There’s a lot to learn from this film when you are 11 years old. The mysterious and complicated world of adults was slowly coming into focus for me, but a lot still went over my head. There are layers I missed the first time I watched Dirty Dancing that would later reveal themselves with repeat viewings (even to this day, Vivian Pressman is now a pretty vivid character for me, rather than a slightly tragic side-show). I remember around this period (the early 1990s) hearing the phrase, ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’, for example, and gaining some insight into its meaning because of Vivian’s actions. To make herself feel better after Johnny’s rejection, she goes straight to nasty Robbie Gould, the waiter, and is discovered on top of him by Lisa, Baby’s sister, who arrives ready to let him pop her cherry. And all the while, a stone’s throw away in another cabin, Johnny and Baby are having another world-beating shag. It’s a busy night.
The moment where, in the harsh early morning light, a grim-faced Vivian, free of make-up, exits Robbie’s cabin, and, as she tucks her tights into her evening bag, looks up to see Baby and Johnny, the image of wholesome sexuality, kissing each other goodbye after a night of love and tenderness, has got to be one of the bleakest images in romantic cinema. In fact, it has saved me from some seriously ill-advised, on-the-rebound-style hook ups over the years – I just picture myself as Vivian at dawn, still in her party dress, no tights, wondering who’s using who, and it’s enough to make me order a cab home. Thank you, Viv.
So now, let’s deal with Neil. Poor Neil Kellerman represents all those men who inexplicably believe themselves to be catnip to women everywhere, when in fact they really couldn’t be less sexually appealing. Even I, aged 11, understood that this man is not the one you want, even though he is intent on telling you that he is all you could ever dream of. He is the absolute antithesis of Johnny, and a sexual wasteland. A date with him would leave you about as moist as a beech-nut husk stranded in the midday sun. Mere mention of the line, ‘I love to watch your hair blowing in the breeze’, to any woman familiar with the film and therefore the scene where Neil invites Baby to come for an evening walk, will result in an instant and uncontrollable physical reaction of pure cringing disgust. Try it – honestly, you’ll be amazed at the power those ten words can have. In fact, you don’t even have to have seen the film.
Crucially, Neil can’t dance. And this, to writer and retired dancer Eleanor Bergstein, essentially consigns any man to the sexual slag heap. For Bergstein, dancing is the greatest indicator of sexual prowess and compatibility. That’s why it’s called Dirty Dancing. Even more criminal than not being able to dance is not being able to dance while believing you can, a flaw Neil exhibits when he walks into the studio to talk to Johnny before the big end-of-season show. Baby tells him that she’s just there to have some ‘extra dance lessons’. We see Neil raise his hands, and gyrate a little, and utter the words, ‘I can teach you, kid,’ which will induce a vomit response in anyone who now firmly understands that dancing = sex. No, Neil, you can’t. No, no, no.
But who am I to judge? Even though I knew every inch of what they were up to, how sex was and wasn’t meant to be done, who to do it with – ideally – and when, what you should and shouldn’t need to wear to get it, there was nothing much happening with me in that department in real life. It was, shall we politely say with a cough, ‘theoretical’. That is, until I went to my first hip hop club in London, far from home, far from church, with a group of new and exciting friends I had met at a drama club.
I had always liked hip hop, rap, R’n’B – I can’t say that I was particularly knowledgeable about them, or that my tastes within the genre were sophisticated, but they were unusual for the time and place I grew up. I went to a comprehensive school in Hertfordshire. It was mixed socially, but predominantly white. Most people were into guitar music and pop. I found bands such as Radiohead and Nirvana made me semi-suicidal, and instead hoovered up the likes of Arrested Development, The Fugees and Blackstreet, which were the bands in those genres that made it to the Top 40 in the 1990s. So although my tastes were uncommon in my little part of the Home Counties, I was still well within the parameters of what was available to buy from the music section of Woolworth’s in town. There was nothing especially cool or underground about me – I just liked what I liked.
Dancing to Nirvana in a nightclub is very, very different to dancing to Blackstreet. Very. Different. The first time I went to a club playing this sort of music I was 17 years old, and – thanks to Dirty Dancing – I thought, ‘Yes, this is it – this is what I want. I know how to do this.’ And I dived in.
And it was here that I had my second ever snog, and let me say it was very, very different to the first one. Very. Different. It had started with dancing, some very, very dirty dancing, which resulted in a stern word from a friend as she pulled me away, looked me beadily in the eye, and told this naïve, ‘watermelon carrying’ suburban bumpkin that the ‘only rule in the club tonight is you leave with who you came in with, OK?’ I nodded dumbly, not quite understanding – of course I would leave with her, I didn’t have anywhere else to stay … woaahhhhh, I see, I get it. She thought I might leave the club with this man I was dancing with, and stay at his house and have sex with him, and fuckinghellimonly17and immeantobeachristianbutgodknowsidontfeel verychristiantonight andohgodimdancingwiththis managainanditsjust.so.sexy.
Then he snogged me. And this man snogged me good and proper. There had been some fairly full-on dancing going until this point, but now some serious shit was happening. We weren’t even dancing anymore, I was somehow just sitting on his lap at the side of the room, snogging his face off. He even put his finger in my mouth as we snogged, and somehow made it work. I have tried to recreate it since with other men, but generally it’s an awful idea. Don’t try it. I think you have to be drunk and recently dancing to Ginuwine’s ‘Pony’ to pull it off.
This was a mini-epiphany for me. Actual sex wouldn’t happen for another three years, and actual good sex a little time after that. But this was as close as I could imagine getting as a frigid, evangelical Christian virgin who didn’t believe in sex before marriage. Was this my Johnny Castle, at last? I can’t remember the man’s name. I think he muttered something about being a ‘driver’ and that he would ‘take care of me’. I’m not going to suggest that this was a marriage proposal, but it certainly felt romantic. He was a nice man. And a truly incredible kisser. He was quite a lot older than me. I don’t remember any sense of feeling pressured by him to go somewhere else, so perhaps I was lucky, or unlucky. We could be happily married now – him doing his ‘driving’ to support us, and me at home with nine kids, still totally captivated by his ability to make putting a finger in your mouth while kissing an enjoyable experience. Who’s to say what could have happened? Either way, I left the club with my friend, who practically body-checked me out the door, and as the hot sweat cooled onto my body in the night-time air, I felt heated from the inside. I felt like Baby. I felt like a woman.
You can do a lot worse than use Dirty Dancing as your guide through the sexual shenanigans of early youth. Baby is not a silent, smiling, swishy-haired princess. She is outspoken, noisy and casual in her appearance. She finds a man in Johnny who respects all of that, likes it, loves it, even. He only wants to lift her higher. Literally and figuratively. This film says, ‘Find a man like Johnny, and go get him. Don’t change yourself, change the world. Change the man if necessary. But remember: you’re pretty in your own way. You don’t have to change a thing.’ It’s a decent message for a teenage girl, better than ‘drink fruit-flavoured laxatives to be thin’, or ‘shade your nose away with this beige pen’, or ‘take more clothes off to be noticed’. It’s sexy, but it’s equal. Everyone’s at it, for good and bad reasons. It’s messy.
But that’s life, and that’s sex. You can’t make it tidy, so you might as well enjoy it.