April 23, 2024

The Time of My Life: Dirty Dancing, by Andrea Warner

If you’ve read my second novel Waiting for a Star to Fall, in which Dirty Dancing features as a plot point (“Brooke had never seen an abortion in a movie before, and it was surprising, because Dirty Dancing was over thirty years old. So it should have been a throwback, but it was something very new: the character who wants an abortion. There is no other alternative, it doesn’t even make her sad, and she doesn’t change her mind at the last minute, or have a miscarriage as a convenient trick to avoid being an agent in her own destiny. She isn’t even sorry… [And] it seemed symbolic that no one had to live in shame. You could be a fallen woman, and then get up on a stage and dance. This was a huge revelation for Brooke, who had never even considered the possibility, the number of ways a script could go.”) then you’ll know that this movie means a lot to me, and Andrea Warner’s The Time of My Life: Dirty Dancing, a contribution to the ECW Pop Classics Series, only deepened my affection and admiration. Warner explores the movie’s roots as based in “the classic Jewish value” of tikkun olam, its celebration of liberal idealism before the ’60s got complicated, the subversiveness of a film whose entire plot hinges on abortion (screenwriter/producer Eleanor Bergstein was deliberate about that!) at a moment when American women’s reproductive rights seemed assured, and how its iconic soundtrack is the bedrock of the film. Andrea also fangirls in typical Andrea Warner fashion, sharing her own personal connections to the story and also critiquing the film for its shortfalls, how it appropriates Black culture and lacks intersectionality—demonstrating both this is a film substantial enough to be worthy of critique and that LOVING ALL OF ANYTHING (in the way that Baby wished Jerry Orbach could love her) means grappling with the ways it disappoints us too.