Jennifer Beals plays Alex. Alex works by day in Pittsburgh's steel mills and by night dances at a local bar. She lives with her old grandma and works hard, but what she really wants is to break free and get a place at the local dance school. But how will she get an audition? How indeed. Oh - and terrible 80s fashions. So very terrible.
Though the film is (we assume) intended as an aspirational tale in which an honest working class girl comes good and gets to go off and be a dancer, it is hard to get over the explicit male gaze through which the story is told. It is no surprise to discover that Flashdance was written by 2 men, directed by a man and produced by none other than Jerry Bruckheimer (also a man). Alex is a character who makes no sense until you realise she's being idealised and imagined purely from a male view-point. She's innocent but surprisingly sexually confident. She likes dancing because... well that's what girls like isn't it? She's completely happy with being stalked by her boss. She's an 18-year-old woman imagined by male movie producers in the 1980s. Make you wonder who this movie's intended audience was. Was it made by men for men? Or was it made by men for women, imagining this is what women and girls wanted to see? The fact the film was popular at the time implies people (some of whom I assume were actual women) did want to see it. Tells you something about how times have changed.
Far from being a strong female character or feminist cypher, everything about Alex that should indicate a progressive depiction is absolutely shallow. Alex works at the forge, but she's neither seen as good at it, or having to fight any battles with sexism in the workplace or having to square the circle of her dreams against societal expectations. Alex is introduced writhing around on a stage and having a bucket of water chucked over her (see image above) - such women's lib. One of Alex's friends wants to be a figure skater but fails - probably because she hasn't got a man looking out for her! Alex wants to be a dancer, but she's neither shown to be much good at it nor does she have to work particularly hard to get into dance school. Rather she has the helping hand of a man pulling the strings to get her an audition - help she only gets by consenting to being stalked and making herself sexually available to him. Not very #MeToo is it? The script then has the audacity to give Alex lines implying she never wanted any help or that the man she's just given a foot-job to in a restaurant was betraying her feminist ideals by doing her a good turn. The shallowness of this attempt to give a veneer of feminist authenticity to the story is jaw-dropping.
The film is a worthwhile watch as a sort of historical document for the hair, clothing and stylings of the time. Contemporary depictions of night clubs from the 1980s always fill me with unease - I can never work out if clubs were really like that or they're satirical depictions of something else. No wonder that scene died a rapid death in favour of rave culture and the eventual 90's dance scene. What Flashdance is most certainly NOT, is an aspirational tale about one young woman's dreams to be a dancer. Rather it's film showing what a group of men in their 40s imagined it would be like to be an 18-year-old woman who dreams of being a dancer; and how they want to have sex with her.
