Not How It Seems: ‘Grease’
In 1978,
John Travolta was lucky enough to be on the cover of the top two best-selling albums in the US. Number one was the Bee Gees-heavy Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. Coincidentally, Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees also wrote the title track of the #2 album, the soundtrack to Grease. (The #3 album of the year was Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, just to give you an idea of how big these soundtracks were.)
Grease is an iconic film. It made a great deal of people fall in love with the 1950s all over again, and played into the widespead, pop culture revival of the ’50s throughout the ’70s. Beyond that, it was very much a musical during a time in which musicals were beginning to fizzle out. Its songs, scenes, even costumes are so ubiquitous today that even Prince William and Kate Middleton karaoked a duet of “You’re the One That I Want” at their 2011 wedding reception. To call it beloved would be an understatement.
The film tells the love story between Sandy and Danny, two high-school students who met at the beach over the summer. You know, the tale relayed in “Summer Nights.”
But of course, there would be no movie without conflict. Danny and native Australian Sandy parted ways at the end of the summer assuming that they’d never see each other again, but a change of plans lands Sandy at the same high school Danny goes to.
The issue is image. Both Sandy and Danny’s friends are very image-conscious teenagers. The boys are greasers, the T-Birds, bad boys who love cars and attempting to get sex (which seems to remain an elusive mystery to them). The girls call themselves Pink Ladies and are also pretty interested in sex. They’re all teens; what do you expect? Knowing Danny has a bad-boy image, Rizzo, the leader of the Pink Ladies, pushes Sandy into a reunion with Danny in front of his friends. He tries to play it “cool,” upsetting Sandy and causing her to run away.
Unlike the Pink Ladies and the T-Birds, Sandy is shy and reserved, something even her friends pick on her for in “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee.”
Rizzo is the most sex-obsessed of the group, and she sneaks off to have sex with Kenickie, a member of the T-Birds, who has been carrying a condom with him for years… leading to it inevitably breaking before he can use it. We can all see where this is headed, right? A few weeks later, Rizzo misses her period and the news gets around the school that she might be pregnant.
Sandy starts seeing a football player but is obviously using him to get Danny’s attention. Danny and Sandy meet at a diner and Danny apologizes for trying to act cool. Sandy says it’s a good thing the football player is simple, and Danny tells her he could run circles around him. Sandy says she’ll believe it when she sees it, which he takes as a challenge. He becomes part of the track team.
Danny asks Sandy to the dance, and they begin to be close again, but Danny’s afraid to be seen in public with Sandy, for fear that his friends will bother them again. Inevitably, the T-Birds and the Pink Ladies show up and do pretty much what Danny had feared, making it hard for him to have an honest conversation with Sandy. Although Sandy and Danny dance beautifully, Danny’s ex cuts in and Sandy storms out. To make matters worse, Danny and his ex win the dance-off, upsetting Sandy even further.
Danny takes Sandy to a drive-in and apologizes again for what happened at the dance. He wants to engage physically with Sandy but doesn’t know how because she’s so innocent. He gives her his class ring, which doesn’t get the kind of sexual attention he’d hoped for, and then he tries to play it cool and put a hand on her, which upsets her so much that she throws his ring back at him and runs away. Danny laments the loss in “Sandy.”
Meanwhile, the T-Birds have been working on fixing up Kenickie’s old car. They finally get it in running order and prepare to drag race the opposing gang. Danny and Kenickie express their appreciation of each other as friends, but even this tender moment is cut short by the other friends snickering at them.
While at the race, Sandy kindheartedly offers Rizzo any help she may need in the pregnancy department, which Rizzo shakes off, but thanks Sandy for being nice enough to care. She then sings that “There are Worse Things I Could Do.” (Later, it’s revealed that Rizzo isn’t pregnant.)
Danny ends up racing Kenickie’s car and wins against the other gang. While watching both the T-Birds and Pink Ladies celebrate, Sandy watches from afar and decides that she wants to start loosening up and having more fun like her friends do.
She decides she needs a makeover to be less puritanical, and so she lets her friend Frenchy make her over. As school lets out to the last-day-of-school carnival, Danny reveals that he has lettered in track, proving that he’s as athletic as the football player. His friends give him a hard time, but he’s proud of his accomplishment.
Then, Sandy shows up with her new image, a much more sexualized look that’s almost a cross between the two groups.
The school sings an unrealistic song together that’s been a graduation staple in years since, “We Go Together” (in which they assume the former classmates will never grow apart). Sandy and Danny ride off into the sunset in a car –which flies.
Okay, let’s talk about the treatment of women in this film starting with Frenchy. Frenchy wants to be a beautician and even drops out of high school to go to beauty school, but it’s much harder than she thought it would be, so she also drops out of that. She’s serenaded by Frankie Avalon in “Beauty School Dropout,” and he tells her to give up on her dreams and go back to school. But Frenchy doesn’t abandon her dreams because she continues to dye her own hair as well as helping Sandy with her complete makeover. So even though a man (who she’s enamored with, no less) tells her to give up, she still tries to pursue her ultimate goals, although possibly in a more realistic manner.
Rizzo is an angry girl from the start. She’s obviously had some bad experiences with men, as evidenced by her distrust of them. She becomes the school scandal in 1959 when teen pregnancy usually landed you with a one-way ticket to a distant relative’s house, but she faces the prospect with her head held high. She makes a bad decision going with the guy from the other gang to make Kenickie jealous after he angers her, but she definitely holds her own against the guys and the other girls at the school. The decisions she makes are all her own.
Now Sandy. My mom always says she hates this movie because of the change Sandy makes to her appearance and demeanor to please a man. True, Sandy does change and a great deal of it has to do with Danny. Let us also point out that Danny made the first change when he decided to go out for a sport. Danny isn’t an athlete — this is glaringly obvious — but he wanted to do something to prove to Sandy that he was worthy of her, and in the end, he didn’t even care what his friends thought; he was proud of what he had done.
Their relationship is tainted by social structures of high school and the terrible people they hang out with (seriously, despite how cool Rizzo is, she is a terrible friend, and I’m pretty sure some of Danny’s friends are a dark alley away from committing some serious crimes). No one should ever act differently around you because of who else is there, and although Danny finally clears up his qualms about liking his girlfriend in front of people, we still have the issue of Sandy’s makeover.
Now, a lot of people seem to think Danny didn’t like her before the change, or that he didn’t feel comfortable with her around his friends, but remember that the only reason they weren’t together at the time of the race was that Sandy left Danny at the drive-in after he tried to put the moves on her. Therefore, while I can’t fully agree with the choice of ending, I disagree with this popular interpretation of the film. I think Sandy changing her look had less to do with “getting Danny” and more to do with Sandy trying to grow up.
Sandy is immature. She’s not the only one, but it’s certainly true of her. She holds her summer romance up on a high pedestal, she doesn’t seem to realize on her own that guys can be jerks, she uses the football player who seems to really like her, and she starts fights with Danny over some trivial things. Sandy also really can’t stand up for herself to the other girls. The bossy and annoying class president Patty Simcox tells Sandy to join the cheerleading squad, so she does. Frenchy wants to pierce Sandy’s ears, so she lets her, despite not really wanting them pierced and being afraid of blood. As a person who has often had people ask to pierce my virginally unpierced ears, I know it’s really easy to just be like, “Hey, no! I don’t want them pierced!” but Sandy just lets it happen.
She can hold her own against guys though, and tells Danny to stop embracing her at the beach, and to get off of her when he tries to put the moves on at the drive-in. As we learn in the reprise of “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee,” however, this is due to fear. Sandy is afraid of the adult world of tight embraces and sexuality. She decides at the point of that song that she’s ready to grow up, and in my opinion that is what the change is about. Make no mistake — she has not grown up. But this is Sandy’s immature impression of what a grown-up person would do. I will give her this though: she makes it clear to Danny that he needs to start shaping up and acting like the man she knows he can be so that he can prove her faith in him is justified.
Sandy is no feminist icon, but Grease is just a story about high school. She’s not going to keep dressing like that, just like the class isn’t really going to stay together forever. But they’re all just kids (played by people in their 30s). While the film definitely isn’t anything to hold up as an example of gender treatment we should aspire to, it’s still not quite how it seems.
“Not How It Seems” takes a look at the underlying messages in classic movie musicals.
