Footloose
(
1984
)
"Well, on my planet, we have a legend about people like you. It's called Footloose. And in it, a great hero, named Kevin Bacon, teaches an entire city full of people with sticks up their butts that, dancing, well, is the greatest thing there is."
-Peter Quill AKA Star Lord, Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
The story of a stranger coming to town an upsetting the established order is one of the oldest plot archetypes in fiction. Indeed Tolstoy once claimed that “All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town” (one could take it a step further by noting that for the stranger to come to town in the first place they would necessarily have to go on a journey). In cinema, it was a venerable trope well before Footloose came along in 1984 and put its own teen and dance-centric spin on it, being employed regularly in old Westerns like Shane (1953) and Hondo (1953) and old Easterns like Yojimbo (1961) and Sanjuro (1962). The appeal of this story is immediate and elemental. All of us who have ever lived in the same place for any extended time have day-dreamed about something or someone coming along to shake up the mundanity of life. We all know, at least subconsciously, that our mode of life is only one of many possible alternatives, and we long (especially when we're young) for something to come by and shake us out of our collective ruts and expose us to some of those disparate variations of life.
Here, that something is none other than Ren McCormack, a kid from Chicago who moves out to Bomont Oklahoma with his mom so they can stay with Ren's aunt and uncle. Short of leaving the country entirely, this was just about the most drastic change of pace possible for young Ren. He's gone from the glitz and glamour of the big city to a town that's so uptight they've actually outlawed dancing and the most exciting thing a young man can engage in is a game of tractor chicken. However, precious little attention is paid to Ren's angst at being suddenly uprooted from everything that he's ever known. Indeed, he seems downright excited to be in a new place and more than willing to go the extra mile to fit in and get along with his new peers. This is not Daniel LaRusso from The Karate Kid (1984) that we're dealing with here who will spend the majority of the run time moping about his lot in life. He might bitch and moan a bit here and there about how nobody in the town will give him a fair shake, but that is not his primary purpose. Ren is here to act as a jolt of distilled change that will disrupt the lives of everyone he comes into contact with.
Chief among them is Ariel Moore, the daughter of the local preacher, Reverend Moore, who is incidentally the man behind the town's dancing moratorium. She is doing everything in her power to distance herself from her stodgy background and make herself appear like a full-fledged hell-raiser. From drinking to sex to reckless shenanigans with her friend's car to (worst of all according to her dad) listening to pop music with a nice beat. Indeed, there's no doubt that her initial interest in Ren is primarily informed by just how much of a rise he'll be able to elicit from her father. She already has a boyfriend, a brainless dirt-bag by the name of Chuck Cranston, but he isn't able to stick in her father's craw to quite the same extent that Ren does. Chuck, for his part, is fiercely devoted to Ariel and would do pretty much anything to keep her interest, feelings that Ariel does not return in the slightest. For her, he's just a passing fancy to be used up and then discarded as soon as she can get accepted into a college and shake the dust of this sleepy little town off her boots. This rather heartless treatment of the men around her will blow up in Ariel's face rather spectacularly when she begins to carry on with Ren in earnest and pushes Chuck's patience to the breaking point.
Less significant than Ariel is Willard Hewitt, a good-natured, albeit quick-tempered, country boy who Ren befriends on his first day of school. Their first interaction is, incidentally, a great bit of male bonding captured on film. Ren bumps into Willard in the hall and Willard proceeds to cuss him out, telling him in no uncertain terms to watch where he's going. Ren responds by complimenting Willard's cowboy hat and asking if “They sell men's clothes where you got that?” The rough banter immediately wins over Willard and from that moment on the two are best friends. Other than that, the most significant aspect of Willard is his inability to dance, a character flaw that will have to be wrapped up before the film's climax with some lessons from Ren.
The most interesting and complex impact that Ren has on this small town though isn't with any of the kids but rather it is with Ariel's father, Reverend Moore. As mentioned above, the Reverend is the principal force behind the town's anti-dancing legislation, regarding the mere act of “getting jiggy with it” as a gateway to sin and depravity. Eventually, Ren gets it into his head that what Bomont needs to liven it up a bit is a high school dance, so he starts to organize one running smack dab into opposition from the good reverend.
On the surface of it, Footloose sounds like a morally uncomplicated tale. Teens want to have a dance party and their square parents, who just don't understand, want to stop them. It sounds like the premise of any number of movies aimed at teens where The Man wants to bulldoze the youth center to put up a new bank or something else lame. However, Footloose is a good deal more nuanced and complicated than it's premise would suggest. For one thing, the principal antagonist, Reverend Shaw Moore, has a damn good reason to be against teens dancing in the form of his son's death. Moreover, his position is fairly nuanced, it's not just that he can't stand rock-n-roll but rather all the assorted vices that come in its wake. Moore would be damn foolish if he just didn't want the kids dancing, but not wanting to provide them with opportunities to drink and use drugs is a more reasonable stance. Of course, if kids have nothing to do they will invariably find opportunities to get drunk/high/pregnant, that's just the nature of the beast. Still, it's hardly unreasonable to want to keep the drunk, little sluts in line, at least until they turn 18.
What makes his stance even more compelling though is the way that the teens behave throughout the film. These are no clean-cut goody-two-shoeses that want nothing more than to go to the sock-hop and hold hands under the bleachers. They are already screwing and boozing to a frankly ludicrous degree, in addition to engaging in much riskier behavior. Right after the film introduces us to Ariel, we see her and her friends driving alongside Chuck's pickup with Chuck driving in the wrong lane to keep pace. Ariel decides that this is a great time to try to climb from her friend's car into Chuck's, nearly getting herself killed when a tractor-trailer truck barrels down the road towards them. The stunt work is excellent, to the point where I needed to check and make sure nobody actually died in the process of making this scene. Later Ariel stands on some railroad tracks and goes for a good old fashioned “train dodge” al la Stand By Me (1986), which is less traumatizing for the viewer but no less dangerous for the character. She's hardly the only teen engaging in risky behavior at Bomont though, as there are plenty of fist-fights, drunken carousing, and games of tractor chicken to go around. Maybe the effect of these scenes is different when you're fifteen and you just think it's some harmless hi-jinx, but watching them as an adult fills me with dread for the safety of these characters. The teens in this movie are clearly not competent enough to be making their own decisions, and it stands to reason that their elders should be doing at least some of the thinking for them. It's a rather elegant way of forcing the audience to consider a point of view that they may otherwise find absurd.
It makes sense that Footloose is not a love song to teenage rebellion in the same way as a film like Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), or Animal House (1978), or even Rebel without a Cause (1955) is. The kids ultimately get their dance not by thumbing their nose at authority but by going through the proper channels and then exploiting a legal loophole when that fails. Rebels pull pranks and commit petty crimes; they do not go to city council meetings and argue their case with quotes from the bible. Indeed, the sequence resembles Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) more than anything out of Porky's (1981). The soundtrack should be the first clue to the film's somewhat conservative undertones, as it's loaded with inoffensive pop music that even the squarest parent couldn't possibly object too. About the most offensive song in the entire movie is a KISS song that Ren listens to in his car. The rest is all the sort of thing that wouldn't be out of place in a movie about teens in the 1950s! None of this was the music you listened to piss-off your parents in 1984; where is Iron Maiden? Where are the Sex Pistols? Teens in the early 80s had access to a veritable cornucopia of angry, obnoxious sounding music that would drive their parents right up the wall and Footloose sees fit to show us absolutely none of that. As a result, Footloose is very much a film that is, at least partially, on the side of the parents and society at large, though it may occasionally tell them to lighten up a bit.