Flashdance (1983) — The Only Movie Where A Dancer Who Performs In A Wet T-Shirt Has The Moral High Ground Over A Stripper.

Part Two of ‘1983 was a bad year for cinema’.

I watched Flashdance for the first time when I was probably too young. I don’t remember if it was on TV or on one of the VHS tapes in the house. Either way, all I took away from the experience was that you could be both a welder and a dancer, which in its own way was a half-decent feminist take-away. Unfortunately, upon re-watching this film a couple of days ago, there is a bit more too it than that (not much, mind you) and the feminist sentiment more or less ends there.

Flashdance is about an eighteen year old woman named Alex, who is a welder in a steel mill by day and a dancer in Mawby’s bar by night. Imagine the entertainment lounge in a knock-off Butlins then give the performers an unusually high production budget and none of the constraints of health and safety. That’s Mawby’s.

One night while Alex is dancing, the almost middle-aged owner of the steel mill she works at (Nick) happens by and sees her in action. That’s fine, that’s just a coincidence. What is not fine is that he then doggedly pursues her for a date, even though she has a personal code that prohibits her from dating her boss. Nick eventually gets her to break this code by *jokingly* firing her thus negating the code. Scum.

What follows is a sequence of music videos interrupted by a paper thin plot that leads to…