CURVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (17)

By: Joshua Glenn
August 19, 2023

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of reconsidered passions, reassessed hates, and reversed feelings everywhere in-between. Series edited by Adam McGovern.

FOOTLOOSE

I was a 16-year-old in the throes of transitioning from one subculture (sci-fi, fantasy, Dungeons & Dragons) to another (hardcore punk, skateboarding) when Footloose, one of the highest-grossing movies of 1984, was released. I went to see it, but didn’t get what the fuss was about. The soundtrack (Kenny Loggins, Deniece Williams, Bonnie Tyler) is Top 40 crapola. Kevin Bacon’s dancing is awkward; when it’s his gymnastics double who’s doing the dancing, it’s excruciating. The movie’s premise, meanwhile — in thrall to a reactionary preacher, a southern Texas town has banned rock’n’roll and dancing — was as implausible to this viewer as it is to the movie’s Chicagoan protagonist.

And yet… “on to greener pastures,” as the last hardcore EP I’d ever purchase (the following year) laments, “the core has gotten soft.” When I rewatched Footloose recently, my hard heart melted.

I still don’t like the soundtrack… except for the scene where Shalamar’s “Dancing in the Sheets,” blasted from an illicit boombox by the preacher’s daughter, gets everyone at the soda shop shaking their asses. This is a powerful, fun example of American Graffiti-style “worldizing” — diegetic music persuading us that we’re sharing time and space with the movie’s characters. As for the title track, at the level of form it mirrors Footloose itself: tedious, predictable, and cringe-inducing… yet undeniably charming and infectious, in at least some of the right places.

Yes, Kevin Bacon’s dancing is awkward — but this is very much on purpose. While most movie musicals are populated by graceful dancers perfectly executing Broadway-style moves, Footloose choreographer Lynne Taylor-Corbett celebrates spontaneous dancing… the awkwardness of which makes it all the more thrilling and life-affirming. (Think of the drunken dancing on the bus in It Happened One Night, or the Cutters’ clumsy victory dance in Breaking Away — pure joy.) The true heart of the movie isn’t Bacon’s often and rightfully mocked angry-dancing scene — Broadway-ish schmaltz — but rather the sequence in which Chris Penn overcomes his macho inhibitions and starts shaking a leg.

In 2023, the movie’s premise feels less unlikely than prophetic. One of the revelations of rewatching Footloose was my realization that John Lithgow’s preacher character is, if not quite sympathetic, at least far more nuanced and self-aware than I’d remembered. This sort of conservative, amenable to persuasion by a spiky-haired teen armed with subversive Bible quotes, has gone extinct, whereas Roger and Eleanor Dunbar, the Stepford-esque kooks who go from book-banning to book-burning, are running shit now. The story’s emotional apex? Diane Wiest’s steely “Eleanor, sit down!”

Is Footloose, in fact, science fiction? The mise en scène is post-apocalyptic-ish, thanks to the abandoned buildings in which the characters dance, fight, and dance again. Plus, there’s a medieval-style joust on rusty tractors, not to mention a sanctuary where fragments of forbidden texts are stored. Into this isolated, devolving society comes Kevin Bacon’s character, who — like Eli Doyle in Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark (also 1984) — possesses heightened physical abilities. Will his infectious dance moves spread to others, or will he be neutralized first?

***

MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

CURVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (17)

Categories

Tags