Tag: Steve Naish

The Rise of Skywalker and the final word in the accelerated saga

Posted on by victorfraga

WARNING: THIS ESSAY MAY CONTAIN MILD SPOILERS

There is a short documentary webisode that lies on the DVD extras of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (George Lucas, 1999) that, thanks to YouTube, I often go back to. The scene begins on November 1st, 1994 and features George Lucas in his writing cabin beginning work on what will become the Prequel Trilogy of Star Wars films. He takes the camera crew around his den showing them his fresh paper pads and boxes of pens and his clunky desktop computer. He then collapses in his chair, exhausted by the prospect of writing these movies and sighs into the air “now all I need is an idea.”

What fascinates me about this footage is the fact that Lucas set out to write a film series that wouldn’t see the light of day for another five years. The Phantom Menace hit theatres in May 1999 and the subsequent films would be spread out over a further six years, with Attack of the Clones coming in 2002 and Revenge of the Sith [pictured below] in 2005. The Prequel Trilogy represents over a decade of dedication, not just Lucas’s part, but a whole team of creatives. As Lucas comments in the same clip “It starts with me sitting here doodling in my little binder but it ends up with a couple of thousand people working together in a very tense, emotional, creative way.” The Prequel Trilogy, despite its faults in direction, pacing, dialogue delivery, acting technique, racist stereotyping, and narrative elements that hinders the overall arc of Darth Vader’s origins, it has stood the test of time and like the Original Trilogy have become cinematic classics that have found a new life in the online world of memes and Reddit and YouTube theory posts. The dedication to scope, world-building, and mythology that might have slowed the films down to a death crawl has actually paid off.

Let’s talk a bit about about slow. Though I’m sure he wasn’t thinking of it at the time, Lucas’s decade long endeavour is an excellent example of the slowness philosophy that is often applied to other outlets: slow cooking, living, parenting, teaching, travel, and technology. The slow philosophy promotes attention to detail, to savour the moment, to experience something at a leisurely pace. These are attributes that rarely apply to blockbuster cinema. Knowing that a decade of one’s life is going to be set aside for the writing and production of three sci-fi fantasy movies is impressive, but what is more impressive is Lucas’s 15-year gap between the Original and the Prequel Trilogies. Star Wars was all but a forgotten pop-culture artifact when Lucas decided to resurrect it in the mid-1990s.

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Fast forward to the present

Our times are not the same as George Lucas’s heyday. When Disney purchased the Star Wars brand towards the end of 2012 the entertainment conglomerate pushed to have the new Star Wars films in theatres with almost immediate effect.

The first of the Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Force Awakens {J. J. Abrams) came in 2015. Since then a Star Wars related film has been released every year. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Gareth Edwards) followed in 2016, Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson) in 2017, Solo: A Star Wars Story (Ron Howard) in 2018 and finally as 2019 closes, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (J. J. Abrams) [pictured at the top and the bottom of this article] rounds off the Skywalker Saga. What took Lucas 28 years to complete with his two trilogies Disney has managed (minus one film, though the Disney+ show The Mandalorian is arguably an epic film-like production) in five.

I’m raising this point for a number of reasons. Firstly, the nature of cinema has accelerated to the point of almost exhaustive collapse. The Star Wars franchise is an excellent case in point but look to the Marvel Cinematic Universe for an even more hyperreal example. The first two phases, beginning with Ironman in 2008 (Jon Favreau; pictured below) and ending with Ant-Man (Peyton Reed) in 2015 saw 12 films issued, six films per phase. Twelve films over seven years is somewhat excessive, but no way in comparison to Phase 3 of the MCU, which unleashed 11 films in the space of four years. Secondly, the “quality over quantity” aspect of slowness has been reversed in this new accelerated cinematic landscape and the Sequel Trilogy and the Star Wars anthology films have been critically shredded and in some cases angrily dismissed by the fan base. All aspects of Disney’s production, from story to direction, art design to acting, casting to costume, editing decisions to the script has been dissected, ridiculed, memed, criticised and dispatched. A cottage industry has developed in which fans of the franchise call Disney out in public. Some of this criticism is justified – the narrative swerves and odd characterisation seen in The Last Jedi is somewhat meta for a blockbuster movie, whilst some of this criticism is uncalled for and downright cruel – the hounding of the films female actresses for example.

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All downhill from here?

Despite my admiration and even genuine like of the Sequel Trilogy, I realise something is off. There is a hollowness and lack of depth to the overall arc and coincidence and convenience has replaced storytelling in order to make the narrative of this trilogy happen. There is also the mismatched direction of J.J Abrams and Rian Johnson that barely correspond to each other with any fluidity. Though the Original Trilogy had different directors for each film, George Lucas was the overseer in creating a consistent set of movies. Here Abrams and Johnson have set out agendas and arcs only to retract, change, or ignore them completely. These elements might be answered in books, TV shows, cartoons, comics, and games, they will certainly be debated ad nauseum for years to come by Star Wars YouTubers and Reddit threads.

The Rise of Skywalker arrives with diminished fanfare and an expectation that the film will be a disappointment in some way or another. Script leaks captured early criticism and the recovery is not yet in sight. I’ll not divulge the narrative or offer a review as such. These have been offered in countless forums across the internet. What I want to discuss are elements of the film that hinders its overall impact as a film and a conclusion.

The film suffers from plot devices (I’m refusing to use the term ‘McGuffin’ though that is what they are), thrown in simply to get the action rolling at a chaotic pace. A Wayfinder device, an ancient dagger, an old adversary, a revealed heritage, the introduction of new (and old) characters, and new and unexplained Force abilities. In themselves, these are not bad ideas. What they are are underdeveloped ideas, ideas which would have benefited from inclusion and explanation way before this film. Suddenly, and as a reaction to the swerves taken in The Last Jedi, a whole new narrative apparatus has had to be created in order to get one movie on track towards the whole saga’s conclusion. It’s an exhausting experience that leaps from one planet to another at dizzying speed. Time accelerates in this film’s presence.

The quite literal resurrection of Emperor Palpatine [pictured above] for the final chapter is welcome only due to that particular character’s utter and delirious wickedness. In reality, it makes little sense and is never really explained, and despite denials from Abrams, the inclusion is an obvious quick fix for Johnson’s despatch of Supreme Leader Snoke in The Last Jedi. We’re led to believe Palpatine has been pulling the strings for the past three decades and with only a few flourishes of dialogue the whole dilemma is snuffed out without question.

Character arcs and actions are redundant or unbelievable. Many complained (including Mark Hamil himself) that Luke Skywalker’s grizzled and downtrodden turn in The Last Jedi failed to correspond with Luke’s optimistic and adventurous persona in the Original Trilogy. In The Rise of Skywalker, characters we’ve been shown to be egotistical devils are suddenly performing actions contrary to this perception. Take, for example, General Hux. In The Force Awakens, Hux is a proto-fascist zealot of the dreaded First Order. A man whom with spit in his mouth and tears in his eyes directs a destructive laser towards the heart of the New Republic government planets and snuffs out potentially billions of citizens. In The Rise of Skywalker, he turns his back on the First Order and allows our heroes to escape and set about the destruction of the First Order. This is not a realistic action of a character we’ve come to know as a snivelling repellent. It is an action that is nonetheless required by the script to get one set of characters from A to B.

And whilst the characters may physically move from A to B, their actual emotional arcs are pretty much stuck. The main character of Rey, for example, has garnered many Force abilities and earned wisdom from her adventures. But, ultimately, she ends up where she began the trilogy, alone on a desolate backwater desert world staring off into the horizon not really knowing her path. In the Original Trilogy, there was knowledge that Luke, Han, and Leia had weathered many crises in the intervening years between episodes. During the Galactic Civil War, there was genuine loss and upheaval. The end of the Original Trilogy showed (thanks to the 2004 Special Editions) citizens celebrating the end of the Empire across many different worlds. It was a universal victory. In The Rise of Skywalker, the victory, if there even is one for the galaxy, is far more subdued and personal. Has Rey really won a galaxy? Will she lead a new collective government of begin a new Jedi Order? Her story ends at the pinnacle of a new dawn with no victors as such and raises more questions for the wider galaxy than it can answer. Judging by some of her questionable Force actions (she shoots bolts of Sith lightning and destroys a ship supposedly holding her conrade), she might even be a future danger to the galaxy.

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Not all doom and gloom

The only character arc that is worth the whole saga is that of Kylo Ren/Ben Solo. As the main protagonist, Ren has carried a weight around his neck and his physical self seems in constant turmoil. When he succumbs to the Light Side as Ben Solo his whole body language and facial expressions become as light as a feather. His whole persona in the last half of the film is one of relief and we feel it with him. In this case Adam Driver really deserves the praise that has been granted him for this performance.

Criticism can be placed at George Lucas’s feet for many problems seen in past Star Wars movies. But his consistency in epic storytelling and worldbuilding was at least an asset. In The Rise of Skywalker, and the Sequel Trilogy as a whole, the whole galaxy seems smaller and you get the impression most have given up on the outcome of this conflict and that the battles are being fought on a much smaller scale in some deadbeat part of the galaxy. It is a reaction many audience members will also feel.

I will say The Rise of Skywalker offers the most complete Star Wars experience seen on screen since Revenge of the Sith, but its placement as a final chapter in the saga is ultimately redundant because of the previous inconsistency of The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi and now this film’s inconsistency to those films and the other trilogies. It doesn’t feel connected to past films. As a standalone film, The Rise of Skywalker is a treat, a rollicking adventure that twists and turns, offers plenty emotional gut punches, nostalgia kicks, and never for a moment bores. But it’s too little too late. The goodwill has been exhausted. The acceleration to rebirth Star Wars to a new generation is obviously rooted in firstly, making fast bucks, secondly, pushing merchandise and toys, and thirdly, signing up new subscribers to a streaming service. Intricate layered storytelling and gradual worldbuilding have been abandoned in this quest.

As a film, The Rise of Skywalker might stand as the final word in the Skywalker Saga, but what it should’ve been is the first word in a far broader and more expansive and diverse universe that was hinted at in The Last Jedi. But as the trilogy, and an entire saga is now at its end the roots have been severed from any potential future. Although I’m as eager as any Star Wars fan for more content, you wish in retrospect Disney had taken a leaf from Lucas’s book and just slowed down.

Film should brighten up our imminent dark future!

Posted on by victorfraga

To paraphrase a statement made by the late British cultural theorist Mark Fisher, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of Hollywood”. As someone who was raised on Hollywood movies and is still enthralled by the creative industry of filmmaking and film story-telling, I also find it hard to imagine a moment in time when film, for reasons we’ll explore below, will not exist and will not be made in the same manner that it is currently.

The nature of film is changing and is now in decline. Attendance to movie theatres has been dropping for decades as home entertainment has shifted audiences’ collective bums from theatre seats to sofas. First it was the revolution of VHS cassettes, then DVD, now the epoch is online streaming. Only the spectacle of a franchise cinematic event – a Marvel film, a Star Wars episode – brings the masses out. On occasion an oddity might rise above the din and become a hit, a recent example of which would be Jordan Peele’s Us (2018) and Todd Phillips’s Joker (2019, pictured below), though these are few and far between. Hollywood’s reliance on domestic audiences to recoup has also dwindled. Hollywood now looks towards foreign markets such as China for return-on-investment. And investment is key to understanding the current state of mainstream filmmaking, as the new online studios of Amazon, Netflix and now Disney produce mid-priced dramas and comedies to keep their consumers at home and in Amazon’s and Disney’s case, keep purchasing their products.

Is this the future of mainstream film? A two-hour-plus exercise in product placement designed to shift toys, clothes and lifestyles. But, if (or as) capitalism unravels, or catastrophe strikes, film may be unleashed from this undesired future and become something of a savoir to those that remain.

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The end is nigh

Whilst never envisioning its own demise, Hollywood has envisioned the end of the world by spectacular means over its short history. In an essay titled Disaster Movies and the Collective Longing for Annihilation, published in early 2013, I argued that the disaster movie genre plays out our fears of mass death and the end of humanity, but also gives us permission to enjoy the destruction from a safe distance and the utopia of a renewed version of humanity that often comes Post-catastrophe. The payoff was to witness the end of the world so we could witness the renewal. Whilst elements of that essay may still be justifiable, the world we live in now is different and more divisive to that of the time the piece was written. A lot has happened in the space of only a few years. Some of it feels like tropes from a comedy film, too ridiculous to contemplate, some of it has been drawn from tragedy and is too heartbreaking to imagine.

With the aid of CGI, it was easier to envision the catastrophic death tolls and the mind-blowing damage of end of the world scenario. In the blockbuster films Deep Impact (Mimi Leder, 1998, pictured below) and Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998) ocean waves caused by crashing asteroids rise up and wash over towering cityscapes. In Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996) and Independence Day: Resurgence (Roland Emmerich, 2016; pictured at the top of this article), populations are wiped out in minutes by invading alien technology. In 12 Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995), a virus infects and kills billions. In Twister (Jan de Bont, 1996), a series of tornadoes tear up a fractured landscape. In Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven, 1998), an army of invading insectoids demolish entire buildings and kill countless. In The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, 2004), the Earth is plunged into a new global Ice Age. In Hollywood, the future can be cancelled easily.

But even then, Hollywood continued to find more elaborate ways to offer screen-based destruction for audiences to joyously lap up.

In most of these disaster films, the world was reset. After the devastation, life was renewed yet continued in much the same way. For example, in Deep Impact, despite the death of possibly millions and the exhaustive costs associated with global destruction, the man who is President of the United States – President Beck (Morgan Freeman) – remains the U.S President and continues the work of that office even through the structures that held the senate and congress is physically decimated. We later learn that Bill Pullman’s President Whitmore in Independence Day serves a second term as U.S President after the initial invasion. The structures of the worldwide system of organisation, i.e capitalism and democratic governance, remain.

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The saga never ends

This has been made more explicit in the 23-film Infinity Saga of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With each movie the threat increased and although most of the saga was Earth-based, the perception of the threat widened to include villains that were demi-gods, actual Gods, intergalactic warlords, and legions of armed warriors from other realms. In most cases, cities are wiped off the map, yet, the populace of Earth seemed to continue on regardless of the dramatic loss of life and the demolition of the cities they live and work in. The faith placed in The Avengers to reset the standards was absolute.

In Avengers: Infinity War (Anthony and Joe Russo, 2018), half the population of the universe is snapped out of existence by the tyrant Thanos, and this event is reversed by The Avengers five years later in Endgame (Anthony and Joe Russo, 2019),when all those who were “snapped” out of existence are “returned”. There is no permanence, and as seen in the first MCU post-”return” film Spider Man: Far From Home (Jon Watts, 2019), life more or less continues on very much the same.

Now the reset can now happen again and again within a single franchise. No threat is sustainable but dangers continue to come that can be swept aside by a team of superheroes.

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Reality imitates fiction?

But this is not the world we live in. We’ve no superheroes among us and the people we put in charge of our daily lives, the leaders, politicians and representatives we elect, are mediocre at best, tyrants and imbeciles at worst. In the near future our own world might succumb to the scenes of destruction that prevail in Hollywood cinema. The threat won’t come from mad tyrants from space, but from circumstances of our own doing. It will very likely be less dramatic than the scenario we see in Hollywood’s version of events. There will be no swelling music to accompany the scenes, no brave muscular superhero to swoop down and save us. We’ll live or die and the after effects of any disaster for the survivors will be just as devastating. No reset or utopia, just continued hardship and survival.

We’ve seen this play out at various times in the past decades. The terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 felt, and were meant to feel like a scene from a Hollywood disaster movie. The Indian Ocean Tsunami that struck the coasts of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, India and the Maldives with an estimated body count of 227,898 people could have been ripped right out of a disaster film. The earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in 2011 was a real-life disaster and footage of the first wave sweeping across the country had cinematic overtones. Hurricane Katrina that struck New Orleans in 2005 offered a post-apocalyptic landscape of submerged city streets and dead bodies floating in the waters.

These are the most news-worthy examples that come to mind, but on a day-to-day basis, people are facing what we might perceive as miniature – personal apocalypses. Climate disruption is frying the forests, melting the ice caps and the burning of fossil fuels continues to pollute our air. The devastation to land means a desperate wave of displaced people. War and unrest in places such as Syria (pictured below, in this year’s For Sama, by Waad Al-Kateab, Edward Watts) and Libya have pushed an exodus of people to take extreme measures in migrating to safer environments in Europe. These civil conflicts are having wider repercussions throughout the world as governments retract decades of assistance and refocus themselves nationally and dismiss the wave of migration as another regions problem.

These are prolonged events that will play out and worsen over decades. But these events are not Hollywood material. The slowness softens the impact. Like climate disruption, we only heed the warnings when disaster impacts us in the immediate moment. But people are subject to even smaller waves of devastation brought on by capitalism and the impact of greedy corporations that inflict themselves of the landscape and then abandon without remorse when the buck and the labour becomes cheaper elsewhere. These pockets of economic devastation exist across the globe and are the end times in miniature.

Catastrophe happens on an almost daily basis and is nudging us at various intervals towards bigger cycles of devastation. There will be survivors of any large-scale natural or man-made disaster. In the harshest of circumstances pockets of existence will continue and may even be able to thrive under these new environmental conditions. The end of civilisation is not always the end of humanity. How we rebuild, or prolong our existence depends on the stories we will recall and stories we choose to pass down.

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Can film save the world?

Today the stories that reveal our contemporary culture are locked within literature, novels, short stories, popular culture, games, apps, social networks, and film. The naivety of that statement becomes apparent when written down, and maybe the fact we have allowed our culture to be locked within these realms is perplexing, but this is the situation we find ourselves in and the direction of societies has always been informed by the stories of the past and present. Film cannot be excluded on the basis that it is considered entertainment. Film has always been a form of education and an apparatus for personal and societal change and progression. It can guide us towards a world we want or away from a world we don’t. This is in line with DMovies’ vision that cinema is a tool for personal and social liberation.

In any post-catastrophe world, film will still be available to those that we’ll call survivors. The means of how it will be made and how it will be screened and distributed will have to be explored in more depth elsewhere, but my initial thinking is the potential hacking of the discarded technology that will litter a post-catastrophe world. Why it must be made is quite simple. We will need to tell stories to starve off hardships and to strive for betterment. We will need creativity to overcome the predicament we find ourselves in.

Humankind has a need to express itself, a desire to explain its times, a longing to record its moments. Anything to overcome the trauma of living in dark times, but even in the light.

Our societies now have film and popular culture ingrained within its very essence. This will not change and will stay ingrained for a very long time to come regardless of our predicament. Show a young child an image of a popular culture artifact, a character from a popular show, a sports logo, a TV theme song, and its recognition is almost instantaneous. There is enough access in any form, physical or digital, to know that film will continue, and must continue beyond any doubt. What type of film comes after collapse is anyone’s guess.

Film, or at the very least its mainstream variant, is tied to capitalism and globalisation, and with any measured catastrophe, capitalism and globalisation will collapse. One must assume that this kind of film will be impossible to make and maybe that is for the best anyway. In post-catastrophe times, humanity will divert, disperse and regroup into smaller, more localised forms, film will most likely do the same after the collapse and instead of needing to communicate on a global scale, film should become the engine of change to smaller pockets of society. It would be nice to consider film and its current audience implementing this before a catastrophic event, but like the climate, we’ll probably have to wait for a full disruption before we even consider it.

The Strange Coalescence of Dirty Dancing and Blue Velvet

Posted on by victorfraga

A YouTube user who posts content under the name Kaflickastan, crafted a re-edited promotional trailer for Dirty Dancing (Emile Ardolino, 1987) that re-imagined the film as a nightmarish noir directed by David Lynch (below). The trailer takes scenes from Dirty Dancing out of the original context and places them into a what looks like a perverse thriller that dispenses with the sweet coming-of-age romantic drama and replaces it with a sinister tale of obsession, violence, and lust.

Scenes from Dirty Dancing that are innocent suddenly take on a sinister and surreal edge. For example, when the Houseman family arrive at Kellerman’s resort they are greeted by the portly owner Max Kellerman, who reassures the family that their vacation will be relaxing and invigorating. Kellerman utters “three weeks here will feel like a year.” In the Kaflickastan’s trailer this reassurance suddenly becomes a veiled threat, similar to when Frank Booth the vile gangster in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) menacingly whispers “you’re fucking lucky to be alive” just before delivering a savage beating.

It’s my belief that Dirty Dancing shares more with Lynchian themes than it would first appear, and acts almost as a comparative piece to Blue Velvet. Lynch’s films often concern themselves with the loss of innocence of their characters and the corruption and darkness that lies under the veneer of the American Dream. This is most apparent in Blue Velvet, which is set in a suburban town, where white picket fences line the streets of the leafy well-to-do neighborhoods. It’s my view that these two films are cinematic bedfellows.

Frances. That’s a real grown up name

Dirty Dancing and Blue Velvet are accounts of childhood innocence lost in the transition from late adolescence to adulthood. The young protagonist of Blue Velvet is Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle Maclachlan), a handsome college student who returns to his hometown of Lumberton when his father suffers a seizure. He is called upon to run the family store in his father’s absence. In essence, Jeffrey has returned to a state which he thought he had left behind: the dull and monotonous life of Lumberton. This is perhaps why Jeffrey wants to explore the dark underbelly of the town; to add a little excitement to his humdrum life.

Dirty Dancing‘s main protagonist, Frances ‘Baby’ Houseman (Jennifer Grey) has yet to break away from the confines of her family. She is certainly interested and engaged with the world and is even due to attend college after the summer to study economics; yet at the beginning of Dirty Dancing Frances seems content in her place as the family’s ‘Baby’. Frances and Jeffrey are eager to gain knowledge and experience beyond what has shaped their lives so far. Frances’ maturation follows a similar, yet obviously less devastating, trajectory to Jeffrey’s. Jeffrey wants to gain a set of experiences, ones that offer liberation from the norm.

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Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey get it on, in Dirty Dancing.

When he discovers a severed ear in the overgrown thicket of a vacant lot, his journey into a darker realm begins. He can’t help but uncover the mystery of the ear and delve into the hidden. Frances also uncovers something hidden. She stumbles into a room where men and women are jiving and gyrating against one another. It’s not only a unique experience for Frances, but it is one that sets in motion an entire new direction of her life. She is exposed to a form of dancing that also liberates her from the confines of conformity.

On the surface it may appear the two films do not share much more than that facet of youth and longing to grow out of the shadow of the parental units, but there is something more. Although contemporary in its setting, Blue Velvet is a union of the two distant eras; the early 1960s and the late 1980s. Dirty Dancing also occupies these eras. Laura Dern’s character, Sandy Williams, is adorned in 1950s-style dresses and bobby socks; she dresses like Frances Houseman older sister Lisa Houseman, whilst Jeffrey Beaumont offers a contemporary link with his pierced ear and modern clothing. The whole town of Lumberton is full of 1950s style diners, old cars, and girls next-door. Though set in 1963, Dirty Dancing also has lingering fragments of the late 1950s, the seismic generational shift has yet to wash the remnants away. However, Dirty Dancing‘s use of music in the soundtrack connects the time in which it is set to the time in which it was made, with the mix of bobby sox croons, raunchy 1960s rock ‘n’ roll and R&B with 1980s soft-rock ballads.

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A very energetic Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing.

Yes, That’s an ear

It is interesting that the ear stands as a catalyst for the breakaway both characters experience. Jeffrey finds a physically severed human ear in a thicket of grass whilst walking back home after visiting his father in hospital. This grim finding begins Jeffrey’s journey into small town crime, police corruption, and sexual exploitation. Frances finds no severed ear, thankfully, but her exposure to the dancing in the working class quarters is a visual as well as aural experience.

The rock ‘n’ roll music being blasted in the working-class staff quarters is more raucous and unruly than the cutesy pop records of the late 1950s and early 1960s that Frances and her family listen to on the car radio. These findings allow for both characters to traverse a path between their lives as respectable and obedient children and the lives they are forging for themselves without their parents’ involvement. Frances still plays the doting daughter to Dr. Houseman, whilst without her father’s knowledge, continues her sexual relationship with her lover, Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze). Jeffrey continues to live with his adoring mother and aunt, and oversees the running of the family business, whilst engaging in sadomasochist sex with Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), and investigating the criminal underworld of Lumberton.

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Still from Dirty Dancing.

Have you had many women?

Blue Velvet and Dirty Dancing are also about sexual experiences. In Blue Velvet Jeffrey chooses to encounter two partners. His first sweetheart, Sandy, is young and inexperienced (much like Frances), he doesn’t demand anything from her other than sweet companionship. On the other hand, Jeffrey’s other sweetheart, Dorothy is older, and far more knowledgeable about sex. She actively instigates the sexual relationship between herself and Jeffrey.

If we put Dirty Dancing‘s Johnny Castle in Jeffrey’s place for a moment we see that Johnny is also acquiring experience from two different women in almost the same manner as Jeffrey: the virginal Frances and the sultry older lady Vivian Pressman. Vivian is the trophy wife of the affluent Moe Pressman, a guest at the resort who pays Johnny to give his wife extra ‘dance lessons’, knowing that he is actually paying Johnny to sexually satisfy his wife. Vivian, in a act of revenge against Johnny, accuses him of stealing Moe Pressman’s wallet, which begins the revelations of Frances and Johnny’s relationship to everyone.

Through his own choice, Jeffrey descends into an ugly underworld of drug crime, rape, and murder that inhabits the peaceful town of Lumberton; his innocence is lost. The weird desires and fetishes of his elders are what lead Jeffrey towards his own manhood. Frances doesn’t descend as such; though she stoops from hanging with the affluent middle-class, to the bawdy working class, but actually she ascends to the working-class staff quarters where she encounters the sexualised dancing that was hidden from her. Like Jeffrey, she also makes a choice and actively participates and leads the seduction of Johnny Castle after being told by her father to stay away from him.

This leads to her break from the position she inhabits within her family. It also exposes the double standards of her father’s class beliefs that extend to the enforced class divisions of the Kellerman resort. Frances and Jeffrey begin with idealistic expectations of adulthood, which are broken down by an unrelenting adult reality. Jeffrey‘s exposure to the adult world is his lust for the seductive, but troubled, Dorothy and the violence he suffers at the hands of vile gangster Frank Booth. For Frances, it is her sexual attraction to Johnny, the over-nurturing of her father, the botched abortion of Johnny’s dance partner, Penny, and the generational shift of the 1960s.

Nobody puts Baby in a corner

The use of the pet name ‘Baby’ is also comparable. In Dirty Dancing, Frances is ‘Baby’ for many reasons: she is the youngest child in the Houseman family and her experience is limited in the adult world. In Blue Velvet, Frank Booth reverts to his ‘Baby’ as a means to achieve some sort of sexual release, which brings him very little actual pleasure. Frank wishes to return back to his innocence and to the arms of his ‘mommy’. When he screams at Dorothy “Baby wants to fuck,” he is intentionally breaking that innocence. Frank then morphs into ‘daddy’, an aggressive violator and abuser. Frances doesn’t at any point in Dirty Dancing say she “wants to fuck” in the same obvious terms (in fact, hearing Frances bark in the same manner as Frank would create a very different film altogether), but with her instigation in the seduction of Johnny Castle she also intentionally breaks her own innocence; she is no longer a ‘baby’.

Dirty Dancing is more than a simple story of sweet romance and sexualised dancing. The film explores the loss of innocence; not just that of its characters, but also the loss of innocence that America in the 1960s would experience in the near future. The film has some serious themes working under its flaying skirt: class politics, the failings of liberalism in 1960s’ America and beyond, abortion, courting and sex out of wedlock, the collapse of the family unit, and all this set against a generational shift that was imminent at the time the film was set. If we suspend belief for a moment and consider that David Lynch had been given the opportunity to direct Dirty Dancing, as imagined in the re-edited YouTube trailer, the swearing might have been astronomical, but there’s a possibility that the film would not have turned out all that different in his hands.

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Illustration by Rebecca Carter, at The Write Signs.

The text above is an edited excerpt from Steve Naish latest book ‘Deconstructing Dirty Dancing’, published by Zero Books on April April 28th, 2017. You can buy the paperback or the e-book on Amazon, Bound or Indiebound by clicking here.