Flashdance: What a Feeling by Irene Cara
I remember when this movie came out the critics rained all over it for being unrealistic. Hmm, a girl who works full time as a welder during the day and then dances 'til late at night at a strip club where the strippers don't have to take off their clothes applies for and gets admission to a dance conservatory even though she has had no formal training and is already 18? Happens every day I'm sure. But attacking a musical for being unrealistic is like criticizing a dance tune for having a steady beat. It's the whole point.
The smooth, clean girls were in university and dressing preppy and the thing about the music was, as I've said before, that it wasn't about her life. The music was about some fantastic creature who could live the sort of high-risk, roller coaster life she never would live.
She knew such lives existed. She knew this intimately because she had an older sisters or cousins who had thrown caution and taste aside in the 1970s and she was well acquainted with the wreckage such lives left behind them. That's why she was making damn sure it wasn't going to happen to her and it is why she knew stories like this belonged in the movies. The song says, "I can really have it all" but any girl with a reasonable sense of prudence knows better and the smooth, clean girls who'd popped up at the end of the 1970s knew better in the 1980s.
By the way: I'd say we're long overdue for a return of girls with that 1980s preppy attitude.
The series starts here.
Everything comes to an end and the era and this series wraps up here.
I remember when this movie came out the critics rained all over it for being unrealistic. Hmm, a girl who works full time as a welder during the day and then dances 'til late at night at a strip club where the strippers don't have to take off their clothes applies for and gets admission to a dance conservatory even though she has had no formal training and is already 18? Happens every day I'm sure. But attacking a musical for being unrealistic is like criticizing a dance tune for having a steady beat. It's the whole point.
The smooth, clean girls were in university and dressing preppy and the thing about the music was, as I've said before, that it wasn't about her life. The music was about some fantastic creature who could live the sort of high-risk, roller coaster life she never would live.
She knew such lives existed. She knew this intimately because she had an older sisters or cousins who had thrown caution and taste aside in the 1970s and she was well acquainted with the wreckage such lives left behind them. That's why she was making damn sure it wasn't going to happen to her and it is why she knew stories like this belonged in the movies. The song says, "I can really have it all" but any girl with a reasonable sense of prudence knows better and the smooth, clean girls who'd popped up at the end of the 1970s knew better in the 1980s.
By the way: I'd say we're long overdue for a return of girls with that 1980s preppy attitude.
The series starts here.
Everything comes to an end and the era and this series wraps up here.
No comments:
Post a Comment