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Wed, 01 Feb 2012

A Steel-Town Girl on a Saturday Night

A few nights ago, I saw Flashdance for the first time ever, a mere 30 years behind the rest of the world. When it started (thank you, TiVo!) I pretty much assumed that I had seen it before, since it's an 80s standard. I figured that even if I hadn't seen it, I must have seen enough snippets here and there to be able to claim to have seen the whole thing. I was wrong. I'd seen the classic "Maniac" workout scene of course, and somehow I'd seen the climactic dance audition at the end. Other than that, it was all fresh to me.

The movie is basically Rocky with dancing instead of boxing, and with twice as many inspiring musical montages, which is a lot when you consider how many inspiring musical montages are in Rocky. Jennifer Beals is an 18-year-old wannabe ballet dancer who has no formal training. By day she works as a welder in a Pittsburg steel mill. By night she is a ... I want to say "stripper," but that isn't quite right because she doesn't take off her clothes. You might say, "burlesque dancer" but that would give the wrong image, too. She works in a dive bar full of blue-collar steelworkers that serves huge pastrami sandwiches and has entertainment that includes both stand-up comedy and clothed sexy dancing involving elaborate choreography, costumes, strobe lights, mime makeup, and stunts. The dancers take off some of their clothes, but they're never naked. The focus is more on the costumes and choreography, which the steel mill guys eat up, even though they never tip. There doesn't seem to be any kind of tipping system for the dancers whatsoever. They just come out, dance, maybe take off their jacket or something, and leave to thunderous applause from exhausted dudes in coveralls eating fried foods. You assume that the bar must pay them generously out of the pastrami-sandwich profits.

Jennifer Beals does all this because she wants to earn enough money to study at a fancy dance academy. She lives by herself in a warehouse loft, and you never see her parents because they live in Altoona, which is practically another planet. We never learn how long she has been a welder/burlequish dancer, but she must have been living on her own for years because we do learn that she's saved enough money to pay for the school and all of her expenses. All she has to do now is get up the guts to apply for an audition.

This movie really made me think, not about dancing or about pursuing your dreams (okay ... a little bit about dancing and pursuing your dreams) but about 80s movies in general and how they stand out in the history of cinema. Some thoughts:

It seems like it's been a really long time since I've seen a new movie that was shot on location in a city like Pittsburg, with lots of street scenes and unfamiliar cityscapes. I haven't thought this out very thoroughly, but it seems like movies now focus on LA and New York, with occasional movies set in of some sort of unmentioned, anonymous no-man's land in between. Attempting to document the majority of the American experience with specific settings just doesn't happen. You don't see movies set in Indianapolis or Boise or Cleveland.
Movies in the 80s had a lot of crap in the interior scenery. Maybe again in this is instance, it's due to it being shot on location. The old lady's house in Flashdance is jammed full of junk, like a lot of old ladies' houses really are. Years and years of accumulation. Likewise, the strippers' dressing room was filled with detritus. Maybe it's that they used real-life locations. Maybe it's that the 80s in general were extremely overaccessorized.
There's a really weird, subtle style of humor in 80s movies. It's innocent and charming, and like the set design, it's all about details. At one point, one of the strippers is backstage eating a banana. She isn't eating it in a sexually suggestive way. She's just eating it because she is hungry, which is really funny for some reason. The question I have is whether this is funny to me because it's actually funny, or whether it's funny because it's so typically 80s.

While I watched the movie and attempted to suspend my disbelief so I could enjoy it, I ran into a few points that might be troubling for younger viewers, who might find them odd or unbelievable.

Could this girl really afford such a sweet loft apartment? The answer, kiddo is yes. Loft apartments in the 80s weren't "sweet." They were gross and cheap and kind of awful. This place was literally an abandoned warehouse right before she moved in, which means she was living in an abandoned warehouse with a toilet in it somewhere. I'm sure there's no air conditioning. Obviously none of the windows are sealed against the cold. It probably smells bad and the roof probably leaks. But it's cheap and there's a lot of room to practice your art, which is why starving artists lived in these places before developers realized they could fix them up and charge, as we said in the 80s, "megabucks" in rent.
Is it realistic that when she goes to the dance school and has her audition, all the judges sit down and light up cigarettes and cigars? Yes. That was pretty much standard when I was a kid. The Clean Indoor Air Act happened in the mid-70s, but in the 80s, you could still pretty much smoke anywhere you wanted except for hospitals and in designated non-smoking sections of public places. People still smoked everywhere, and a lot of people smoked. Certainly no one ever went outside to smoke. Everything reeked like tobacco all the time.
It is weird that this older dude is after her, making no attempt to hide his skeeviness at all? Hm. Yes and no. Sure, guys are skeevy now, but skeeviness was expected and accepted even more back then. Plus, even though she's only 18, I think that age was considered more adult than it is now. Fewer people went to college. There wasn't really an extended adolescence that lasts well into a person's 30s like there is now. That's kind of a Gen X invention. None of this is to say that it wasn't skeevy, though, because it was.

So anyway, sorry this was so long. If it's any consolation to you, I also recently saw Girls Just Wanna Have Fun for the first time, and I decided to keep my opinions on that movie to myself.

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