On Day 4 of the 10 Day Movie Challenge, I was accused of having lost focus. I was supposed to be listing movies that impacted me, but, one commenter said, “This seems more like the women who impacted you, Greg.”
I should be careful about protesting too much, methinks.
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It’s true that I like strong women in movies: Carole Bouquet as a vengeful Nemesis? Check. Audrey Hepburn as a blind woman in self-reliant survival mode? Check. Sean Young… well, I wasn’t so much a fan, though her pathos was key to the story. But Daryl Hannah as a defiant replicant spray painting her eyes in preparation for her last stand against Deckard? Check.
Flashdance was more personal, though.
The movie came out in 1983. I was “college age,” and, since I was a musician with “college age” peers, I hung out with a lot of artists—musicians, of course, but also stage actors, writers, photographers, painters, assemblage artists. Lots of late nights talking art, learning from each other, dissecting albums or plays or art books.
Good times.
But I’d always been kind of… well, back then, I’d have said that I had always been lazy, though I realize now that that was the wrong diagnosis. Either way, I found Flashdance to be incredibly motivating.
I’m sure part of the motivation came from the depiction of Jennifer Beale’s character, Alex—welder by day, dancer by night. And I’m sure that part of it came from the character’s unwillingness to compromise. But I don’t think either of those would have been enough on their own.
I think it was the dance—the realization that dance that good required the same type of perseverance and focus that the character embodied. And that motivated me to want to do the same.
(By the way, I don’t think I’m alone in admiring the dance sequences; the [admittedly few] dancers I’ve known seem willing to forgive a lot of the movie’s sins—and the movie commits many sins—because they like the dancing).
The impact of the movie lasted longer than otherwise might have happened, too, for an odd reason. Not long after I saw the movie, I stumbled across a poster that, almost like synesthesia, evoked all the feels of the movie for me.
The poster featured a gymnast, sitting the edge of a mat, arms around her shins, her feet chalky and cracked. The picture, at least as I interpreted it, screamed exhaustion—the result, presumably, of an intense workout.
Dedication, perseverance, focus.
Yes, it’s a kitschy poster. I found it where you might expect, in the quad at some college campus, in a traveling salesperson’s outdoor booth, likely surrounded by motivational posters, movie one-sheets, and Nagel prints. (At least she’s not wearing leg warmers—which is actually the title of one of the more famous posters from the same photographer, Harvey Edwards—who has somehow managed to escape Wikipedia.)
Kitsch or no, the picture spoke to me, and I bought it, hung it on my wall, and, in my way, meditated on it, and the way it reminded me of my experience of Flashdance.
This is part of a series, echoing the “10 Day Movie Challenge” that I got sucked into on Facebook:
Every day I must select an image from a film that has impacted me in some way, present it without a single explanation and nominate somebody to take the challenge by starting his/her own post and selecting someone to continue.
Without a single explanation? Nice try.
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