‘Dirty Dancing’ or — The Dark Side of American Innocence?

I’d never seen ‘Dirty Dancing’ (1987) but a friend had been nagging me to see for ages and I was curious to discover why everyone wanted to put a baby in a corner. And now I finally know.

So it’s America in the early sixties and everything is just wonderful. There’s a young, new President alive and well in the White House and the word ‘Vietnam’ still seems exciting and fun. In this time an innocent young woman called Baby (ah, I get it now) is off on holiday with her family to Kellerman’s, a fancy resort for rich, white, middle-class folks. Her dad is a middle-class white doctor and Baby is going to join the Peace Corps. Isn’t America, and life, just great?

Once there they do what all American families do on holiday — dance, eat, drink… whore out their wives?… and, basically, have a wholesome time. Sure, the sons of the wealthy elites working and shagging their way through the Summer there are obnoxious disciples of Ayn Rand (I must admit, I wasn’t expecting a critique of Objectivism in this movie) but at least there’s Patrick Swayze’s Johnny Castle, a dance instructor and… male prostitute?!… who is down to earth and lives life with unrestrained passion.

When Johnny’s dance partner, Penny, falls pregnant to the nasty, rich Robbie it means the pair won’t be able to perform at another resort, thus threatening Johnny’s livelihood as a dancer. Baby steps up and says she can take Penny’s place, even though Baby can’t dance. But, with Johnny’s teaching maybe she can just about pull it off.

Johnny and Baby practice together and as Baby becomes a better dancer so Johnny and Baby start to fall in love. Johnny soon does to Baby’s virginity what Oswald will do to the back of the President’s head and Baby, and America, will never be the same again.

I was trepidatious as ‘Dirty Dancing’ started that it was going to be another one of these rose-tinted, romanticised nostalgia trips back to Eisenhower/early Kennedy America. You know the sort of crap. Yet what’s interesting about the film is that not long in we discover that this America — a middle-class, white ideal — is rotten to the core. Kellerman’s is a cesspool of infidelity, prostitution, gambling, sex, bigotry, abuse, hypocrisy and flannel trousers. It’s a creepy, weird, right-wing place; a sort of cross between Trump’s Mar-a-Lago and ‘The Shining’s Overlook hotel. What the hell is going on here?

So the film pretty quickly starts to feel way less of a nostalgia trip and more a rather scathing takedown of this American Dream. The fact the nasty, rich Robbie is reading The Fountainhead was a nice, unexpected touch and even the lovable old couple are nothing but thieves. The rich feed off the poor, view those below them as disposable and human life as something to be exploited.

With all that going on the movie ‘Dirty Dancing’ reminded me of the most was Brian Yuzna’s gross-out, freak-fest ‘Society’ (1989) as both films have a highly critical eye of how the privileged feed on the poor, except with ‘Dirty Dancing’ having more dancing than body horror in it. So there’s more going on here than just Swayze lifting Grey up and down and wiggling his bits in her face.

Not that it’s perfect with some of the pacing flagging a little when the movie gets to the inevitable ‘will they, won’t they, of course they’re going to’ get together story thread towards the end, but it picks itself back up for the climax after Patrick Swayze travels back from the future with a record containing production values that NOBODY in the early 1960’s could’ve pulled off and nobody notices.

Although the famous line “Nobody puts Baby in the corner” took me off-guard because when Johnny says it she’s not really sitting in a corner as such. More a slight recess but “Nobody puts Baby in an alcove” doesn’t sound quite so catchy. And Swayze himself is extraordinarily sexy and simple oozes and drips sensuality so it’s a good thing they’re currently wiping cinema seats down just now.

Also, although it’s set in the sixties this movie screams the eighties. It tries to stick to a certain temporal fidelity but soon gives up on that with costumes and hairstyles popping up that look more Studio 54 than post-Eisenhower Catskills as “Hungry Eyes” plays on the soundtrack.

‘Dirty Dancing’ is an enjoyable, sweet, weird film with, possibly, something important to say about American hypocrisy and inequality more than people doing the Mambo. The script is economically written (we get to piece a lot together of what is actually going on at Kellerman’s by only a few, choice lines) with some nice pieces of dialogue (I particularly liked “Where is my beige, iridescent lipstick?”).

All in all it’s a touching film about rejecting the rampant conformity of the fifties and embracing the rampant conformity of the eighties… and rock songs with saxophone solos.