SP2201
I am in the habit of rewatching movies I have seen before, some of which I have seen many times. Yesterday, while my granddaughters were occupying the big living room TV watching Rocky and Bullwinkle (which also never gets old), I chose to watch Dirty Dancing on my iPad. The movie is set in the summer of 1963, when I was nine years old, strangely enough, the same age as my oldest granddaughter. While it is a story of a summer romance set in the Catskills Mountains at the Kellerman’s Resort, it is really another story about the changing times of America and the shifting of one era into another. Some might see it as a trivial chick flick about a young girl falling in love with her dance instructor, I think it was much more.
The movie stars Patrick Swayze as the dance instructor, in what is the role that defined his career in 1987. It also stars Jennifer Grey as the young camper who falls in love with Swayze. For both actors, it is the movie that they are best known for. He was 35 and she 27 at the time the movie was made, though they both look and play roles that are about a decade younger. She is a young idealistic college-bound girl from the upper middle class Jewish world of New York City. He is New York City street tough who is uneducated and has a good heart and fantastic body.
The story revolves around the class struggle underway in America in those days of change and nascent sexual liberation. Swayze’ s dance partner, an ex-Rockette named Penny, gets impregnated by a Yale Medical student who is working as a waiter at the Catskill’s resort for the summer, trying his best to earn enough money to buy an Alfa Romeo sports car. That is the same car that Dustin Hoffman drives in The Graduate, another coming-of-age movie set in the same era. Apparently an Alfa Romeo sports car was a great symbol of upper middle class materialism. Naturally, the Yale Medical student doesn’t care about Penny and says she “doesn’t count.” At one point he explains this to Grey and hands her a copy of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and tells her he has taken notes in the margins as a way of saying that he is treating the book as his bible for how to live his life. I do not seem to be able to escape Ayn Rand these days as I contemplate the changing morals of our society. I have already noted in my stories the similarities between these times and the early 60’s, and Ayn Rand has figured prominently in those.
I find it interesting that Penny getting an abortion sets the stage for the drama and the class struggle in the story. In 1963 an abortion was more illegal than legal and yet was something even more necessary than it is today, given the paucity of contraceptive alternatives back then. The horror of a botched abortion done by a hack with a dirty knife for $250 is something that was very much on our national collective consciousness. None of thought it was the right way to go and yet we also saw unwanted pregnancies as something that were both inevitable and unnecessary. So, we as a world, set out to change that by coming up with a number of medical alternatives starting with the birth-control pill and other devices to stop unwanted pregnancies as well as legalizing abortion and imbedding that right of choice into the national mantra of civilized society. Jerry Orbach plays Grey’s father and is a doctor who cared for and fixes poor Penny after her botched abortion. He is looked at symbolically as the standard bearer of the national psyche and during the film and because of the Penny affair, he goes through a change of seeing these street toughs represented by Swayze and Penny as bad boys and girls to having more sympathy for their plight and saying that he admits when he is wrong about things. This acknowledgement of an adjustment to his morality is the main theme of the story.
Swayze may be tough and cool, but he is also kind and gentle as opposed to the Yale Medical student, Robbie, who comes across as privileged and uncaring. I doubt there is anybody who watched this movie that is not sympathetic to Swayze and turned off by Robbie. The movie is set up to force that view. It reminds me that I have spent my life listening to and feeling that liberalism is the only path to salvation. And yet here we sit today with so much discussion about the fall of liberal democracies and the changing values of the world. Just yesterday, Vyacheslav Nikonov, a Russian legislator was quoted at saying about Russia’s stance against Ukraine and the entirety of Western liberal democracy, “We are on the side of good against the forces of absolute evil…. This is truly a holy war that we’re waging, and we have to win it and of course we will because our cause is just. We have no other choice. Our cause is not only just, our cause is righteous and victory will certainly be ours.”. This is so very troubling on so many levels. It is one thing to fight evil and it is yet another to fight an evil that thinks, truly thinks, that its cause is just. This is the existential Ayn Rand struggle except it is being played out by the Russians that Ayn Rand despised.
I have spent a lifetime thinking that everyone can see that Jennifer Grey is righteous and that Patrick Swayze, while hardened by the crucible of the streets, is kind and good, but Nikonov and his fellow autocratically-inclined ideologues are equally committed to their view of the world where white, Christian supremacy must rule. I have never understood how Christianity could take such as perverse turn as it did during the Crusades, where supposed men of God went to the Jerusalem to smite evil in the form of the heathen Muslims who wouldn’t let Christianity control the sacred moral high ground of Jerusalem. And yet here we are a full Millennium later and we are trying to claim the Christian moral high ground once again, only this time not in Jerusalem, but across the free world.
This is Billy Jack and One Tin Soldier all over again. It is anathema to me that people can think and feel this way as it seems so very wrong to me. And that is the problem, none of it seems or feels wrong to them. It is so disturbing that one is inclined to just turn one’s back and drive away. that is what Patrick Swayze does in Dirty Dancing. He gets into his Chevrolet, a car he cares little enough about to smash the rear window to get to where he is going, and he just drives off to leaves the Catskills to their anachronistic wrong-minded ways. As he drives off we see his license plate, something I’ve never noticed before. It stands out now to me as SP2201 in a way that it never has before. It does so because, of course, he does not let things stand and he returns in that same car to call out the Catskills for what they are. “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.” The fight for right goes on with SP2201 in the lead.