Dance as Speech Footloose

The council scene is the film's First Amendment argument in disguise

The structural climax of Footloose is not a dance sequence — it's an argument. Ren stands in front of the Bomont town council and reads scripture against scripture. The film never names the First Amendment, never uses the word "speech." But the scene is built like a constitutional argument: a citizen testifying that an act the state has banned is an act that should be protected, on grounds the state itself recognizes.

The genius of the script is that the grounds are biblical, not legal. Pitchford (in Footloose) knew his audience would be a small-town congregation. He gave Ren citations from a text the antagonists already accept.

The verses Ren reads:

• 2 Samuel 6:14 — "And David danced before the Lord with all his might."
• Psalm 149:3 — "Let them praise his name in the dance: let them sing praises unto him with the timbrel and harp."
• Ecclesiastes 3:4 — "A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance."

The argument is not that the kids should be allowed to dance because dancing is fun. The argument is that dancing is a category of human expression — joy, grief, worship — that the very religious tradition the council invokes already endorses.

The warehouse solo is the demonstration the council scene refers back to

The warehouse sequence — Ren alone in the empty Beamis Mill, working out his anger and confusion in movement — is in the film for several reasons (it's a music-video set piece, it shows what kind of dancer Ren is, it gets Bacon onto the Footloose poster). But it also does formal work for the council scene that comes later. By the time Ren stands at the lectern and says that dance is communication, the audience has watched him communicate something through dance that he could not have said any other way.

"Originally Ren comes to control and dominate his environment through the warehouse solo." — Gabriel Diego Valdez, Basil Mariner Chase (2014)

The film's argument is built into its form: the kid says dance is a language; we have already seen him speak it.

Pauline Kael missed it because she expected the dance to be the climax

Kael's 1984 review complained that the climactic dance the film "promises" never arrives:

"The director, Herbert Ross, and the writer, Dean Pitchford, exhaust one bad idea after another, and build up to a letdown: you don't get the climactic dance you expect." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1984) (anthologized; not freely online)

She was right that Footloose does not deliver a Flashdance-style number-as-climax. She was wrong, in this reading, about why. The climax of Footloose is the speech, not the dance — the speech that argues the dance is permissible at all. The actual dancing at the flour mill is a coda. The question of whether the kids can dance has already been answered by Ren, by Shaw, and by the church.

The film places dance in a long American tradition of contested speech

Footloose was released eighteen months before the 1985 Senate hearings on rock music labeling — the PMRC, the "Filthy Fifteen," the parental advisory sticker. The film is in the cultural air of that fight without naming it. It assumes a viewer who recognizes that pop music has been on trial in America for thirty years (Elvis, the Beatles, disco, punk) and that the trial is religious as often as it is legal. See Reagan-Era Religious Right.

"There was an ongoing witch hunt in the form of the Satanic Panic, and basically the 1980s seemed to be a time where powerful social forces were trying to push back against stuff they just didn't like." — Mutant Reviewers, Mutant Reviewers (2012)

Ren's argument — that dance is a form of speech and therefore that suppression is a category mistake — is the argument that civil-liberties lawyers would make explicitly two years later. Footloose got there first, in scripture.

Shaw's conversion is what the speech aims at

The structural test of any "art under siege" film is what happens to the antagonist. The mainstream Hollywood version is that the antagonist loses — outvoted, embarrassed, replaced. Footloose chooses a different path: Shaw is persuaded. He goes home, sits with his wife, drives to the church, finds his congregation already burning books in the parking lot, and stops them. The next Sunday he gives a sermon that effectively endorses the prom.

"The story of the movie is essentially the story of Reverend Moore being convinced. The kids never win an argument. The kids win a heart." — Philip Meade, Philip Meade (2018)

The form supports the theme. If dance is a form of speech, what speech is for is to change minds, and the film puts a changed mind at its center.