Dirty Dancing, somehow a movie for our times

I watched Dirty Dancing (1987) recently for the first time, sort of as part of a loose effort to get to some cultural touchstones that were blind spots for me like Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) — two other movies with great dance numbers. Here’s the thing: Dirty Dancing is a really good movie. It’s obviously entertaining and sexy, but also pretty well shot, very well acted, and ultimately a smart film with some real ideas in its head.

What I found interesting was that Dirty Dancing didn’t function like a time capsule. It’s not just a charming snapshot of the mindset of its moment, but captures feelings of generational transition in ways that carry across decades, and speaks to an experience and worldview that felt surprisingly relevant and current.

It’s impossible to go into a movie as iconic as Dirty Dancing without an awareness of some of its key elements. Obviously I had seen the clip where Swayze dances at the end but with the Muppet Show theme song swapped in. But I have to admit I often get Dirty Dancing, Footloose, and Flashdance all sort of jumbled up in my head since I had never seen any of them. I really didn’t know much about Dirty Dancing before we put it on.

Importantly, I didn’t know it was a period piece set in the early ‘60s. This is such an iconic piece of ‘80s pop culture, the famous music is SO quintessentially ‘80s that I figured the setting must be contemporary to its release. This aesthetic incongruity is key to what makes the movie work timelessly, across eras and generations. Cultural signifiers of the two times are placed deliberately, almost jarringly, together. A movie set in 1963, made in 1987, but by mixing the setting and styles of both moments it announces itself as not being about either era specifically. The newly composed, and very of-their-time, pop songs live in the movie right next Micky & Sylvia playing on a character’s record player. This all culminating of course in the final scene when the needle is placed onto a 7” record to play “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life,” resulting in a moment that breaks the reality of time and space and sending the movie into a time outside time.

The movie is set a period of transition: the fading of the more starched and pressed 1950s and the rising of a new generation of youth. The older generation stubbornly holds on to their positions of power and seems confused or even hostile to the ideas of the younger generation — most clearly in the camp owner’s reluctance to let Johnny perform more modern styles. There is a very clearly depicted “upstairs/downstairs” dynamic between the upper class owners/patrons of the camp and the lower class service staff, and though it isn’t particularly deep, there is the sort of class awareness we see a lot of in Millennial art, especially since the Occupy Movement and eventually Bernie Sanders got us all thinking about the 1%. It depicts a pervading sense that an older generation has consolidated control, and is reluctant to cede any of it to new ideas. Obviously in the time since 1987 this feeling has only grown in America, where we’ve still never had a Gen X president let alone any sense that Millennials will ever have a say in national decision making. Dirty Dancing really captures something I think basically every generation feels as they try to claw their way to relevance out of the stiff grip of their parents’ generation.

Baby’s is a coming of age arc, the likes of which every decade deserves a good few of. Johnny’s character has a lesson more specific to learn: that there is something worth being positive about in the world. He has seen the harder side of life, and has seen the rich constantly belittle and disregard those below them. Despite being a geyser of charm, he has hardened himself emotionally after seeing no reason to ever assume there is something good to hope for. If that doesn’t describe the general sense we face today, I don’t know what does — in the 2020s we’re staring down a feeling of powerlessness to do anything against worsening climate disasters, a rising tide of right wing authoritarianism, racism, and social and systemic discrimination against queer individuals and communities. I mean there is even a key subplot about how dangerous it is when a woman is denied access to abortion as a form a healthcare. Johnny sees in Baby a person who is willing to try and do good, to help people around her, and it gives him the hope to see anything good in the world around him at all. By no means is Dirty Dancing trying to make a grand political statement here, but there is something quietly radical about the message that if we can do something to help people we should make the choice to do it.

In our time, when optimism can be hard to come by, Dirty Dancing surprised me by exploring reasons for feeling hopeless and finding in the end a reason to have a little hope.