Flashdance and ballet
Flashdance, on the other hand, depicts ballet itself as a goal only, the dream achievement of its working-class, racially mixed, welder/exotic dancer heroine Alex (Jennifer Beals). In a sense, the Hilary of Fame is the sort of dancer Alex yearns to be, but Alex is not able to break down the class and race barriers that would allow her simply to study at a snotty ballet company school and thereby achieve her vague ballet desires. However gritty and realistic the welding and strip-club scenes feel, ballet and its practitioners are treated, in the fashion of melodrama, as somewhat villainous; the point of the film seems to be to show that Alex, from the wrong side of the tracks, can breach the fortress of elite art through pluckiness, spunk, and break dancing. But Alex is already a self-supporting adult with a huge urban-industrial apartment and her own dance floor; her yearning is not the problem. It's the film's ignorance about ballet that makes it so ludicrous and so easily the "fantasy of achievement" that Angela McRobbie labels both this film and Fame.
More obviously than any classical Hollywood musical, Flashdance utilizes the "opera vs. swing" narrative to suggest that ballet is a moribund, effete, and stiff form that has been waiting for a break-dancer to bring it to life and make it relevant. At the same time, Alex's audition for the ballet school -- performed to a recording of Irene Cara singing "What a Feeling" (Cara had sung and played a character in Fame as well) -- functions like the big finale to a classical musical, a triumph in itself that brings the performer success in show business (here, art) as well as romance. Alex's rich boyfriend and former boss, Nick (Michael Nouri), is waiting for her after her (successful) audition (he has brought along her dog, some roses, and his Porsche), and the film ends on a freeze-frame of the couple in a smiling embrace. Flashdance's big attraction was thus not its ballet; there is no ballet dancing in the film, just nasty (white) girls who stretch and pose in leotards and toe shoes and pink tights while they stare at and whisper about Alex as she walks through the halls of the ballet academy and dares, however briefly before fleeing the scene, to stand in line to apply for admittance. Rather, it was break dancing that helped propel the film into the status of a mass-media sensation.
From Dying Swans and Madmen: ballet, the body, and narrative cinema, Adrienne L. McLean.
I can say that, in my brief brush in the ballet world, it's true that it's a stressful job for dancers: the pressure for perfect technique, slenderness, etc. But I haven't met one who was snotty or diva-like. And the art of ballet itself is certainly not as depicted in the film, not that it had much chance to speak for itself.
More obviously than any classical Hollywood musical, Flashdance utilizes the "opera vs. swing" narrative to suggest that ballet is a moribund, effete, and stiff form that has been waiting for a break-dancer to bring it to life and make it relevant. At the same time, Alex's audition for the ballet school -- performed to a recording of Irene Cara singing "What a Feeling" (Cara had sung and played a character in Fame as well) -- functions like the big finale to a classical musical, a triumph in itself that brings the performer success in show business (here, art) as well as romance. Alex's rich boyfriend and former boss, Nick (Michael Nouri), is waiting for her after her (successful) audition (he has brought along her dog, some roses, and his Porsche), and the film ends on a freeze-frame of the couple in a smiling embrace. Flashdance's big attraction was thus not its ballet; there is no ballet dancing in the film, just nasty (white) girls who stretch and pose in leotards and toe shoes and pink tights while they stare at and whisper about Alex as she walks through the halls of the ballet academy and dares, however briefly before fleeing the scene, to stand in line to apply for admittance. Rather, it was break dancing that helped propel the film into the status of a mass-media sensation.
From Dying Swans and Madmen: ballet, the body, and narrative cinema, Adrienne L. McLean.
I can say that, in my brief brush in the ballet world, it's true that it's a stressful job for dancers: the pressure for perfect technique, slenderness, etc. But I haven't met one who was snotty or diva-like. And the art of ballet itself is certainly not as depicted in the film, not that it had much chance to speak for itself.