Chateau Lloyd

As part of my ongoing exploration of the movies of my youth, I finally watched Footloose.  Some might wonder why it took so long, and the answer is simply that the film never interested me.  I recall when it came out, because the title track was ubiquitous on the airwaves.  Having finally seen the film, I recognize that a great many other songs got serious airplay as well.

So it was very much of the zeitgeist.

But it was also about Kevin Bacon dancing, which did not interest me.  It still doesn't, but at least now I know what that looks like.

As for the plot, it's your standard 80s story of an outsider who stirs up a stagnant community and convinces it to lighten up and have fun.  This was a recurring trope as the Baby Boomers sought to establish dominance over the popular culture.  In this they were wildly successful, as proven by the massive national debt and collapse of both marriage and birth rates.  We're just partying all the time now, man.

I was somewhat impressed at how the story developed, however.  John Lithgow's stuck-up preacher had more nuance than I was expecting and proved to be a genuinely dynamic character who evolved rather than simply changed all his opinions at once.

That's one element sorely missing in today's films.  Characters just flip back and forth without any rhyme or reason.

Another aspect I appreciated with the respect accorded to him as the patriarch of the family and a religious leader.  Today men are widely mocked and almost always proven wrong by their smarter wives or kids.  I'm not the first to noticed than men are shown to be buffoons, always in need of correction.  This is presumably because women do the shopping and like to feel validated.

Back in the day, however, men were still wise and responsible, and their opinions had weight.  Women earnestly worked to convince them and when they came around, it was about unity rather than dominance.

That attitude is in pretty short supply today, and if it's out there, it is only because of independent outfits like Angel Studios.

As for Footloose, I doubt I will watch it again.  Indeed, I think the fact that even during the height of the "watch party/VHS" era I never saw it shows how it scored a clean miss on my demographic.  We watched films like Airplane! and Animal House until we memorized every line, but Footloose never made it into the rotation because it was a date movie, and a bunch of guys hanging out didn't want to be reminded that we lacked girlfriends.

I will note that the whole "dancing is bad" thing made me laugh and I was pleased that the writers had Bacon's character cite instances from the Bible (highlighted of course by the preacher's daughter).  That was a nice touch.