Having been raised very sheltered from the pop culture of my childhood, I have lots of blank spaces where certain touchstones go: I didn't see Dirty Dancing until late in college. Or Karate Kid until a boyfriend made me watch it many years later. And I didn't see the original Footloose until two days before they sent me to LA for a press junket for the remake.
Seeing it with my grown-up, lived in eyes for the first time, I didn't really like it all that much. It bothered me that Ariel came off as a psychotic whose only motivation was the craziness in her head. And then when she gets in that knock-down, drag-out fight with Chuck that ends in him holding her down and punching her until she stops struggling? Boy did that hit a trigger.
And it had me really, really upset.
As in, how-am-I-supposed-to-watch-this-again-in-two-days-in-a-room-full-of-strangers-and-maintain-some-sort-of-professional-demeanor upset. How am I supposed to talk about this movie when my only thought right now is pleasestoppleasestoppleasestop?
I was worried. And, thankfully, I needn't have been.
Maybe it was just knowing that all of that was coming allowed me to get my mental guard up? But I don't think so. See, in Craig Brewer's remake of Footloose, that scene is different. And the reaction to it, by the characters and, through them, by the film overall, is VERY different.
The remake is more or less a faithful revival of the original. In fact, "revival" is a word that I'm borrowing from the director himself. It's very similar, and where it deviates, it makes sure to leave a footprint from the original, so fans can play I Spy.
But i's portrayal of domestic violence is one hundred thousand times more enlightened than it was in 1984, and I wish I had gotten the chance to thank Craig Brewer for that when I interviewed him (I didn't because I used up half my time talking about Black Snake Moan--four minutes is not as long as you would think!)
In the new movie, the scene itself is shorter. What happens still happens, but not for so long. That helps.
And Ariel is a more self-aware character. Instead of just being a girl who acts out, Julianne Hough shows us a girl who's consumed by the loss of her brother to tragedy, her father to grief and her home to paranoia (girl has got it, people, trust). It's not that she's acting crazy for the attention, it's that she's using exhilaration to forget about pain. And that changes the tenor of the fight. Because it takes away the easy explanation that what happened was just a natural consequence of her behavior. That she was asking for it.
But the more I think about the new movie, the more I know that what really made all the difference was what came after. Two main male characters--her father and Ren--both separately and unequivocally condemn her boyfriend's actions. Her father in the church--he later slaps her himself and the movie does a good job of not only NOT forgiving it but loudly acknowledging its hypocrisy--and Ren in a later scene. Two separate occurrences of Ariel being told that what he did was 100% wrong.
And there's no "but." No one asks what she might have done to make him angry. No one tsk-tsks about her recent thrill-seeking behavior, and any imagined role it may have played. No one tells her that her black eye is "only one side of the story" (a perennial favorite of some people I used to know).
In the words of Ren, the Hero We're Holding Out For Till The End Of The Night: "I think he should be in jail." And that's it.
And that's so, so much.
Because I realized that what had hit my trigger was in one way the scene itself in the original, but more so how it was tossed aside as just something that was inevitable, and hey, it brought the two love interests together because conveniently Ariel needed a ride after Chuck sped off and left her in the dirt! End scene. The violence belongs only to itself. It's never really discussed in any other context with any other characters.
Unfortunately the first movie's treatment of the issue is more realistic than the remake's. People ignore, they shrug off, they explain it away with victim blaming, they refuse to believe. Because it's tricky! It is. And it's hard to address. But what happens is that society's tendency to do those same things is already creating a vortex where abuse will keep swirling inward inside the victim's psyche, given more strength by the silence of friends. Such a small thing as acknowledging that a wrong has been done is so important. It puts a kink in the vortex. A diverging voice muddles the swirl.
It's why people go nuts when Jon Hamm talks about rape. It's why people write thank-you blog posts to directors who get one scene right! It's a complicated and tricky thing, and it's hard to get right.
Which is why when someone does, it's so, so powerful. And it means so, so much.
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