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Step Up 2 The Theorizing of Dance Films

jhicks — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 11:57:42 CDT

They say Step Up 2 is the greatest dance flick of all time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7DM-cT7npY It includes the national dance crew champs and obviously a lot of other professionals. What aesthetic defines this genre, though, that authorizes a statement like "greatest" or "best." Surely this movie fails in a number of areas. So, wherein lies the value? What is doing right and for whom? It comes out July 15th, but since it was leaked on the internet (aren't we all?), I suspect you could get it.

A kind of lamer version of this seems to be Step Up, the first. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEJHfq12m44 Still worth seeing what the sequel tried to build on, wtf this genre is trying to do.

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Dance-Movies-All-Time/lm/3FSQWVT3VUO2Eis a list of "classics" in this genre, though I suspect they are doing something a little different. Maybe not. At the core of all of them seems to be a boy-meets-girl plot. Do the Bring It On movies count as dance flicks? I kind of think so.

Anyway, I've seen some pretty bad movies with you, so I can't imagine your sense of taste would be offended by any of these. Then again I could be completely misjudging your appreciation of camp and flash. Film students unanimously ignore movies like these, which is ironic because Step Up 2 was directed by a USC grad who Stephen Spielberg (another USC alum, but English, not film) mentored. NYU needs to catch up on this trend, if anything. Where are the fun dance films from Spike Lee and Marty Scorsese?

As a kind of hermaneutic, we might consider what different types of music do to this genre. Seems like hip hop is ideal because it gives you access to a culture of "shinin," in which you go way out of your way to impress other people. Plus hip hop comes with break dancing, which has been a part of the culture since before anyone under forty remembers. Also, these movies tend to use ballet as a cultural symbol for whiteness, elitism, and being out of touch with reality. See Flashdance, in which (if I remember) a stripper shows dance school admissions faculty the next thing in dance. I can only assume that a generation of strippers and dumb broads auditioned at Julliard under similarly wacky pretenses afterward. I sure hope so anyway. I'm primarily interested in the dance movie as a vehicle for promoting arrogance and showing off, like a really long music video but that pretends to plot and characters (I know, I know, Britney's "Oops, I Did It Again" is obviously genre bending, but stay with me here).

-- David

Intriguing. It might prove useful to distinguish movies about dancing from those merely featuring dancing, as well. I can't say for sure, but I believe the Astaire/Rogers movies didn't have plots that revolved around dancing -- they didn't discover themselves through dance, or whatever. This seems like a useful distinction, and we might want to consider whether we're watching movies that feature dancing, or those specifically about dance.

AFAIK, (but IANAL), you've got it right with Flashdance. Ballet as whiteness and elitism sounds about right, though I wonder if that's widespread; it seems to me that the broader trope involves opposing "dance" to "not-dance," and that not-dance always oppresses. Footloose seems the paradigmatic example: "A city boy comes to a small town where rock music and dancing have been banned." Guess where that goes? Saturday Night Fever: "A Brooklyn youth feels his only chance to get somewhere is as the king of the disco floor." Flashdance offers "A Pittsburgh woman with two jobs as a welder and an exotic dancer wants to get into ballet school." (Does the use-your-stripper-moves-to

-blow-these-square-minds ending share something with the use-your-knowledge-of-shampoo-and-shoes-to-get-into-law-school ending of Legally Blonde, and perhaps the you-had-the-power-to-go-home-all-along ending of The Wizard of OZ?) It seems as though your boy-meets-girl plot could be a subset of this dance vs. not-dance opposition -- if the boy/girl can only be won through dance! (Possibly a stretch, but again, one's desires achieve fulfillment through dance. Does it seems odd to propose dance as purely utilitarian, a method of escape? It strikes me as similar to asking to what use we can put poetry.)

(Also, to the earlier point: Singin' in the Rain's plot summary reads "A silent film production company and cast make a difficult transition to sound." Nothing about dancing as plot. Does this make Dirty Dancing a dance movie, or not?)

So, then, do the Bring It On movies count as dance flicks? Though they feature dancing, I wouldn't say they're about dancing. They're "about" cheerleading, which is similar but different. (And of course they're "really" about x, y, z, etc.) Moulon Rouge would also seem to feature dancing, but really be "about" theater, artifice as life, etc.

I wondered if the "dance movie" is an American phenomenon, and it doesn't seem that way. Shall We Dansu? came from Japan, and features ballroom dancing. Interestingly, according to a couple of the comments, ballroom dancers in Japan receive ridicule from the larger culture. There again you have the oppositional framework, and the main character supposedly "awakens to a more full understanding of living a vivacious life through dance."

So, some other movies about dancing might include:

Breakin': A struggling young jazz dancer (Lucinda Dickey) meets up with two break-dancers. Together they become the sensation of the street crowds. Features ICE-T in his film debut as a club MC.

Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo: A developer tries to bulldoze a community recreation center. The local breakdancers try to stop it. (How's that for overcoming?)

The Forbidden Dance: Filmed during the Lambada dance craze (if there really ever was one), this film tries to have a social conscience. A princess (Laura Herring) in the Amazon rain forests tries to fight a conglomerate threatening the forests by going to Los Angeles. There she links up with a rich kid (Jeff James) who tells her that she must get on tv to succeed with her mission. Quick as a wink the two come up with the idea of winning a lambada dance contest that is getting tv attention. Sid Haig also co-stars as a witch doctor who accompanies the princess and provides some humor. (Despite its rating, I'd watch this, because I could watch Laura Elena Harring's breasts for hours.)

I thought I had more, but that's about it. Step Up 2 downloaded. I did read the Times article about the director a couple months ago. Hope it works out for him, this film thing.

-- Jesse

The distinctions you're making are of course useful. The list of "dance classics" was an amazon.com page, so that's not much of an authority. I think the two things that would be interesting to do as a start would be to ask, "what is the dance movie?" Obviously that's just a definition argument. It's whatever the definition says it is, and the definition is as good as its ability to encompass all the relevant movies and exclude the rest. You pointed out more hip hop dance movies. I should have mentioned probably the most famous in this genre, if you can call it that, at least in recent memory: the much-lampooned You Got Served. Also, I think Save the Last Dance might count. I tend to want to narrow the inquiry to just movies ABOUT dancing, rather than movies that use dancing to facilitate character interaction. Fast and the Furious, so far as I am concerned, is not really ABOUT cars, so much as they move the plot along. That distinction might be wrong, but it feels so right.

-- David

What struck me was the wealth of ideology in vehicles for entertainment that seem to beg to be dismissed. Well, fine, so they're not art. People are watching them, though, and they're saying something. What is it? What does the dance movie do, typically? I was thinking along the lines of genre, conventions, arc, and above all ideology. What is the worldview of the dance movie? We can probably do this with any genre, but dance movies seemed 1) a small enough category as to allow us to see pretty much all of them, 2) not taken seriously and therefore wide open, and 3) trying to convey some point(s). I might be wrong, but the dance movie for its own sake seems not to exist. Rather, what you get is some kind of didactic story telling you to do something. Not sure what. Step Up 2 seemed to be telling you to believe in yourself. They seem also to have to create a bad guy--and not always with any real competence. Let's get real. The antagonists of Step Up 2 are weak. Man vs. Man (the step mother, the rigid teacher, the black kids) and Man vs. Self. Sure, but ultimately none of these conflicts comes off as particular insurmountable. What of that? But really I'm up for any genre or anything. I know you could think up something much more interesting. I just thought it would be fun to write something up together. I think you're very smart, and it would be fun for me. I can't honestly say I'd be too proud of a dance movies article, though I'd be Camera Obscura or one of those journals would take it. Let's bat around some topics and do something. I think it would be fun.

-- David

One reason I wondered if other countries had dance movies had to do with what seems to me a very "American" ideology: the triumph of the individual over The Establishment. I know, we always have to root for the underdog, but here the Establishment seems portrayed as especially vile because they function as gatekeepers and disciplinarians: they decide who gets to dance, and what kind of dancing they'll do. Bringing "the streets" to "the academy" has its analogue in Duchamp's Fountain: it's not where art is from, it's where it's at. Maybe.

I think almost all dance movies are going to tell you to "believe in yourself," because, as one of my students once put it, "you can't structure creativity." And anyone who offers you a structure for creative self-expression is The Establishment. That may be why the antagonists in these movies seem so personally weak: they're really just placeholders for the abstraction that's forcing you to not be you! It's the system! Then there's often a class/economic layer also representing The System.

I have copies of Breakin and Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo, which seem like prototypes of the genre. Maybe not, but they seem a good place to start. I have Footloose on the way. Flashdance, obviously. -- Jesse

I basically live in the library now that State College has become Heatwave Town. During a break from reading, I went to look at what journals might be interested in a piece on dance movies, or really movies at all. A couple journals that are normally English dept. stuff might be interested, but those are a gamble. Film Criticism would probably take it. They are published by Allegheny College, here in PA, and do not look to be any kind of stuffy or terribly competitive affair--despite being a good journal. According to the MLA Bibliography, it is over thirty years old and receives sixty submissions per year, publishing twelve. You can't beat those odds, since a lot of those submissions are pretty safely assumed to be crap. The journal is a good place to appear in, despite its being published by Nowhere U. It is indexed by the MLA Bibliography, Lexis-Nexis, and all the relevant search engines, which is good. Their articles are also freely available through Proquest, so people could get their hands on an article if we landed it there. People tend not to bother looking up articles in journals that aren't online, not that I'm desperate to change the face of film studies. Additionally, one of their most recent contributors is a PhD candidate, I think at a school I haven't even heard of. That speaks well to our chances of landing the thing.
That would be the first place I would send it anyway, but just because I'm impatient. A smarter person would send it to a flashier journal or two and see whether they would do something out of their normal routine. I'm pretty happy with any journal that appears in JSTOR or Proquest. Incidentally, and this also speaks to the chances they would publish the article, they just recently did something along similar lines identifying and describing the "hard body" movie, I think the person called it. I'll show you that article some time. It's not really what we would do, but it is a decent model in some respects. The author published along with the article a bunch of appendices, one of which is just pictures of Dolph's butt in Universal Soldier, which is hilarious, but the third of which is a big fat list of all the movies this person thought counted as hard body movies. Such a thing might be relevant in a piece on dance movies, if it turns out that term is not used much or not defined. I could see the article basically trying to answer two related questions: What is a dance movie, and what are its characteristic elements? That gets you pretty quickly into form, structure, and ideology without too much trouble.
-- David

Dancer Risks Everything
"Of course, there's no way Cassie could have infiltrated this subculture, unless she entered a biracial relationship with a young man who wanted a better life for himself than stealing cars and playing ball, someone who could teach her how to let go of her formal training—along with the pain of her mother's untimely death—and just let it flow so she could, in turn, convince his hardened, cynical friends that she was 'not bad for a white girl.'" Right. So is this satire of dance movies pro-ballet enough?

-- David

One quick note on style/structure: watching the final scene from Step Up 2 re-asserted the importance of reaction shots. One comes from the Establishment guy, who grudgingly (sort of, but not very) acknowledges that The Streets do "keep it real." (I guess.) Does he in this reaction accept the Streets on its own terms, or accept that his Ivory Tower can somehow assimilate Street culture? The competing team reacts, of course, with horror and dismay: they've been served. It seems also, though, that these reaction shots help orient the audience with regard to the dance itself: you can tell by the reaction that they got served, even if you can't recognize it yourself. I mention this possibility of non-recognition because, while watching Breakin' I realized I had no prior experience on which to judge breakdancing. It all looks somewhat grand mal to me, but that's because I'm not from The Streets. So that led me to wonder about the audience for these films. Should they know when someone gets served?

I think your comments about race and class go to a particular ideology of authenticity and creativity. Not only can't you structure creativity -- yours or anyone else's -- but the lower-class, often black culture, because it has no formalized (economically formalized, right? One pays to go to the academy (Flashdance)) structure for creativity, it somehow has a greater claim to the "authentic." Only "the streets" could produce such an organic and thus "authentic" form of expression, runs the implicit argument. (You see early rappers making this argument all the time, actually.) Form and content seem inseparable here, as numerous rap parodies have made clear.

Yet to find this culture, you have to go to the Streets; thus all the implied accusations of slumming, etc.

That sounded rather obvious once articulated, but I also think there's a connection to Thomas Frank's The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Frank argues that counterculture ad-men -- advertising executives and "creatives" who genuinely were counter to the company man style of the 50's -- heavily promoted the concept of "lifestyle." The difference between "life" and "lifestyle," I'd argue, is the difference between where you're from and where you're at. Accidents of birth define, in some sense, who we "are," our life-script, while lifestyle is something you can choose for yourself. (More specifically, it's often something you can purchase.) I think these movies, much like American culture generally, explore the tension between "yes, you can completely remake yourself as whoever you want" and "but there's something inauthentic about that," as well as "some cultures can't simply be bought into (because they're so authentic)." Authenticity -- being yourself -- can't ever happen in a vaccuum: you, paradoxically, need someone to teach you how to be yourself. And that person is always from the wrong side of the tracks, or a reclusive Sean Connery. (Tribal lifestyle and acceptance somehow super-authentic.)

-- Jesse

Notes from 06.12.08
Things we talked about, in no particular order:

Reaction shots are sometimes used to help audience interpret the action, particularly whether a dance was good or not.
The paper could be a definition argument organized by classification and division. Hip-hop dance movies seem distinct from, say, ballet, ballroom, or cheerleading movies but, in theory, share a number of similarities as well that are generalizable to the whole. Sections should probably, then, be conceptual, rather than organized by type. One section on ideology makes sense. Perhaps another on form/plot structure, which identifies patterns and formulas. Maybe another on audience reception dealing with who the audience(s) might be, what expectations they bring to such a film, and how they interact with it. Some go for the spectacle. Some for the music. Doubtful anyone goes for the plot, but surely a few do.
An interesting corollary to the dance movie's apparent ideology (know thyself) is the lone male action hero so popular in the 90s. One way of understanding the dance movie is as the action movie for girls. Are the protagonists largely female? Might be a give away, if so. How many female action stars? Red Sonja has a female lead; T2 has a prominent female in a sort of action role; Tomb Raider; needs fleshing out, but the list is probably not huge.
One way of grouping the movies by plot seems to be according to the rewards they offer their leads. What does dance get you in the end? In some, you get a lover, an understanding of your true self, friendship, community, money, admission to an educational institution,affirmation of your worth from other people, upward mobility. This last one, though, is complicated because whether the dancer ever moves up into a higher class than the one he or she belongs in at movie's start is hard to say. Do certain forms of dance lend themselves more frequently to certain rewards? Ballroom films lead to lovers, while hip-hop leads to the authentic self?
How do we understand the creative process behind these movies? What importance does director play in our understanding of the final products? How about screenwriter? Choreographer? Wherein lies the auteur? Who do we blame?!
What forms of ideology present themselves in these movies? Finding your true self seems to be the dominant goal of these movies, but not all. Self-discovery narratives require protagonists who lack self-awareness or self-actualization at the story's beginning. Some examples we have don't really do that. Step Up 2's lead female undergoes no real self-discovery, though she seems to inspire it in others.
Issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality in these movies seem neatly tucked away. As Jesse pointed out, to allow the audience to focus on the dances, the ideology of the movie must be rendered both inoffensive and invisible. How trivial and gross would the characters seem (or more so, anyway) for ignoring the important issues surrounding them. I argue they are anyway, since they do ignore these issues by and large, but I have to go looking for the ideology and pay attention to how the characters ignore it. The effort I have to expend tells you something about how the films discourage this sort of analysis to begin with. Obviously exceptions exist. See the treatment of homosexuality in Bring It On.
Do any of the films have apparent or detectable messages? Explit ones? Implicit ones?

That's all I can remember for now.

Oh, one painfully obvious thing to keep track of is character types and psychology, such that it exists. Who is the protagonist? Of what race, class, gender? Do patterns emerge over time as the genre develops? Step Up 2 seems a fairly self-conscious attempt at experimentation in the genre or at least departure from norms. In several of these instances, the departures are more feigned than actual, as say with the black dancers being the gatekeepers, who in reality just get robbed of their meaningful free-time activity, sense of self, achievement, and community. Who are the usual love interests? Comic relief characters? Dance team members? Villains? Character types are important to keep track of.

On inoffensive and virtually undetectable ideology:

He used to think of the world of language (the
logosphere) as a vast and perpetual conflict of paranoias.
The only survivors are the systems (fictions, jargons)
inventive enough to produce a final figure, the one which
brands the adversary with a half-scientific, half-ethical
name, a kind of turnstile that permits us simultaneously to
describe, to explain, to condemn, to reject, to recuperate
the enemy, in a word: to make him pay. So it is, among
others, with certain vulgates: with the Marxist jargon, for
which all opposition is an opposition of class; with the
psychoanalytic jargon, for which all repudiation is avowal;
with the Christian jargon, for which all denial is seeking,
etc. He was astonished that the language of capitalist
power does not constitute, at first glance, such a systematic
figure (other than of the basest kind, opponents never
being called anything but "rabid," "brainwashed," etc.);
then he realized that the (thereby much higher) pressure of
capitalist language is not paranoid, systematic, argumentative,
articulated: it is an implacable stickiness, a doxa, a
kind of unconscious: in short, the essence of ideology.
-- Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, p 28

The Law no longer needs to be written or recognized since it is being made everywhere ... The Law disappears by spreading over everything. And as it's absent, it's always right.
-- Sylvere Lotringer, in dialogue with Paul Virilio, Pure War (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 27

It might prove useful to pay attention to the DVD synopses of these. Even if we never quote them, they do a lot to suggest a particular audience, as well as making pretty clear the "themes" at work.

Footloose, for example:

Footloose jumps with spirit, dazzling dance numbers, and an electrifying musical score. It portrays the timeless struggle between innocent pleasure [Oh really?] and rigid morality, when city-boy Ren McCormick (Kevin Bacon) finds himself in an uptight Midwestern town where dancing has been banned. Ren revolts with best friend Willard (Chris Penn) and the minister's daughter [!!] (Lori Singer). Features a treasury of Top 10 songs -- Kenny Loggins' "Footloose," Shalamar's "Dancing in the Streets," Deniece Williams' "Let's Hear It For the Boy," Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out for a Hero," and the Footloose love theme, "Almost Paradise."

Also features commentary by Kevin Bacon. Additional commentary by producer Craig Zadan and Writer Dean Pitchford. The front reads: "He's a big-city kid in a small town. They said he'd never win. He knew he had to."

Another one I just picked up, which is, I believe, Moroccan, is called Making Of. I picked it up for the first second sentence:

Twenty-five-year-old Bahta (Lofti Abdelli) has no job, no degree, and no prospects. His one passion is breakdancing, but even that outlet is repressed by the police who regularly harass him. After attracting the attention of a group of fundamentalists, Bahta is recruited into the violent and dangerous world of terrorism.

Movies I've obtained thus far:
Breakin'
Breakin'2: Electric Boogaloo
Step Up
Step Up 2 The Streets
Footloose
You Got Served
Beat Street
Save the Last Dance
Bring It On
Bring It On Again
Bring it On In It To Win It
Bring It On All or Nothing

Center Stage? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0210616/

Dance Movie List

jhicks — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 12:40:10 CDT

Dance Movies We're Studying

Breakin'
4 May 1984 (USA)

Director: Joel Silberg

Writers: Charles Parker (story) &
Allen DeBevoise (story) ...

For the break of your life! Push it to pop it! Rock it to lock it! Break it to make it!

Plot: A struggling young jazz dancer (Lucinda Dickey) meets up with two break-dancers. Together they become the sensation of the street crowds. Features ICE-T in his film debut as a club MC.

Notes:

Album Title
Year
Record label
Released on (CD, etc.)

TRACKS APPEAR ON ...

Album Title Year Record label Released on (CD, etc.)	Album Title Year Record label Released on (CD, etc.)
Album Title Year Record label Released on (CD, etc.)	Album Title Year Record label Released on (CD, etc.)

SINGLES/PROMOS/REMIXES

Single Title Release Date Record label Released on (CD, etc.)	Single Title Release Date Record label Released on (CD, etc.)
Single Title Release Date Record label Released on (CD, etc.)	Single Title Release Date Record label Released on (CD, etc.)

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wetpaint — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 12:15:09 CDT

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