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

Freeman, Hadley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501130455 ISBN 13: 9781501130458

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2016

Synopsis

From Vogue contributor and Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman, a personalized guide to eighties movies that describes why they changed movie-making forever—featuring exclusive interviews with the producers, directors, writers and stars of the best cult classics.

For Hadley Freeman, movies of the 1980s have simply got it all. Comedy in Three Men and a Baby, Hannah and Her Sisters, Ghostbusters, and Back to the Future; all a teenager needs to know in Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Say Anything, The Breakfast Club, and Mystic Pizza; the ultimate in action from Top Gun, Die Hard, Beverly Hills Cop, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; love and sex in 9 1/2 Weeks, Splash, About Last Night, The Big Chill, and Bull Durham; and family fun in The Little Mermaid, ET, Big, Parenthood, and Lean On Me.

In Life Moves Pretty Fast, Hadley puts her obsessive movie geekery to good use, detailing the decade’s key players, genres, and tropes. She looks back on a cinematic world in which bankers are invariably evil, where children are always wiser than adults, where science is embraced with an intense enthusiasm, and the future viewed with giddy excitement. And, she considers how the changes between movies then and movies today say so much about society’s changing expectations of women, young people, and art—and explains why Pretty in Pink should be put on school syllabuses immediately.

From how John Hughes discovered Molly Ringwald, to how the friendship between Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi influenced the evolution of comedy, and how Eddie Murphy made America believe that race can be transcended, this is a “highly personal, witty love letter to eighties movies, but also an intellectually vigorous, well-researched take on the changing times of the film industry” (The Guardian).

About this title

About the Author:

Hadley Freeman is a columnist and writer for the Guardian newspaper in the UK. She was born in New York and lives in London. Her books include Life Moves Pretty Fast, The Meaning of Sunglasses, and Be Awesome, and her work has appeared in Vogue US and UK, New York magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and many other publications.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

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.

Baby doesn’t understand the lower-middle-class world in which Johnny and Penny live, a world in which one can easily lose one’s dreams in a snap, but she doesn’t judge. Baby is a great film heroine. As Johnny says, Baby looks at the world and thinks she can make it better, and at first he finds this irritating and dismisses her as a “Little Miss Fix-It.” But it’s also what makes him fall for her: when she messes up the dance and misses the lift, she improvises and they get away with it. “That is when Johnny falls in love with her,” says Bergstein. “Because he sees how she always wants to make it better, and she shows him that she can.”

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, 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 butt. 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 one of the greatest 1980s montage scenes 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 hair dryer for Geena Davis in 1991’s Thelma & Louise, and hardly seen at all now.V

“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 feminized masculinity—but other eighties teen films such as Pretty in Pink and Say Anything at least offered male characters whom young straight male audiences might empathize 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 Philadelphia Inquirer’s film critic Carrie Rickey wrote decades later: “[The New York Times’ 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 women’s movie—or book, or TV show—to be dismissed by male film critics as frothy nothingness.VI 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 emphasizes 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 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 realizes afterward 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 pull himself together only by listening to a Peter Gabriel ballad, poor boy.VII

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 submit only 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 Britain, 2011’s The Inbetweeners Movie, and is pretty much invariably from the boy’s point of view. What you don’t see anymore are tender depictions of teen sexuality, or realistic ones.VIII 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 swingi...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1501130455
• ISBN 13: 9781501130458
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352