In Defence of Dirty Dancing

The year is 1963. You're seventeen, can't do a thing with your hair, and your family nickname is only marginally more ridiculous than your real name. Your main interest is the economics of underdeveloped countries, you're stuck at the holiday camp from hell, and you're useless at the merengue. Then one day you carry a watermelon through a big brown door, get all but dry humped by a man in tight trousers, and the world opens up. This month, Dirty Dancing returns to the big screen, twenty years after its original release, and the inevitable mass occupation of cinema seats (mostly by those who already own the double DVD and enhanced soundtrack) surely merits a reverential pause. Time to pay your respects: Swayze is back.

Forever immortalized in pop culture referencing (have you tried putting Baby in a corner lately?), Dirty Dancing is not so much a movie as a cinematic zeitgeist, upstaging and out-sexing every dance based romance film which followed it. Dirty Dancing is a fairy tale, a coming of age, a metamorphosis, and a camp cliché in its construction phase. More than anything, in comparison with later dance movies and contemporary musicals, Dirty Dancing is hardcore sleaze and filth on all fronts. Where Grease had pregnancy scares and underage drinking, Dirty Dancing ups the stakes with backstreet abortion and allegations of theft and informal male prostitution. Similarly, the cinematic dance sequence – in its heyday in the conservative 1930s – has been widely held to be a symbolic substitute for the climactic sex scene. Subverting this convention to within an inch of its life, Dirty Dancing's set pieces – the sex-without-sex – all but act out consummation itself. More grinding pelvises and groping hands than a Prince video.

However, what Dirty Dancing recognises and exploits most shrewdly, and the real reason for the guaranteed success of the cinema re-release, is the effect of a well executed crescendo. Like Johnny's mambo, this kind of cinema is "a feeling, a heartbeat" and the strength of Dirty Dancing's escalating pulse ("gu-gung") is such that the inherent ridiculousness of the film's climax - being held aloft at a Butlins-esque variety show by a man in a skin-tight t-shirt – is inexplicably bypassed.

Now occupying a well deserved place in the cult canon, the best dance movie with the worst reputation is back for a cinematic victory lap, and quite right too. Dirty Dancing has been labelled "Star Wars for girls" – but we know it's much, much more important than that.