A couple of weeks ago my wife and I started to watch "Dirty Dancing" (1987). I was pretty shocked at how bizarre that movie is. I'm sure I sat through it back in the 80s, but probably barely paid attention. I realized that it's basically the female version of "Bloodsport" the 1988 Jean Claude Van Damme martial arts action movie. Both movies are a fantasy version of the author's autobiography.
The writer of "Bloodsport" is Frank Dux--which is certainly not his real family name. There are a bunch of youtube videos that delve into his backstory and outrageous claims about his martial arts expertise and military record, so I won't bother duplicating it here. In short, he's a person that created a fictional life and background, then heavily promoted it, and turned into a lifetime actor. Media figures helped him promote his fictional autobiography.
"Dirty Dancing" is basically the same thing. The writer of the movie fictionalized her young adult life and eventually it became a movie.
Anyway, "Dirty Dancing" is a pretty basic story, but it's also extremely weird and outdated, so it seems more like a fever dream than some harmless fluff middle and highschool girls watched back in the 80s. The story starts off with the main character getting money from her father to fund an abortion for a white female dancer who works at a kosher resort in the Catskills and who was knocked up by a jewish waiter who also works there. That gets her a ticket into the undergound secret life of the white people who work at the resort and live the "real life". The main character "Baby" gets to live the real life while her family is visiting the resort.
The thing that's really jarring about it to me today is the abortion part of the story. I guess that was a movie trope in the early 80's. Infanticide was really heavily promoted to white women back then, and it was sort of portrayed as a rite of passage for middle class and upper middle class girls in lots of movies. A pregnancy would derail a careless girl's ambitions to be a dancer or a doctor/lawyer or whatever. To me today, that seems really fucking weird and vile.
Anyway, I want to contrast those two movies with "My Side of the Mountain" which was written by a woman named Jean George. "My Side of the Mountain" is sort of autobiographical too. It's about a boy (even though the author was a woman) who goes off to live in the woods in the Catskills, ironically, which is where the resort setting of "Dirty Dancing" is.
Anyway, the kid in "My Side of the Mountain" goes off to live alone in the woods with the animals to get away from NYC.
The fantasy of people like Jean George is to get away from the city and live alone with nature. The fantasy of the authors of "Bloodsport" and "Dirty Dancing" is basically obtaining recognition through performance in arbitrary competitions, but ultimately just lying about it and creating a fictional character.
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