You might think Dirty Dancing is a movie about people doing dirty dances. And it often is -- sometimes excessively and to its detriment. Really, it's a piece of blatant, unmistakable, brilliant, leftist propaganda. But not in the facile way you might expect.
The premise paints a clear enough picture: the elite gather in a luxurious summer vacation resort to swap Yale stories and Yale letters of recommendation. This carousing occurs inside what is basically a castle, towering imperiously over the miniature fiefdoms of the guest houses. The working-class staff are housed in strictly segregated ramshackle cottages, allowed inside the walls of the castle only to serve and perform for their masters. They live tenuous lives, exploited sexually and financially by the owners of the resort and the guests.
If the politics weren't already blatant enough for you, one of the villains (if there are indeed individual villains and not just a general cesspool of systemic rot) attempts to use a copy of "The Fountainhead" to justify why he need not assist his dancer girlfriend in obtaining a safe abortion.
Additionally, there is the constant discussion of wage insecurity in the face of the blinding wealth of the upper classes. And then, the risk of death when attempting to find, and afford, an abortion in the absence of legal abortion or socialized medicine.
There's no need to go on. But like so many masterpieces, the rub is not in the story but in the telling.
Our main character is Baby. She is at once full of idealism and benificiary of the oppression and exploitation she hopes to mitigate. She's a guest at the resort, attending dinners and dances staffed by the serfs of the employee cottages. She hates it, but so would anyone with half a conscience. She feels unease at the thought of the inequality. That unease creates a psychic crisis which must be resolved. But so would it in anyone honest enough to look on the reality of the situation. As it does in us.
This (and general hornyness) leads her to Patrick Swayze. He is the perfect cipher for her crisis. He is a victim and an agitator. He is exploited but also contains within him the spark of rejuvenation for a sclerotic world. His dancing taps into something primal and joyous, something lacking from the calculated world of back-slapping at the resort. On his plight hangs the fate of Baby's (and our) psychic comfort.
So they build a relationship, fall in love, Baby is exposed to the conditions of the social classes below her, and everything appears to be playing out about as you might expect. Until the last scene. Patrick barges in to dance with her, and they throw off the constraints of the old and evil, and dance the new and good, in spite of the fuddie-duddies.
And then, in basically National Lampoon's fashion, the barons and heiresses LOVE the new dance! They begin dancing to it ecstatically. You see? No revolution necessary. No inherent evil corrupted to the bone. All of these ghouls needed only be shown the light, unsuppressed by the true villains, to come to their senses, to be converted, to bring the dawn of a new era. Baby's father gives Swayze the nod of approval. The summer retreat will surely have dirty dancing lessons next season. Welcome, misfits, to the bounty of American Prosperity!
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She begins the story as a primal Lib, full of idealism for social justice, and ensconced in all the ineffectual signifiers through which she thinks idealism ought to be expressed. She wants to volunteer with The Peace Corps, go to law school, an get an economics degree. Not to say that those things are inherently unjust, or that they could not be combined in some way to bring justice to the world. But one need only ask: how many Peace Corps volunteers, and lawyers, and economists, and combinations of the three, are sitting at tables like hers in the self-same resort -- that monument to exploitation and injustice. The System is ready to absorb these things, allow them their limited scope of change, and repurpose them to self-perpetuate. And simultaneously, reward them handsomely, both economically and morally. To look at Baby, and her surroundings, is to realizes that her current path ushers her comfortably, atop a palanquin of privilege, through the valleys of misery to an eventual seat beside the same vacationers at the same tables. And all the while she would feel as if she were in the gradual (but ultimately futile, under the purview of the System) struggle for the right side of history. It is her arc away from this pleasant delusion and into knowledge of the true plight of those beneath her social station which is the heart of the film.
How does that arc end? First, consider how the film ends, when our banished hero Patrick Swayze defiantly returns to dance his style of dancing to shame the old fuddy-duddies. His style of dancing is the counter-culture, it is the future of the world, come to sweep away the sclerotic status quo! It is, in fact, announced by the owner of the hotel lamenting that "it feels like all this is going away."
And then what happens? In basically National Lampoon's fashion, the barons and heiresses LOVE the new dance! They begin dancing to it ecstatically. You see? No revolution necessary. No inherent evil corrupted to the bone. All of these ghouls needed only be shown the light, unsuppressed by the true villains, to come to their senses, to be converted, to bring the dawn of a new era. Baby's father gives Swayze the nod of approval. The summer retreat will surely have dirty dancing lessons next season. Welcome, misfits, to the bounty of American Prosperity!
Why does this scene stick in the throat (besides the absurd brilliance of the line about "...baby in the corner")? Why does this scene feel so extremely tonally discordant with the subject matter? For a movie so contemptuous towards the vampires in our midst, their sudden conversion to the counter-culture feels like an abdication. In other movies like this, the hero would die or be killed in some kind of tragic incident made inevitable by his unfortunate circumstance. An image of a high-speed car/motorcyle crash comes to mind, although I can't be sure if this is a memory or a fantasy pastiche from the accumulated motifs of American cinema.
It sticks because it is the lynchpin of the film's message.
Art is a manipulation; an emotional product. In other words, what we get from art is only what it makes us feel. And like all emotional manipulations, we gravitate towards those that confirm our underlying biases. If you already believe that the elite exploit the working class for their labor, when you watch a movie about the exploitation of the working class, you become angry -- but not in any transformative way. You feel anger, but not unease. In fact, you probably feel more sure of everything than you did before. You have confirmed both that you are right and that there are good people out there that agree with you (even if they are only artists). Surely that must lead to something good?
But it doesn't. That affirmation leads to nothing but self-satisfaction and the perpetuation of the same world as existed before. To see the heroes triumph in such a nakedly sincere way would act like a release vavle for all the animosity you felt for the antagonists and their counterparts in reality.
You could end the movie with the exploitation continue unabated. But what would that observe? What insight would that provide besides artless despair? That's easy enough to disregard as overly cynical; the kind of unalloyed bummer reserved for documentaries.
Better to encapsulate a more profound truth in the filmmaking. Switch the style suddenly and without warning to provoke a bit of unease. To suggest what about the social struggle and counter-culture's role in it? The more sinister truth: that the powers that be don't fight culture, they consume it. They integrate it, appropriate it, and sell it back to you. Look at every brand during the pandemic supporting "our frontline heroes." Look at Pepsi BLM commercials. Look at the absolute rape and corporate enslavement of 60s symbols in everything from t-shirts to music to film.
That resort won't be destroyed by the outburst of new ideas (even the weasle-y little son-of-the-owner starts dancing to it), it will exist exactly as it did before with a new set of classes offered next season. The uneasiness you feel when attempting to digest this scene is its gift to you. You are Baby, high above the misery of people who aren't striving to wring an MFA out of movies. Your love affair with the noble poor, so easily dismissed after the credits (or after a wild summer romance), cannot be just a self-serving catharsis embodied in an entertainment product -- easily digestible without provoking action. Unless you recommit to recognizing that, and in recognizing the false victory of your affirmed biases, the whole thing is lost.
The scene feels strange because it wants to make you feel uneasy. You should you feel uneasy in the apparent victory of the protagonists. You should doubt, as if you got something wrong. And the thing that you got wrong was your satisfaction in imagining the good guys won just because you saw it in a movie.
Art isn't politically transformative. It can exist as a catalyst, but it isn't action. Some would argue that it's the opposite, a psychic simulation which catches all opposition and produces a replica of the satisfaction of real action. In other words, it seves to defuse political change by releasing some of the pressure of unexpressed frustration. In any case, it can always be digested by the system of power and dissolved into something harmless, or even complimentary to the retention of the status quo. The music and dancing that provokes one generation is transformed into a constraining consumer ideology of the next. One need only look to the rape and corporate enslavement of 60s revolutionary symbology, the conversion to harmless tourist gimmickery, to see what I mean.
The system absorbs art, as readily as it absorbs economists and lawyers and Peace Corps volunteers, and to be repurposed to Power's ends.