Browse: Home / Like No One’s Watching

Menu

Skip to content
  • Home
  • Who We Are
  • About
  • Privacy
  • Contact Us
  • Login

The-SoluteLogo

A Film Site By Lovers of Film

Menu

Skip to content
  • Features
  • Reviews
  • Long Reviews
  • News
  • Articles and Opinions
  • Other Media
  • The Friday Article Roundup: The Truth is In Here
  • Lunch Links: Schwarzfahrer
  • Websites on the Internet: THE SOLUTE
  • New on DVD and Blu-Ray
  • Movie Gifts Holidays 2024

Like No One’s Watching

Posted By Gillianren on October 2, 2019 in Short Articles | Leave a response

A friend of mine, for her birthday this year, doesn’t want presents, but she would like us to give to a charity (she’s not fussy, knowing that her friends would pretty much only support charities she does herself) and dance. Now, I’d love to do both of those things, but I’m remarkably poor, and I have serious joint pain, not helped by how erratic our weather has been lately. But what I can do, I told her, was write about dancing in movies. And she was fine with that.

Specifically, though, I’d like to talk about dancing in not-musicals. My initial idea for an article image, in fact, had been from The Breakfast Club. Those kids are dancing because they are teenagers (okay, stoned teenagers, as I remember the scene), so they dance when there’s music. And that’s the kind of thing I’m thinking about. I feel as though there aren’t enough movies, and TV shows, where characters dance just because they feel like dancing. The closest you tend to get is Ye Olde Lip-Synching Into A Hairbrush, a thing I literally never did as a teenager. Even most of the time, when characters attend dances, they don’t dance—think Sixteen Candles and all those characters hugging the wall while extras dance.

Before my knees went out, I loved to dance. Some of the happiest memories of my life are on dance floors of one sort or another—the camp dance at the music camp I attended for six years. Ring Con of fabled memory. The early years of Chibi Chibi Con, under the Fabulous DJ MOG. A concert or two, though I haven’t been to many of those in my life. And, yes, around my mom’s house when I was a teenager and no one else was home. I’m not the most coordinated person in the world, and I’ve never been hugely athletic, but dancing was one of the activities I loved, even after my early childhood ballet lessons were done.

And I don’t know; maybe that’s my childhood as a music student talking. About the only movie I can think of where large groups of teenage characters dance for the sheer joy of dancing, because they hear music and want to dance to it, where it doesn’t seem in any way out of place, is Fame, and most of those kids are either music or dance students themselves. Footloose involves a town where it’s possible to make kids not dance, presumably by also forbidding the sale of any hairbrush that can be used as a pretend microphone.

Sure, there can be a self-consciousness factor; our article image today comes from a Trollhunters episode where Blinky (Kelsey Grammer) passes on to Jim (still Anton Yelchin) the “wisdom” he’d come across in a “human telephone booth” in the ’70s: “Dance like nobody’s watching.” Which Jim, let’s be real, is still bad at. But like I said, I’m thinking of the dancing alone. At bare minimum bopping along to your music while you’re doing the laundry or whatever. Dance is not about performance; dance is about how you want to move. I guess few people in movies want to move that way?

Among the people who I feel most likely to read this article are a dozen or two with whom I’ve danced, some time in the past. I wonder how many movie characters would as middle-aged adults be able to remember a dozen or two people with whom they’d danced, or a dozen or two times when they danced alone. Or not even a specific time when they danced but a sort of melange of dancing memories. Sure, we all remember Tom Cruise in Risky Business, whether we’ve seen the movie or not (I have not), but should it have been such an unusual scene as all that? Like who hasn’t danced around their empty house in their underwear?

Supporting my Patreon or Ko-fi does not count as charity, simply as paying for services rendered, but I’m sure my friend would count it as in the spirit of her birthday!

Posted in Short Articles | Tagged dance

About the Author

gillianmadeira@hotmail.com'

Gillianren

Gillianren is a forty-something bipolar woman living in the Pacific Northwest after growing up in Los Angeles County. She and her boyfriend have one son and one daughter, and she gave a daughter up for adoption. She fills her days by watching her local library system’s DVD collection in alphabetical order, watching everything that looks interesting. She particularly enjoys pre-Code films, blaxploitation, and live-action Disney movies of the ’60s and ’70s. She has a Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/gillianren

Related Posts

It’s Zendaya’s World, We Just Live Here: Persia on SHAKE IT UP→

Optical printing cuts down on casting costs.Lunch Links: PAS DE DEUX→

This is a way lower res image than I will be allowed to get away with at the new site.Lunch Links: Schwarzfahrer→

Websites on the Internet: THE SOLUTE→

  • Comments
  • Popular
  • Most Recent
  • j*****@yahoo.com'
    mr_apollo on Year of the Month: Mon OncleWonderful piece, Sam. It's made…
  • j*****@yahoo.com'
    mr_apollo on Year of the Month: Mon OncleFellow heretic here. I've never…
  • n***********@gmail.com'
    Ruck Cohlchez on Film on the Internet: AN AMERICAN CRIMEI wouldn't have called it…
  • j***********@gmail.com'
    Son of Griff on LIFE ITSELFGlad to hear back from…
  • n*********@gmail.com'
    Jake Gittes on Film on the Internet: AN AMERICAN CRIMEThis is the single most…
  • “The End” of SAVAGES

    38527 views / Posted November 10, 2014
  • The Untalented Mr. Ripley: The Craft of Standup Comedy and the Non-Comedy of TOM MYERS

    31128 views / Posted June 26, 2018
  • What the fuck did I just watch? SPHERE

    30536 views / Posted March 19, 2015
  • Gordon with Mr. Looper

    Attention Must Be Paid: Will Lee

    27728 views / Posted January 7, 2023
  • Scenic Routes: SHOWGIRLS (1995)

    23633 views / Posted November 20, 2014
  • The truth is FAR out there.

    The Friday Article Roundup: The Truth is In Here

    December 6, 2024 / The Ploughman
  • This is a way lower res image than I will be allowed to get away with at the new site.

    Lunch Links: Schwarzfahrer

    December 5, 2024 / The Ploughman
  • Websites on the Internet: THE SOLUTE

    December 4, 2024 / ZoeZ
  • New on DVD and Blu-Ray

    December 3, 2024 / Greta Taylor
  • Movie Gifts Holidays 2024

    December 2, 2024 / The Ploughman

Last Tweets

    ©2014 - 2016 The-Solute | Hosted, Developed and Maintained by Bellingham WP LogoBellinghamWP.com.

    Menu

    • Home
    • Who We Are
    • About
    • Privacy
    • Contact Us
    • Login
    Do NOT follow this link or you will be banned from the site!