I Cry for the Children of the Eighties

Last night I decided to watch Flashdance to see how exactly it defined the generation of people who've turned forty recently. Unmoved by a long string of bizarre modern interpretive dances which are supposed to be exotic dances at a lower-working-class bar (lower-working-class guys want simplicity—scantily clad girls wiggling around—not a strobe-lighted interpretation of the modern condition), I tried to focus on the story. There isn't one.

An eighteen-year-old girl who works as a welder in the most dry-ice and flashy-light infested job site I've ever seen and as a dancer in a bar starts sleeping with her thirty-six-year-old boss (the owner of the construction company, not the bar) and then auditions for the Pittsburgh Conservatory of Dance and Repertory. That's the story. There is no arc. The characters do not change in any way. They are like cardboard cutouts. Jennifer Beals and Michael Nouri actually look like they are kissing cardboard boxes when they kiss each other.

When the scene switched to a nude girlie show, I turned it off. It was too ridiculous, and nothing had happened in the first hour of the movie to recommend the rest of it. In fact nothing at all happened in the first hour of the movie.