The story of the dirty dancing

Tentatively titled reasons dirty dancing

is the film we all deserve and rarely

get and some and a lot

around them mainy because their

parents

were fans of them they were still kind

of recent still being aired on TV

occasionally and I imagine talked about

among adults however a combination of

having parents that didn't live in the

UK for a majority of the 70s and 80s yes

l am Cady heron and my own

self-imposed

devotion to the sound of music which I

have noted in another video here meant

that I actually really lost out on most

80s films I haven't seen most 80s films

knowing that as a fact a few years ago|

picked up this amazing book called life

moves pretty fast by Hadley Freeman

journalistic love letters to Hadley

Freeman's favorite 80s movies I went

through a real phase of reading a

chapter on each film and then watching

the film to try and catch up really

tried labyrinth Ferris Bueller's Day Off

The Breakfast Club Princess Bride and to

be honest most of them completely

bemused me until l stumbled upon thedirty dancing late in my teens I think

when I was about 17 one of my friends

Behr lent me the DVD in order to educate

me at the time I remember watching it

and thinking like oh that's pretty fun

but I went back and watched it a few

years ago and ever since have been

completely obsessed and because I can

attribute almost no personal nostalgia

towards this film it got me thinking

about why I really loved it and why

perhaps the qualities that it displays I

find wanting in modern cinema some of

the research and facts that I present in

this book are directly with thanks -

life moves pretty fast which I really

recommend you reading it's incredible

but I ended up re watching the film

twice in the last week and academically

taking notes on why lI think it's cool

okay that's this is that's the whole

this is that's the whole video that's

what I'm doing because when I think

something works it's worth working out

why in the case of dirty dancing it also

tells us a lot about the stories we hear

now and why why certain stories reach

Us

and certain stories don't suppose you

haven't seen dirty dancing here's tenseconds of the topic baby othervwise

known as Frances is part of an

aspirational middle-class family that

day in a semi-famous holiday resort in

the 60s the film was released in the

1987 so we're already talking like a

lens of nostalgia on top of the other

nostalgia that youll watch it at

watching it in 2024 ANSYS is bright

aspirational determined altruistic but

she hasn't really seen that much of the

real world yet the ranking of the

holiday resort goes as followS

guests waitstaff who are all hired from

Harvard and Princeton and very

impressive universities to work there in

their summer holidays and it's

explicitly said by the manager that the

reason he hires them is so that they can

show the guests josh's a good time and

be very impressive afluent servants

Tori kids as an attraction essentially

and below those people are the

entertainers so the dancers presumably

the Cooke staff the cleaners that kind

of thing

this performative service class will

come into play later baby or Francis I

can't I'm just gonna call her Francis |iscene also cited this is not really a

problem for producers they were quite

normal with it it wasn't reallya thing

it was only after the film got to the

cutting stages and their main sponsor

who was a spot cream company

objected to

the idea of having an illegal abortion

in the film that it was really

questioned the spot cream company

offered the money to go back to the

cutting room and cut the abortion out or

reshoot but this was a time v.a.t.s

from what I can tell for my learnings

from the book and Studios had much

more

power over the films they shot and the

directors and writers had say on the

final cut of the film

now that studios are owned by much

bigger companies that have other weird

objectives in mind a lot of social

messages and political messages end up

on the cutting room floor if they are

seen in any way to negate the

commercial

success of a film some people might call

this censorship but aren't justa simple

farmer from 1864 but in the 80s when

this film was made

ellen:oh Bergstein had the power to say

oh no I think we'll do without it thankyou it was already a very low-budget

film because people labeled it a women's

flm and nobody would watch it so they

were like you know what we're gonna take

a gamble we can do without sponsorship

money spot cream company because

when

the film is set it's illegal for people

that access legal abortions penny goes

for an illegal abortion and she ends up

with a kind of like guy with a dirty

knife at a fold-up table and becomes

very ill Bergstein put that in the film

because she felt precarious about the

status of abortion at the time she felt

that people were losing hold of how

important abortion was and how

important

legal abortion was

equality to the film centers woman's

desire from a female gays winning

combination we barely ever see from the

beginning it's very clear that Francis

has sex on the brain the film doesn't

judge her for that the film was set.