Patrick Swayze’s graceful masculinity in Dirty Dancing – newsdubai

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Acting is an art form and behind every iconic character is an artist who expresses himself. Welcome to The Great Performances, a recurring column that explores the artistry behind some of cinema’s greatest roles. In this post, we examine Patrick Swayze’s performance in Dirty Dancing.

As a child in the 1990s, my relationship with the career of Patrick Swayze began in an unusual place. It was an episode of the TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000 with the film Santa Conquers the Martians. Aboard the Satellite of Love, Crow T. Robot and the gang perform a new holiday standard, “(Let’s Have) A Patrick Swayze Christmas”. With lyrics like “It’s my way or the highway / this Christmas at my bar / I’ll have to smash your kneecaps if / you bastards touch my car”, the song is a list of everything you’d expect from the main character Road house would do. As the song suggests, Swayze was a man’s man. King of a certain brand of machismo that women wanted and men wanted to be.

However, Patrick Swayze’s action-oriented persona is not what makes him such a unique actor. Throughout his career, he imbued every tough guy character he played with a complex range of emotions. He actively exposed the hypersensitivity that hides behind traditional displays of masculinity.

Just look at one of his first meaty roles in Francis Ford Coppola’s The outsiders. He’s the leader of a gang, but Swayze ditches any more greasy mentality. Instead, he plays the mindset of a brother desperately trying to hold his family together after the death of their parents. Something similar happens in red dawn. He’s a nationalistic character with brass balls, but he doesn’t lean heavily into stereotypes of John Wayne-style machismo. After a shocking betrayal, Swayze’s character Jed orders the execution of one of his survivors. Instead of playing the scene with cold, dead eyes, Swayze emphasizes Jed’s anxiety and anguish over his decision.

His approach to masculine characters is perfectly realized in a film that was a big departure from his previous performances: Sexy dance.

In the film, Swayze plays Johnny Castle, a dance instructor at a summer resort in the Catskills in 1963. He’s confident and opinionated, but unsure of who he really is beyond his female con artist. His life changes after meeting Baby (Jennifer Grey), a vacationer. Their relationship blossoms after Baby has to fill in for Johnny’s dance partner, Penny (Cynthia Rhodes), who needs an abortion.

Abortion subplot is one-way writer Eleanor Bergstein layered nuanced, progressive themes in this gentle dance film. Sexy dance takes place in a time when the United States was on the verge of social change. Bergstein uses this evolutionary moment to subtly reinforce progressive themes, like the fact that women deserve access to safe health care when making decisions over their own bodies.

There is another progressive theme Bergstein includes that is central to Swayze’s performance. It is one that deconstructs stereotypes that society traditionally places on men. Johnny has an external tough guy intensity thanks to Swayze’s commanding presence. But Swayze juxtaposes Johnny with positive representations of masculinity, subverting the era’s rigid interpretations of manhood.

Take for example when Johnny meets Baby for the first time. Although Swayze initially wonders what a guest is doing among the staff, he doesn’t play Johnny, who clings to a masculine desire for control. He immediately switches gears and greets Baby’s innocence with kindness. After leading her onto the dance floor, he shows her a few steps so she feels included and accepted.

Later in the film, Johnny admits his admiration for her courage and even encourages her to never lose that part of herself, instead criticizing Baby for going to her father for help with the abortion. It’s an unexpected degree of warmth that Swayze plays with simple sincerity. His character’s frustration with Baby may grow as their big dance approaches, but Swayze never loses the grace Johnny shows her in their first moment together. It’s an authentic seriousness that may seem incongruous with his bad boy demeanor on the surface, but is integral to why audiences fall so hard for Swayze’s Johnny. He just is does not just like the other guys.

Of course Other things the reason he’s not like the other guys is because Swayze is a good dancer. Traditionally, men have not always been encouraged to be lyrically expressive with their bodies. But throughout the mid-20th century, superstars like Gene Kelly, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Gregory Hines helped change the perception of the athletic athleticism possessed by male dancers. Swayze carries that torch Sexy danceshows that, yes, action heroes able to be balletic too.

What is so impressive about Swayze, besides his ability to emphasize the magnetism of Kenny Ortegas (News) choreography, is that he does it with such incredible form. You can see it in his opening dance with Penny. Even though they are partner dances, the training Swayze received at the Joffrey Ballet is right there on screen. You can really see it in his arm movements (or Port de Bras, if you’re from the ballet world.) As his legs shuffle beneath him, his upper body maintains a graceful, effortless balance as he’s swept up in the music and movement. Instantly, Swayze proves—both to us and the audience at the dance—the virile elegance that every male dancer embodies.

Between Red Dawn, Road House, and Point Break, Patrick Swayze solidified himself as a real man’s man of 1980s and early 1990s Hollywood. He was so effective at massacring Russians and ripping out esophaguses that it can be easy to forget the graceful masculinity that he stitched into so many of the characters he played. He never fell into the trap of creating one-dimensional representations of what it means to be a man. That’s why Johnny Castle is in it Sexy dance is perhaps the greatest showcase of his talents. It combined his strengths as a gifted dancer and as a powerful actor who constantly penetrated the emotional complexities of his masculine characters in ways that are still surprising today.

Related Topics: The Great Performances

Jacob Trussell is a writer based in New York City. His editorial work has been featured on the BBC, NPR, Rue Morgue Magazine, Film School Rejects and One Perfect Shot. He is also the author of ‘The Binge Watcher’s Guide to The Twilight Zone’ (Riverdale Avenue Books). Available to host your next public access spooky show. Find him on Twitter here: @JE_TRUSSELL (he/him)