Life Moves Pretty Fast: The Lessons We Learned from Eighties Movies (and Why We Don't Learn Them from Movies Anymore) - Softcover

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Hadley Freeman is a staff writer for The Sunday Times in the UK. She was born in New York and lives in London. Her books include Life Moves Pretty Fast and the bestselling House of Glass, and her work has appeared in Vogue US and UK, New York magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and many other publications.

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Life Moves Pretty Fast

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 it 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 realize 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 recognize 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 forty-fives 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 a professor, and the condescension they had to endure from men, including accusations that their boyfriends did all their work for them (“It made me so mad!” she wails, still just as infuriated today as she was three decades ago). During the making of that film, Bergstein included a dance sequence inspired by the kind of dancing she used to do with her friends when growing up in Brooklyn, but it was ultimately cut. This was fortunate for two reasons: one, just the thought of Michael Douglas Dirty Dancing is faintly traumatizing; and, two, this then made her determined to write a movie that foregrounded the dancing. After a few years, she wrote the story of a young woman known as Baby (Jennifer Grey) who goes to a holiday camp in the Catskills with her parents and sister in the summer of 1963 and falls in love with the dance instructor, Johnny (Patrick Swayze).

After having endured so much studio skepticism about the film, Bergstein has become pretty hardened to critics misunderstanding and dismissing her film. Proving author William Goldman’s adage that no one knows anything in the film business, one producer said before the film was released that it was so bad they should just burn the negatives and collect the insurance money, and, hundreds of millions of dollars later, Bergstein laughs at the memory. But there are two comments she frequently hears that drive her crazy: “I hate it when people describe Baby as an Ugly Duckling, because Jennifer [Grey]’s beautiful, obviously. I also can’t stand it when people describe it as a Cinderella story, because all Cinderella ever did was sit on her rump!”

Baby definitely does a lot more with her rump than just sit on it. When the film opens she is reading a book about economic development because she’s going to major in the economics of underdeveloped countries—not English literature, she impatiently corrects a condescending suitor—and join the Peace Corps. “Our Baby’s going to save the world!” her proud father, Dr. Houseman (the delightfully eyebrowed Jerry Orbach), boasts to the folk at Kellerman’s, the (not very subtly Jewish) holiday camp. (Dirty Dancing is easily the most Jewish eighties teen film, which is probably another reason it is so close to my own Jewish heart. As Bergstein says, “You just have to know how to spot the clues.”I)

But until she can save the world, Baby sets about saving everyone she meets. Grey is perfect as a naïve and idealistic but likable teenager, one who is determined to help the poor and downtrodden, and yet has no concept of what life is like for anyone who is anything other than JewishII and middle class (another probable reason why I found it so easy to relate to this film so much). She is repulsed by the disdainful manner with which the holiday camp’s bosses treat the (Catholic) working-class entertainment staff, and she is horrified when she realizes her father is just as big a snob. When she learns that the dance instructor Penny (Cynthia RhodesIII) is pregnant with the waiter Robbie’s (Max CantorIV) baby, she tells Robbie to pay for Penny’s abortion. When he refuses, she gets the money herself. When Johnny needs someone to stand in for Penny for the dance routine, Baby offers herself. When Penny’s abortion is botched, she gets her father to step in.
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