A chance encounter leads the protagonist Frank Keane to Marilyn Hotchkiss' dance class where he is at first unwilling, hesitant and uninspired on the dance floor. However, in what I take to be one of the most striking scenes of the movie, Mr. Keane, asked to demonstrate the lindy hop, loses all his inhibitions and lets the dance take control. This is a powerful moment, one of deep emotional expression for Frank. At this moment, Frank in some way is able to move past his grief, and is opened up for what is a budding romance.
Here, Mr. Keane learned an important lesson about dance. "Dance is a very powerful drug Mr. Keane," says the Marienne, his instructor, "If embraced judiciously, it can exorcise demons, access deep seated emotions and color your life in joyous shades of brilliant magenta that you never knew existed." Throughout the movie, we see how dance helps characters to channel their feelings and to exorcise their demons. Yet, dance is not something meant to be unbounded. In this moment of abandon Mr. Keane must be reproved and called back within himself. He is disrupting the dance class. This is why dance must be "embraced judiciously." Marienne continues: "One must shoulder its challenges with intrepid countenance if one is ever to reap its rewards."
You see dance, just like anything else of great power, has a right way it is used. If there were not rules for dance, it would no longer hold its form and degenerate into something disorderly. This is not only true of dance. Marienne admonishes another character: "There are rules, Mr. Ipswitch, in life, just as there are rules in dance. Those rules may seem arbitrary at times, they may seem impossible at times, they may seem unfair or onerous, but they are rules nonetheless. And they must not be broken."
This connects to another aspect of the movie which involves the flashbacks to 1962 when another key character, Steve, is twelve and is unwillingly signed up for Marilyn Hotckiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School. Steve is at the age when he is starting to be interested in girls, but hardly knows how to express it. The closest he gets is giving Lisa Gobar a black eye. What Marilyn Hotckiss is doing, though her students hardly realize it, is teaching these young men and women a way of expressing these new feelings appropriately. The boys learn, though it is at first full of rigid formalism, how to ask their partner for a dance. The girls then respond with the formulaic "I'd be enchanted.." Then the two begin a rigid boxstep. If you've tried to learn how to ballroom dance, you know that this process of learning how to dance can be kind of awkward. You try to avoid stepping on your partner's feet as you count your steps (hopefully not out loud) and pretty much just stick to the basic formula. It is only after learning the basics that dance can become a creative, beautiful, flowing thing which takes on a life of its own. But it still must stay within the bounds of what makes it a dance.
I reckon that one of the things we are missing in our society today is ballroom dance. How many of us were really taught how to show our feelings of love and affection properly? How many of us were taught how to show proper respect to members of the opposite sex? I'm not here to pine away for a bygone era, but there was a reason for the rules of etiquette, and something is lost when many of them have fallen away. Sure they may be rigid and awkward to get used to, but it is within those guidelines that true love and respect can be given direction and allowed to flourish. In the same way, the rules of dance allow true expression and creativity to be realized. This leads me to the Chesterton quote of the day: "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up."
Let it suffice to say that this film is one whose imagination very much brings out the connection between love and art about which I have previously written here. Here, the art is a way to give expression to feelings and emotions which are otherwise inexpressible and even unmanageable.
Another interesting connection to which this film gives a nod is the connection between violence and love. Watching it this time through, it seemed to me that violence was often an expression of some emotion and even of love that was perhaps misguided. We see this when the girls insist on joining the boys' game of British Bulldogs, a rough and tumble version of sharks and minnows, and we see it when Steve (accidentally) gives Lisa a black eye. This almost innocent "violence" connects with my own experience that teasing and picking on another is often a sign of affection. For the adolescent (boy at any rate), nothing says I love you like drenching the beloved with water or decking them with a snow ball. Indeed, I don't know if that is ever really outgrown. We just learn other ways to express our affection as well (like hopefully ballroom dancing).
Of course there are many other things I could say about the movie, and many details that could be interesting think about. For now, my hope is that I have sharpened and not dulled your interest in seeing this movie. I hope you can enjoy the beauty of the movie for what it is, and appreciate the richness and depth of the film.
This is great Ben. You really give a very clear description as to why society has many of the rules it does. I think you have much more of a point when you talk about violence being "an expression of...love that was perhaps misguided." The divorce rate in society today has increased to about 50% of all marriages ending in divorce, and much pain and suffering comes out of broken families. I believe they all have a desire to appreciate beauty when they see it, but never learned how to do it properly. Keep up the good posts.
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