Teenager Vault: Save the Last Dance

Like I said in the Boy Band Battle Royale introduction, being a pre-teen and teen girl the late '90s/early '00s meant that I got to experience a deluge of music and movies that were made specifically for my age demographic. Teenage girls had pop culture in a bit of a stranglehold. Movies like 10 Things I Hate About You, She's All That, Whatever It Takes, Never Been Kissed, Save the Last Dance, Can't Hardly Wait, Bring it On, and Drive Me Crazy all came out within a three-year span, and all of them - with the possible exception of Can't Hardly Wait - were made with teenage girls in mind. Also, almost all of them were pretty awful on a number of levels. For instance, almost all of them follow excruciatingly predictable patterns that climax at the prom. Almost all of them actively demolish the idea that female friendships are positive, supportive, and nourishing - in these movies, either the female lead has no female friends, or her one female friend is untrustworthy, especially when it comes to boys. And almost all of them turn on the female lead  trading in her already harmless rough edges and interests to get the cute boy. There are two exceptions to these rules in the above list - Bring it On, a delightfully mean-spirited little sleeper hit that plays sexual harassment and gay panic for laughs; and Save the Last Dance, a surprisingly serious number that had a little more to say than the average teen movie. 


I got the opportunity to watch Save the Last Dance with a fresh pair of eyes over the weekend. Previously, I had assumed that everyone who spent 2001 as a teenage girl could quote huge chunks of the movie by heart. 

I mean, for instance.

But, as it turns out, our intrepid contributor V had never EVER seen Save the Last Dance in her life. Not one to ever turn down an opportunity to educate on the cinematic front, I jumped at the chance to re-watch a movie that my 13-year-old self deemed a classic. And I was pleasantly surprised by a lot of what I saw. 


I mean, yes, this movie is shamelessly self-indulgent and borderline melodramatic. It has completely unnecessary and sometimes incorrect break-downs of black/hip-hop culture in 2001 - apparently black people never said "cool" back then, but "slammin'"; also, apparently there's an emotional background to every possible dance step in a black man's arsenal. It wraps things up in the same facile way as every teen movie does. 

With a daaaaaance!

But it also has a surprisingly strong female lead in Sara, played by Julia "Dour" Stiles. We see that Sara had a strong relationship with her mother before her (the mother's) untimely death, which opens the movie. She had a close female friend in her old school, before she moved to Chicago; and quickly gains another close female friend at her new school. She meets the cutest boy in school (really the cutest boy in any school; that Sean Patrick Thomas is razor fine) and approaches the relationship with an endearing confidence that is pretty rare in movies like this. She tells Derek exactly how she feels about his no-good Tupac-wannabe friend, initiates their first romantic physical encounter, and takes a lot of pleasure in boasting about her alleged dance skills. And she never really changes her personality in order to win him over - the transition she makes during the movie is more about coming to terms with her mother's death and letting herself realize her own potential than it is about changing how she dresses or lowering her romantic standards. 


Sara's friend Chenille - CHENILLE - is an interesting female character as well. At first she seems to be the typical Old Hand Who Takes The Protagonist Under Her Wing, a la Mean Girls's Janis Ian, but she ends up having a surprising degree of nuance. She has an ugly baby son with Kenny, and their entire dynamic is the sort you would expect from a real-life teen couple with a son - clumsy, angry, horny, and confused. And she gets the best monologue of the whole movie, when she drops some truth bombs on Sara about the realities of a white woman coming into a black woman's world. (She later retracts the entire thing, which is unfortunate, but she was trippin' off Kenny.)


So no, Save the Last Dance is not perfect. But it tries very hard to be about something more than most teen movies, and that's worth a lot in my book.

I do frown on its promotion of women dancing alone in alleys, though.