Deconstructing Dirty Dancing

Renowned film critic Roger Ebert said Dirty Dancing might have been a decent movie if it had allowed itself to be about anything. In this broadly researched and accessible text, Stephen Lee Naish sets out to deconstruct and unlock a film that has haunted him for decades, and argues that Dirty Dancing, the 1987 sleeper hit about a young middle-class girl who falls for a handsome working-class dance instructor, is actually about everything. The film is a union of history, politics, sixties and eighties culture, era-defining music, class, gender, and race, and of course features one of the best love stories set to film. Using scene-by-scene analyses, personal interpretation, and comparative study, its time to take Dirty Dancing out of the corner and place it under the microscope.