Before addressing all the insanity on the show last night, I want to point out what’s probably obvious—-the Adama/Roslin love affair is just another example of how television improves dramatically when writers relinquish certain crutches and fears, and instead tell stories that reflect the range of human experience. By finally getting over the rule that middle aged lovers should be shown in a non-passionate, desexualized manner, the writers accomplished the twin goals of writing some of the more intriguing characters on television and also moving forward this incredible mutiny plot that hinges so much on Roslin’s unwillingness to lead. Needless to say, congrats to them for also putting a woman into a role that you never see, outside of maybe “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”—-as the critical leader, without whom the community falls apart. She’s like Jack from “Lost” in that way.
Obviously, after a whopper of an episode like that one, there’s so much to discuss. I appreciated that the writers didn’t pretend that there was any suspense around the question of whether or not Roslin was really going to come back—-over and over it was said that she just needed some time to heal and think about what her new, non-religious life would be like. Which is why I want to focus my post (though I encourage you to talk about whatever aspects of the show you thought were intriguing) on the interesting anti-religious gear shift the show’s taken. I hope it sticks, because that would be brilliant and incredibly brave. It would suck if in fact it was just that everyone had a crisis of faith post-Earth that they recovered from.
But this episode pushed me more into thinking they’re sticking with this theme. It’s not just that Baltar went on a fascinating rant last week where he argued that god should be asking humanity’s forgiveness, though that’s an important issue. After all, when a person realizes that they have a better moral sense than the god they’ve been taught about, they’re either on the path to atheism or towards a fundamentalist worldview that views god’s capricious and cruel nature as all the more reason to fear him and try to curry his favor. The existence of Baltar’s fawning followers has always put his religious convictions into question, but now they’ve become all that more ridiculous. He told them all, to their faces, that he all but doesn’t believe in god, and what’s their response when he runs off to escape the mutiny? “We’ll pray for you.” In one ear and out the other.
It seems, so far, that injecting the failure of the Earth mission into “Battlestar Galactica” has reinvigorated the show, which was going slow at some parts in the first half of season 4. Last night’s episode was kind of shocking to me, because for the first time, the struggles that put the Quorum at odds with Roslin and Adama finally started to resonate emotionally. Even though I know what the creators are trying to do—-inject some gray areas, and make sure that Roslin and Adama don’t lapse into saints—-it’s never quite worked, because it asks you buy into two assumptions that just don’t work. One is that humanity wouldn’t immediately accept martial law under such dire circumstances. Considering that our nation happily re-elected itself an obviously malevolent wannabe dictator because of shockwaves from an attack that killed .001% of our population, I fail to believe that they wouldn’t go even further when the actual survival of the human race is on the line, and the leaders are benevolent and repeatedly demonstrate that they’re going out of their way to save everyone. Hell, even people like me who think they have to close Gitmo down and release all the prisoners immediately would accept some form of martial law under the circumstances, especially with a duly elected executive. Most representative government is supposed to move slow, and that’s at cross purposes with the majority of decisions made under fire by Adama. The other thing is that a lot of disputes would have easily been cleared up if Galactica was more communicative, and I don’t believe that Adama or Roslin would have a major problem with transparency, as a general rule. Adama’s story about Earth doesn’t quite fall under that, because that goes into the bucket of National Mythology, which gives people something to strive for even if we haven’t achieved it. (Like the way we call ourselves a people that believes in equality and justice.)
But post-Earth? I believe that people would revolt against military rule, especially if it’s been 4 long years of fighting. The military orders in this episode—-install faster jump drives in the civilian ships—-were something that doesn’t seem like an “under fire” decision, but more like an infrastructural decision of the sort that is usually made after democratic deliberation. And frankly, the buddy-buddy relationship with the Cylons just doesn’t seem like it would make sense to your average civilian who has not been privy to the cooperation and almost-friendship that the people aboard Galactica have had with the rebel Cylons. Transparency would help in this situation, but not so much, because seeing the Cylons as people requires direct experience with them, especially since they, you know, killed billions of people.
Fortunately, I was young, my imagination fertile and adrenal glands strong, because bringing Starbuck to life was over the dead imaginations of a lot of Network Executives. Every character trait I struggled to give him was met with vigorous resistance. A charming womanizer? The “Suits” (Network Executives) hated it. A cigar (fumerello) smoker? The Suits hated it. A reluctant hero who found humor in the bleakest of situations? The Suits hated it. All this negative feedback convinced me I was on the right track.
The world is grateful that Dirk Benedict, and Dirk Benedict alone, gave us Starbuck and the original Battlestar Galactica. We must also thank him for the discovery of the airless void known as “space”, the little pinpricks of light we call “stars”, and also for the Oxford comma. That one was for you, Dirky. And seriously, fuck writers. What did they ever do besides provide logical endings and spell words correctly. Too infinitee and bezond, say all of!
I appreciate that he bravely fought for a wisecracking womanizer with balls of steel. Nobody had ever thought of that. Not once. Beverly Hills nearly burned down when a writer suggested a steely-eyed manly man crack a joke - a joke, I say! - in the middle of a stressful situation.
So we persevered, Starbuck and I. The show, as the saying goes, went on and the rest is history for, lo and behold, women from all over the world sent me boxes of cigars, phone numbers, dinner requests, and marriage proposals.
Excised are several sentences about how he managed to fight for the right to be a walking, smoking penis, which in turn led to his being named head of the United Nations of Tobacco-Scented Pussy.
Salon has a guide to catch people up to everything that’s happened on Battlestar Galactica before the final half of season four begins tonight. It’s pretty useful if you’ve already see it, and need to catch up, but if you haven’t, well, they try to iron out some of the plot twists and turns to make it less confusing, but it doesn’t help much. You really need to watch it, not just to catch up, but because the show is a genuine pleasure to watch in the way that “Mad Men” and “The Wire” are. I didn’t think it would hold to rewatchings as well as that show, but the marathon they’re showing today in anticipation of the new half season proves it’s very rewatchable. If you haven’t seen it, then don’t read further.
The end of the first half of the 4th season really got the show back to what I think is the underlying theme that makes it such a powerful show—-above all, above all the “who’s a Cylon” stuff and the mysticism, the show is a powerful yelp of protest against war itself. And the more I think about it, the more I think there’s a sort of sick genius to the show, in that it sucks you deeply into the intricacies of the war. How many times have I fully supported and understood this act of revenge or that? But when you step back, even for a moment, you realize that every time one side strikes the other, it just perpetuates the cycle of violence. “All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again,” is a piece of scripture that is repeated by the characters, and it’s obviously meant to be a multi-layered thing. But one layer is certainly the one that indicates that this is a warning (unheeded by characters and mostly unheeded by viewers) about the cycle of violence. The grim ending of season 4, part 1 drives this point home to the Cylons and humans—-unable to quit fighting each other, the Earth tribe appears to have completely annihilated itself.
Watching this show in the context of an escalation of violence in Israel adds that much more power to this message. Surely inside of it, it feels that every strike against the other will somehow accomplish something besides a continuation of the violence. But every time someone strikes, they do nothing to improve the situation, and someone just ends up dead. There is no such thing as the conflict that will end conflict, unless it’s the conflict that ends life itself, and that of course is genocide (even if self-inflicted). Setting down arms may not end the conflict, but it doesn’t perpetuate it. Why we can’t see the writing on the wall is one of the greatest mysteries of our species. Consider that the Cylons and humans were literally battling over ownership of the promised land. Their uneasy peace is unlikely to last now that the promised land wasn’t what they thought it was.
We’ve been re-watching some episodes of the second season of “Mad Men”, and there’s a choice that they made that I can’t for the life of me understand, so I figured I’d toss it out to the fans in cyberspace to see what their opinions are on it. My working theory is that the producers put a lot of attention into every little detail on the show, and that most of it echoes with meaning, even what the characters are watching on TV or reading (like Betty’s reading of Katherine Anne Porter as she begins to be a more adult, cynical person facing up to some ugly realities). The music choices are often quite pointed in the same way, like when season two opened with “Let’s Twist Again”, which throws back to “The Twist” being in the first season. And just as importantly for this post, the music choices are largely songs that had already come out, or would in a few years so fit the general tone of the era. There’s one giant, glaring, super-duper obvious exception that waves its hands in your face and stomps its feet. At the beginning of episode 6, called “Maidenform”, you see the three biggest female characters getting dressed and the Decemberists’ “Infanta” is blaring at top volume, being every inch the 21st century Decemberists sound that it is.*
The annual tradition has begun—-right wing pundits are stirring up shit with their gullible readers by declaring that there’s a “war on Christmas”. You’d be hard pressed to find a better example than the mythical war on Christmas to demonstrate that culture warriors are a cynical, disingenuous bunch who make up issues to get excited about to distract people from the real Republican war on people who aren’t rich. That said, I do think that Brent Bozell really is as upset as he comes across in this temper tantrum of a column. Because the Colbert Report expertly dismantled the scare tactics of the right in the video above—-they actually managed to get Toby Keith to sing a song about fighting for the right in the war on Christmas, and it’s hysterical. It’s so funny, in fact, that it caused Bozell’s anus to constrict violently around the giant stick that’s crammed up there, and I suspect he got splinters.
The lyrics (written by “Daily Show” executive producer David Javerbaum) are not what you would call subtle (or intelligent) about those bullying Christians. The song jokes that idiotic Colbert-clone conservatives think Santa Claus and Uncle Sam are one and the same, “so boys, take aim.” Perhaps this joking about slaying the unbelievers might warm the hearts of those who equate Christians with bloodthirsty Muslim radicals. I’m sure Rosie O’Donnell gives it two thumbs up.
So I’m watching the first episode of the new season of “24” (hey, somebody has to still care besides the Corner) and I noticed two interesting juxtapositions.
First, the story (so far) deals with a civil war in Africa, and has child soldiers as a central theme. After the theme was introduced, an advertisement for Human Rights Watch’s End the Use of Child Soldiers campaign was aired. Good synergy.
Second, the outgoing president (Powers Boothe) is described as being “in the telepresence suite.” I noted the phrase as one I’d never heard before, but descriptive enough to be clear, and presumably just 24 being all high-tech-y, like in season one when they mentioned “opening a socket” about five times per episode. But then, at about 4:00 pm Bauer time, what should run but an advertisement for Cisco Telepresence.
Now, it’s totally possible that I’m just out of the loop, that this is like the time I heard of Newport News, Virginia for the first time and then ran across references to it seven times in the next three days. Or maybe they actually threw the line “The President is in the telepresence suite” into the show just to cross-promote Cisco’s videoconferencing solutions. It’s hardly the most egregious product placement ever, but it may be the sneakiest that I’ve personally noticed.
We just finished watching the second season of “Mad Men” yesterday, and boy, is that a satisfying show. It’s hard to review an entire season of a show, especially such a complex one, so I’ll make this post more just a collection of observations. Feel more than free to add your own in the comments; I’m happy to hear the buzz around this show is gaining it the large audience it deserves.
The second season was quite self-consciously packed with literary allusions on top of all the other allusions the show makes—-to products, TV shows, historical events, and movies. Last season, there was a tightness to allusions—-they were never made in vain. Joan’s reference to “The Apartment” foreshadowed her eventual dropping of Roger, and I suspect that Bert’s reference to Ayn Rand is supposed to make you realize that for all his pretensions, he’s intellectually shallow. (We get this again this season with his mercenary approach to the Rothko painting he’s purchased.) This season, the Frank O’Hara book (and poem) “Meditations In An Emergency” bookends the season, and if you didn’t get the hint, then the fact that the last episode is also called “Meditations In An Emergency” should clue you in. Personally, I was thrilled, because while I’m lukewarm on a lot of poetry, I’m fond of Frank O’Hara, who is not only a beautiful writer, but brash and funny. And of course, so very New York. The allusion is a multi-layered one, and if you keep it in mind during the whole season, you can pick up little threads where they were using O’Hara as an inspiration to riff off of, right up until Curt says, without blinking, that he’s a homosexual. (From the poem: “Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How best/discourage her?)”) Actually, if you read the poem, you can see how the themes in it echo throughout the season, but especially in Don’s situation. Right off the bat you get some lines that, in the hands of the writers of “Mad Men”, become the paradox of Don’s situation:
In writing this post, I want to make one thing very clear up front: I do not like the movie “Dirty Dancing”. How could you, really? It engages in stereotypes about sexually liberated working class people (versus repressed upper middle class people), it flirts with being a musical but doesn’t commit, and it has that cliched 80s wish fulfillment ending where everyone who has been oppressing our hero/heroine realized their mistakes and makes it up to them by gathering around and applauding. Worst of all, it pairs classic mid-century pop music with the worst sort of 80s pap, some of which is sung by Patrick Swayze. It’s a timid, stupid film. Which is why it’s all the more interesting that it does make one move that seems risky, especially by today’s standards: it portrays abortion honestly. It’s remarkable, really, because the script is so implausible, but in the realm of portrayals of abortion, the one in “Dirty Dancing” is bafflingly at the top of the list of most realistic portrayals. The woman who gets the abortion is a good person and she contextualizes it in terms of can’t—-can’t be pregnant, can’t have a baby, it’s just can’t. Getting money for it and getting the time off of work are the biggest issues for her. And when it goes wrong, we very clearly see the social assumptions behind abortion bans, and they have nothing to do with “life”—-Baby’s father, who is a doctor (and the unsubtle stand-in for our sexually repressed society), is aggravated at the licentious behavior he believes led up to this moment and blames the nearest young man for the predicament in a show of paternalism. That’s it in a nutshell. Abortion bans are about a paternalistic, condescending attitude about women’s agency and a general uneasiness about sex. “Dirty Dancing” is one of the least subtle movies ever made, and that’s part of the abortion storyline. But at least it’s honest, which is so rare in movies and shows that portray abortion that it ends up standing out as a brave storytelling choice.
Naturally, someone has to fuck with it. Before the election, a reader sent me this blog post from the Chicago Reader about a stage adaptation of “Dirty Dancing”, and now that we’re back to pre-election frenzy blogging, I have the time to write it up. The play is a straight adaptation with very few changes, but of course they couldn’t let Penny have her abortion and survive it without shame, as she does in the movie.
And for a little non-election reading, an interesting post on why the character Don Draper on “Mad Men” is attractive to women who should have more self-respect than to find such a cheating SOB sexy. (Via.) It all started with this article that used self-described feminists swooning over Draper to argue that it’s further evidence that feminism is a farce, because women’s own masochism is the source of their problems. Nice Guys® give a “fuck yeah” and demand the pussy that is their due because they don’t think they’d cheat on January Jones with Maggie Siff. At Jezebel, they point out that the women interviewed are career women who have house husbands (which means they’re such a teeny tiny minority that you can’t extrapolate anything from their behavior), and so perhaps their attraction has something to do—-gasp!—-with the fact that women are attracted to men they can empathize with.
This theory of attraction, that people find stuff in common and bond over it, seems to be growing in popularity even as conservatives insist that men and women hail from different planets and simply can’t have anything real in common. Even sex isn’t something you can really have in common, because you know, men want sex and women want love and relationships happen after a tense exchange of these commodities.
The news that Amy Poehler is leaving SNL and starting a sitcom with the producers of “The Office” is the least tragic entertainment news ever. SNL can be very funny, but all too often it just suffers from the inescapable problem that it’s too hard for a team of writers to come up with an hour and a half of pee-your-pants-funny stuff in a week. I’ve seen more than one skit where Poehler was just phoning it in, and she was easily the hardest working actor on that show, so that’s saying a lot. Given the chance to develop a comic character like Tina Fey was with Liz Lemon (who I suspect is different than Fey is some pretty substantial ways) will be awesome. About time, really.
Anyway, this one paragraph from the link above gets at one thing that SNL has managed to give the world and I want to praise them for it:
And then there’s Hillary. As I commented earlier this week on Broadsheet, no one ever thought that Poehler particularly resembled or sounded like Clinton. But the affection and respect she showed while mercilessly ripping apart Clinton’s much-mocked laugh, unrelenting ambition and self-interest and triangulating habits meant that Poehler’s impersonation was always dead-on, but never mean.
I’m loathe to admit it, because my official opinion of Chevy Chase is that he sucks grapefruits, but he really did stumble on something brilliant with his weird impressions of Gerald Ford. It became blanket permission for the cast for the rest of the show, with some exceptions, to play politicians by riffing on them more than trying to faithfully embody them, and that’s Poehler’s strategy for playing Clinton. In doing so, she says a lot more about Clinton and what she means to people than she would just trying to get her mannerisms down. Same thing, I think, with Fey’s impersonation of Palin. Palin doesn’t actually cock her head like a confused dog all the time. But by incorporating that into her impersonation of Palin, she communicated something much more important about Sarah Palin, which is that she’s a dumbass.
Also in the category of great riffing jobs that are all the better because the actor is doing something other than trying to get the mannerisms down perfectly:
Plus, Will Ferrell works in a joke about Bush’s fear of horses, which is a quality he has that never fails to amuse me. The big, manly man Bush is afraid of horses. Yeah, a real man of the people, that one.
Holy motherfucker, is Snickers running a commercial that’s, at best, mocking men for power-walking (which I wasn’t even aware until right now was supposed to be emasculating), and at worst, unsubtle celebration of violence against men perceived to be gay? (Via.)
Usually I try not to waste my time being offended by stuff, especially stuff that’s at least trying to be artistic on some level, but TV commercials manage to cross the line. It took me a moment of being offended before I could collect my thoughts. Which are still scattershot, but here you go:
Conservative actors are banding together as “Friends of Abe”, a secret group of secret conservatives secretly worshiping at their portable altars of Ronald Reagan.
The group, whose members call themselves “Friends of Abe” after Abraham Lincoln, was organized as an underground movement because of fears that prominent industry titans with outspoken liberal views would retaliate, said participants. They often were reluctant to name members of the group in interviews for fear it would hurt their careers.
“It’s a growing movement, and word is getting out that there’s many of us in this business ...,” said 1950s singer Pat Boone, one of the few conservatives to talk about the movement publicly. “If certain studio execs - hirers and firers - learn that this is a movement and growing, and that some of these people that they hire are of this inclination, these people could be unemployed.”
You know, I know of a few very successful Republican actors - Fred Thompson, Kelsey Grammer, Bruce Willis - and it always seems as if failed Republican actors are willing to blame their failure on their political beliefs rather than on the fact that tons of people fail in Hollywood. Case in point: Ron Silver, who I remember getting on Fox News to protest the sort of roles he and other conservative actors were getting, ignoring the fact that before he supported Bush in 2000, he had a recurring role on Veronica’s Closet. And he was the bad guy in Timecop. He kind of had a crappy career beforehand, and it’s continued unabated down his path of mediocrity. Hell, even the world’s worst “celebrities” are getting direct help from the McCain campaign to make an appearance in Iraq, at no apparent detriment to their inexplicable careers.
An idea: Hollywood aversion to conservative views may have something to do with the Republican view that it’s the world’s largest purveyor of communism and forced anal sex at age 15, and have no problem beating them over the head with it whenever they need to score easy family values points. Maybe instead of trying to tell the studio bosses that there’s conservatives here, too, they should send that message to the GOP.
Or, alternately, we can have another few years of theorizing whether or not Iron Man was a hateful liberal screed against capitalism.
Hee, Matt made a funny. Addressing yet another article that peddles in the idea that Keith Olbermann’s success is a miracle, because liberals traditionally fail on TV, he says:
How many failed attempts were there, exactly? My recollection of the relevant history is that first O’Reilly was successful. Then, because you’re not allowed to put liberals on television, networks responded to his success by putting more conservatives on. Then someone at MSNBC had the crazy idea of giving Phil Donohue a show. Then Donohue’s show became MSNBC’s most popular program. At which point MSNBC canceled it because you’re not allowed to put liberals on television. Some time after that, MSNBC put Keith Olbermann on intending, as Boyer reports, for his show to be a “newscast of record.” Then, by accident, Olbermann started doing some liberal stuff. And it was successful, which based on the track record (one effort to put a liberal on cable and his show became the network’s highest-rated program) is exactly what you would expect.
The myth that liberals don’t do well on TV is a classic example of an Everyone Knows myth in action. Common but erroneous wisdom is more powerful than any conspiracy, because a conspiracy can be exposed, but information contrary to what Everyone Knows, no matter how devastatingly true, just gets buried under a pile of cognitive dissonance. Why something might become that untrue thing that Everyone Knows often is indeed political, but more out of convenience. It’s convenient and appealing for network executives to believe that the general public doesn’t want to listen to those liberals who’d raise marginal tax rates if they had their way, so they persist in believing it, despite evidence to the contrary. The other thing that feeds the myth is that the unwashed right wingers here in the flyover states stick out a little bit more to the coastal elite making these decisions, and so it’s easy to decide that they’re representative of Middle America, as opposed to the more mundane apolitical people who will listen to a liberal or the mundane liberals in our mundane but fuel-efficient vehicles. And of course, the idea that people living in blue states are Middle America, too, is also discarded, with a lot of assistance from the right wing noise machine.
Before addressing all the insanity on the show last night, I want to point out what’s probably obvious—-the Adama/Roslin love affair is just another example of how television improves dramatically when writers relinquish certain crutches and fears, and instead tell stories that reflect the range of human experience. By finally getting over the rule that middle aged lovers should be shown in a non-passionate, desexualized manner, the writers accomplished the twin goals of writing some of the more intriguing characters on television and also moving forward this incredible mutiny plot that hinges so much on Roslin’s unwillingness to lead. Needless to say, congrats to them for also putting a woman into a role that you never see, outside of maybe “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”—-as the critical leader, without whom the community falls apart. She’s like Jack from “Lost” in that way.
It seems, so far, that injecting the failure of the Earth mission into “Battlestar Galactica” has reinvigorated the show, which was going slow at some parts in the first half of season 4. Last night’s episode was kind of shocking to me, because for the first time, the struggles that put the Quorum at odds with Roslin and Adama finally started to resonate emotionally. Even though I know what the creators are trying to do—-inject some gray areas, and make sure that Roslin and Adama don’t lapse into saints—-it’s never quite worked, because it asks you buy into two assumptions that just don’t work. One is that humanity wouldn’t immediately accept martial law under such dire circumstances. Considering that our nation happily re-elected itself an obviously malevolent wannabe dictator because of shockwaves from an attack that killed .001% of our population, I fail to believe that they wouldn’t go even further when the actual survival of the human race is on the line, and the leaders are benevolent and repeatedly demonstrate that they’re going out of their way to save everyone. Hell, even people like me who think they have to close Gitmo down and release all the prisoners immediately would accept some form of martial law under the circumstances, especially with a duly elected executive. Most representative government is supposed to move slow, and that’s at cross purposes with the majority of decisions made under fire by Adama. The other thing is that a lot of disputes would have easily been cleared up if Galactica was more communicative, and I don’t believe that Adama or Roslin would have a major problem with transparency, as a general rule. Adama’s story about Earth doesn’t quite fall under that, because that goes into the bucket of National Mythology, which gives people something to strive for even if we haven’t achieved it. (Like the way we call ourselves a people that believes in equality and justice.) 
The original Starbuck finally has a place to let the world zzzzzzzzz…
We’ve been re-watching some episodes of the second season of “Mad Men”, and there’s a choice that they made that I can’t for the life of me understand, so I figured I’d toss it out to the fans in cyberspace to see what their opinions are on it. My working theory is that the producers put a lot of attention into every little detail on the show, and that most of it echoes with meaning, even what the characters are watching on TV or reading (like Betty’s reading of Katherine Anne Porter as she begins to be a more adult, cynical person facing up to some ugly realities). The music choices are often quite pointed in the same way, like when season two opened with “Let’s Twist Again”, which throws back to “The Twist” being in the first season. And just as importantly for this post, 
Warning: Pure spoilage.
In writing this post, I want to make one thing very clear up front: I do not like the movie “Dirty Dancing”. How could you, really? It engages in stereotypes about sexually liberated working class people (versus repressed upper middle class people), it flirts with being a musical but doesn’t commit, and it has that cliched 80s wish fulfillment ending where everyone who has been oppressing our hero/heroine realized their mistakes and makes it up to them by gathering around and applauding. Worst of all, it pairs classic mid-century pop music with the worst sort of 80s pap, some of which is sung by Patrick Swayze. It’s a timid, stupid film. Which is why it’s all the more interesting that it does make one move that seems risky, especially by today’s standards: it portrays abortion honestly. It’s remarkable, really, because the script is so implausible, but in the realm of portrayals of abortion, the one in “Dirty Dancing” is bafflingly at the top of the list of most realistic portrayals. The woman who gets the abortion is a good person and she contextualizes it in terms of can’t—-can’t be pregnant, can’t have a baby, it’s just can’t. Getting money for it and getting the time off of work are the biggest issues for her. And when it goes wrong, we very clearly see the social assumptions behind abortion bans, and they have nothing to do with “life”—-Baby’s father, who is a doctor (and the unsubtle stand-in for our sexually repressed society), is aggravated at the licentious behavior he believes led up to this moment and blames the nearest young man for the predicament in a show of paternalism. That’s it in a nutshell. Abortion bans are about a paternalistic, condescending attitude about women’s agency and a general uneasiness about sex. “Dirty Dancing” is one of the least subtle movies ever made, and that’s part of the abortion storyline. But at least it’s honest, which is so rare in movies and shows that portray abortion that it ends up standing out as a brave storytelling choice. 
And for a little non-election reading,