Yes, really. After a shitful week an equally shitful dance movie can make everything seem okay again. Mary K and I were rather in need of cheering up, so we met for dumplings and tequila, and then squashed ourselves into a Hoyts theatre full of teenagers and prepared for some upliftingly awful badness.
It didn’t disappoint. The film honoured most of the classic dance movie tropes – the dead mother, the disadvantaged kid making good, a valuable life lesson about being true to yourself. It would have been a basic by-the-numbers (and certainly ticked the box for sheer dreadfulness) if it didn’t divulge from the formula in one radical way. Instead of cheering on the disadvantaged kids from the streets, the audience was encouraged to barrack for the motley group of performing arts school students.
What? While most older dance films enact parables about rebellion in the face of social or religious conservatism (Footloose, Hairspray, Girl Just Wanna Have Fun), and the more recent ones typically feature a main character torn between two worlds, or generally experiencing some sort of inner conflict (Save the Last Dance, Centre Stage), SU2TS pits privileged (mainly) white kids against ‘ghetto’ black kids and lets them win. Its main narrative tension is derived from a number of dance battles between the arts school kids and the street kids, in which the arts school kids perform pretty much identical routines to their ‘gangsta’ counterparts but win by virtue of being wholesome, inclusive and generally morally superior.
SU2TS misses two really great opportunities that could have elevated it above the dross it is. Firstly, a more innovative choreographer would have incorporated the classical and traditional styles the dance academy kids were ostensibly versed in to the jerky, breakdance and hip-hop-driven style of the street. One of the characters is apparently a brilliant tap-dancer, others take ballet, and yet none of these elements are considered in the choreography – they’re just introduced and ditched.
Secondly, the film could have spent a bit more time explaining why a group of indie dance kids were more ‘authentic’ than the ghetto teens (in a film like this, the most ‘authentic’ character or group is always going to win). It hints, briefly, at the black community’s disillusionment with a gangsta culture that subsumes creative expression and churns it out as generic music video crap. The film goes out of its way to spell every other theme and idea out, but the idea that the hyper-masculine and aggressive (’criminal’) co-option of an artistic endeavour devalues its worth to the community is raised, but never explored.
Of course, this is not a particularly incisive film, but B movies often offer more incisive social commentary by virtue of the assumptions they make than ‘good’ films, which tackle the same issues, ever do. There’s a wealth of writing to be done about masculinity and the idea of a dance battle, the archetypes the film trades in and the artistic decisions its director didn’t make, but you really just want to know how it ends, right? The sensitive white boy gets the white girl with the dead mother. They kiss, in the rain, in the middle of a montage. There are close-ups from multiple angles. Really, who could fail to be cheered by that?
4 Comments
March 24, 2008 at 9:22 pm
I can’t believe SU2TS concluded in a white-on-white hook-up. I thought B-grade dance movies were supposed to transcend race.
I’ve never felt so black.
March 24, 2008 at 10:52 pm
I hope you’re both ok, or at least feeling the positive effects of trash-watching. My regards to you both.
Mary K, you are not black.
March 24, 2008 at 11:31 pm
Excellent, as always.
It’s always the films with shitty premises which make for the most compelling viewing, with the sole exception of Glitter.
March 25, 2008 at 9:34 am
I could be black.