Cultural Gap Film #15: Flashdance

Relevant elements: The songs, the water-pull dance scene, a steel town girl who welds by day and dances by night  

Why it resonated: MTV had primed the viewing public for flashy set pieces that fuse music and movement, and America always loves stories about hardworking people chasing their dreams  

General comments on the film: Since about the one-third mark of Flashdance, I've been trying to determine if this film would have been anywhere near as successful and relevant if it were released at any other time. If it were released five years earlier, it would have been scoffed at as a weaker knock-off of Saturday Night Fever. If it were released five years later, the novelty of music video style would have been diluted to the point of no longer distracting from the movie's thin plot and characterization.

In other words, the movie screams 1983 from the opening titles onward. It also screams Pittsburgh, which makes it even more interesting that it has managed to stand as an iconic film. Since the filmmaking and storyline don't provide anything remarkable that would capture people's imaginations to that degree, it seems to me that the movie's impact is due mostly to its being a crystalization of a particular point in time that people find interesting (at least for now). 

Think of the 1980s, and what comes to mind? Big hair, breakdancing, off-the-shoulder shirts worn with legwarmers, MTV, and cans of Diet Pepsi? These are the basic elements of Flashdance. The prominence of the soundtrack underlines this point, as Irene Cara's "Flashdance...What a Feeling" almost deserves top billing for all of the work it does in the film. 

There are of course other movies that offer perfect snapshots of their respective times, but this one has the good fortune of encapsulating a period that garners a lot of attention even today in American culture. You might have noticed that young women today are wearing virtually the same slouchy tops that Jennifer Beals sports throughout the movie. And even people who weren't alive yet at the time have a very distinct idea of "the '80s"--more than they have a similar sense of "the '90s" despite having lived through them. 1983 has a strong flavor, and Flashdance is bursting with it.

Being tied to a time brings up the possibility that a movie will fade from the popular consciousness as its time recedes farther into the past, and I'll be curious to see what happens to this one in the next ten to twenty years. Already, its songs are being played on oldies stations, and it's hard to imagine that teenagers born after the year 2000 will choose to watch it, unless there are still '80s parties in the 2020s.