented as extreme or slapstick, such as 1999’s
American Pie
, 2007’s
Superbad
, 2012’s
Project X
or 2013’s
The To Do List
and, from the UK,
The Inbetweeners
, and is pretty much invariably from the boy’s point of view. What you don’t see any more are tender depictions of teen sexuality, or realistic ones. Instead, teen sex comes with warnings or in the nervily ironic coating of raunch.

‘You can have a movie with a wild party and lots of sexual comedy, but you can’t have a movie in which a fifteen-year-old girl is teaching her friends about sex,’ says
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
’s director Amy Heckerling. ‘Like in
Borat
, you can have naked men with their dicks swinging around for ten minutes as long as they’re not sexual. But you don’t see any more young people realistically exploring their sexuality together.’

Film producer and director Jon Avnet agrees that one of the biggest differences between today’s teen films and those of the eighties is the depiction of sexuality, and, as the producer of
Risky Business
, one of the sexiest and most influential
^fn6
eighties teen films, he should know.

‘The subway scene in
Risky Business
between Rebecca [De Mornay] and Tom [Cruise] is really pretty hot, and I don’t think you could have something that hot in a teen film now. Sex as a form of intimacy is tantamount to death in teen films today,’ he says. Instead, he suggests, sex in teen films is now either non-existent or ‘like something out of
Porky’s
’.

One woman in
Dirty Dancing
very nearly does get punished for having sex: Penny, who almost dies after undergoing an illegal abortion. I’m not sure what I thought was going on with Penny when I was a kid; maybe I thought she’d fallen down some steps and hurt herself, maybe I was so baffled by it that I simply ignored it. But when I came back to the film as a teenager, expecting to spend a happy ninety minutes wallowing in sexy dance sequences, familiar one-liners (‘I carried a watermelon’) and Jennifer Grey’s magnificent original nose (since tragically mutilated), it was something of a shock to realise that what
Dirty Dancing
is really about, at its heart, is the importance of legal abortion. The film is astonishingly open about the brutality of illegal abortions. Penny, we are told, went to ‘some butcher’ who had ‘a folding table and a dirty knife’. This was, we are repeatedly told, ‘illegal’, which is why she can’t go to a doctor when it goes wrong and she nearly bleeds to death.

‘When I wrote the film, abortion – like feminism – was one of those issues that people thought just wasn’t relevant any more. A lot of young women thought those battles were won, and talking about it was tiresome,’ says Bergstein. ‘But I thought Roe vs Wade was precarious, and that’s why I put in all that purple language about the “dirty knife” and everything. The film is set in 1963 but came out in 1987 and I wanted young women seeing the film to understand that it wasn’t just that she went to Planned Parenthood and it went wrong.’

No one – not the studio, not the critics – complained at the time that the movie’s entire plot is put into motion by an illegal abortion: ‘They didn’t even notice that it was there,’ says Bergstein. ‘The studio thought the script was stupid and bad for so many reasons they scarcely noticed that. Certainly no one suggested that it might be controversial. They thought it was just a stupid teenage dance movie.’ The first objection raised came from an acne cream company who wanted to sponsor the film – and get their tube of cream on every poster – but they backed away when they saw the film. The studio suggested that the film be reshot but Bergstein pointed out that the abortion is integral to the movie, as it’s how Johnny and Baby meet and, most interestingly, prompts them into having sex for the first time, and so the studio backed down.

‘I knew that if I put in a social message it had to be carefully plotted in. A lot of movies have social messages but they end up on the cutting room floor. It’s true that not many people talked about the abortion plot when it came out, but it meant that I was getting the message to people who wouldn’t go see a documentary about abortions, and we were also getting big feminist audiences,’ says Bergstein.

Just as eighties teen movies didn’t shy away from showing how much teenage girls like sex, nor did they avoid discussing one possible result of the activity: getting an abortion. In 1980’s
Fame
, wealthy Hilary (Antonia Franceschi) has an abortion after accidentally becoming pregnant. The only question anyone raises about her decision is from the nurse, who asks which credit card she is going to use to pay for the operation. In 1982’s
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
, Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who, at fifteen, is underage, loses her virginity and becomes pregnant after a hurried encounter with nineteen-year-old Damone (Robert Romanus). He then fails to help her pay for the abortion and doesn’t even turn up to give her the promised lift to the clinic so she has to turn to her dopey brother (Judge Reinhold). The film never judges her, nor does it turn into some terrible morality tale about what happens to loose girls. The only person who is damned by the movie is the feckless Damone for failing to help her. In fact, Stacy ends up completely fine, utterly unaffected by her abortion and dating Rat (Brian Backer), the boy she should have been with all along and who appears similarly untroubled by Stacy’s abortion.

‘The studio had no problem at all with a fifteen-year-old female character having an abortion. The whole thing was realistic: teenagers were having sex [offscreen], some teenagers were having abortions, and the film reflected that,’ says Heckerling. ‘When [Damone] doesn’t give her the cheque for the abortion, we’re saying that these kids aren’t ready for kids. He can’t even get a cheque, how’s he going to be a father?’

As in
Fast Times
, the woman in need of the abortion in
Dirty Dancing
is not criticised by the film, only the idiot who got her pregnant and then refuses to help. But
Dirty Dancing
is far more vehement in its criticism of feckless men than
Fast Times
, possibly because, unlike
Fast Times
, it was written by a woman. ‘Some people count and some people don’t,’ sneers the evil impregnator and Ayn Rand fan Robbie, who then heartlessly accuses Penny of sleeping around.

Perhaps the most extraordinary onscreen discussion about abortion comes in
Fatal Attraction
, the ultimate example of the eighties backlash against feminism that Faludi writes about. Yet despite the film’s hilarious scaremongering about the risks of feminism, it is strangely, even crazedly, if not strictly speaking pro-choice then certainly pro-abortion. When Alex (Glenn Close) tells Dan (Michael Douglas) that she is pregnant after their affair, he – the good guy – desperately wants her to have an abortion but she – the bad woman – refuses, and this, the film suggests, is proof of his responsible nature and her selfish one. As this is
Fatal Attraction
, and an Adrian Lyne film, there are, inevitably, misogynistic impulses underpinning the film’s pro-choice message: namely, that it is unfair that women hold the control when it comes to abortion (I know: ha ha ha) and that the most important thing is that Dan preserves the sanctity of the nuclear family he has at home by making his mistress have an abortion. Still, it’s quite something now to see a movie in which a man is good for demanding a woman have an abortion and a woman is bad for refusing to have it.