Themes and Analysis (Footloose) Footloose

The town in the movie was a real town in Oklahoma

Footloose is more reportage than parable. Dean Pitchford (in Footloose) read a newspaper item about a real Oklahoma town and built a fictional small-town America around it.

"Headlines about the town's ban on dancing inspired a Yale-educated writer to create the screenplay and lyrics for what would become an American cultural juggernaut." — Joy Hofmeister, 405 Magazine (2024)

The town was Elmore City, Oklahoma, where dancing had been illegal since 1898 and where, in 1980, a senior class lobbied the school board for permission to hold a prom — and won. Pitchford flew to Oklahoma City, drove south, and spent a week interviewing the kids and their parents. The character of Ren is named for two of the senior boys who organized the petition: Rex Kennedy and Leonard Coffee. (405magazine, okgazette)

See The Real Elmore City for the full story.

Music as rebellion is older than rock and roll, and the film knows it

The argument Ren makes at the council meeting is biblical. He reads scripture against scripture — David danced before the Lord, the Psalmist commanded praise with timbrel and dance, Ecclesiastes set "a time to dance" — because his audience is a congregation, and because Pitchford's research told him that's how the Elmore City kids actually won.

The film places its rock-music plot inside a centuries-old genre. From the Puritans banning Christmas to the 1920s panic over jazz to the 1950s panic over Elvis to the 1980s panic over heavy metal, American religious authority has organized itself around the suppression of dance music in regular cycles. Footloose is set inside one of those cycles and ends with a third option — not the kids winning by force, not the church winning by force, but the minister voluntarily letting go.

The film is a Reagan-era artifact about a Reagan-era anxiety

The script was developed in 1982–83 and the film opened in February 1984, eighteen months before the Parents Music Resource Center hearings in the Senate would put rock lyrics on national trial. The cultural temperature is the same.

"Ronald Reagan was in office, Christian Conservatives like Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority had risen to power, 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)

The Bomont book burning is the film's most explicit nod to the moment. The titles being thrown on the bonfire — Slaughterhouse-Five is named earlier in a dinner-table scene — are titles that were actively being challenged in American school districts during the early 1980s. See Reagan-Era Religious Right.

Dance as speech: the council scene as a First Amendment argument

Ren's speech to the town council does the work that a courtroom scene would do in a different movie. He does not argue that the kids deserve to dance because dancing is fun. He argues that dancing is a form of communication — joy, grief, worship — and that suppressing it is a category mistake about what dancing is. The scriptural quotations are the formal proof; the warehouse solo earlier in the film is the demonstration. See Dance as Speech.

This reading makes the film a quieter cousin to the era's other "art under siege" pictures — Flashdance (1983), Beat Street (1984), Breakin' (1984) — but where those films treat the establishment as background, Footloose puts the antagonist in the same room and gives him a counter-speech.

Pauline Kael called it sanitized; Roger Ebert called it confused

The 1984 reviews were not kind. Kael saw the film as machine-tooled formula:

"Footloose turns out to be a sort of Boy Scout version of Flashdance — a carefully toned-down, overly respectable piece of schmaltz." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1984) (anthologized; not freely online)

Roger Ebert was more sympathetic to the parts but unsympathetic to the whole:

"Footloose is a seriously confused movie that tries to do three things, and does all of them badly. It wants to tell the story of a conflict in a town, it wants to introduce some flashy teenage characters, and part of the time it wants to be a music video." — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (1984)

The criticisms have stuck. Most contemporary defenses of Footloose argue not that Kael and Ebert were wrong about the seams but that the film's emotional logic — Shaw's grief, Ariel's anger, Ren's loyalty — works in spite of them.

The ending converts the antagonist instead of defeating him

The structural choice that distinguishes Footloose from the formula it's accused of being is the resolution. Ren loses the council vote. The dance happens anyway because Shaw — in a Sunday sermon to his own congregation — releases the kids. The antagonist isn't outvoted, outwitted, or outlasted; he is persuaded. The final image is Shaw and Vi standing on the road outside the flour mill, not joining the dance but no longer trying to stop it.

"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)

That choice is what makes Lithgow's performance load-bearing. If Shaw is a cartoon, the conversion is meaningless; the film works because Lithgow plays the man's grief seriously enough that his change of mind costs him something.