I really really actively hate Grease. I hate that it’s popular, and I hate what it seems to be saying about American culture. If you are lucky enough not to be acquainted with this film, it’s a musical about the fifties made in the 1970s, and it brings out the very worst in both decades. Anybody who studies twentieth century American history can tell you that the fifties are easily our most boring decade. All ten years were one big snooze. The films were great. The film noir pictures of the fifties had a sort of perfection to them. It’s absolutely necessary that Kiss Me Deadly and Touch of Evil top any list of favorites. In fact if you want any sort of genre pictures -- westerns, science fiction films, Biblical epics, comedies, musicals et cetera -- you ought to look at the pictures of the fifties. This is when genre filmmaking reached its peak. The seventies were about “personal” filmmaking. If Norma Desmond thought that films were small in 1950, she should have lived to see the films of the seventies.

People like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma and even Martin Scorsese cut their teeth on Hollywood films from the fifties and in many ways tried to emulate them, but their films were purely modern in the end. Grease sometimes plays like a perversion of Brat generation cinema. Those guys understood that the repressive atmosphere, which kept filmmakers from saying exactly what they meant, was not only part of the game, it was subtext. Grease seems to really hate the fifties. That’s the only possible reason that I can imagine for the film to be conceived and adopted. It's a nostalgia picture for people who weren't teenagers in the fifties. They see the fifties not in terms of economy, elegance or subtext. They see it purely as a time of suppression. Even that may be OK, had the picture given the smoking, drinking and sex some sort of charge of rebellion. A musical involving teenagers really exploring sexuality, a musical movie really and explicitly about sexual liberation would be marvelous, dancing being an obvious stand-in for the sex act. Instead, the film seems to be teasing the characters for thinking that they are getting away with something naughty. The picture seems to be saying something along the lines of, "If you kids think that's fun, wait until you try the real stuff." I have no idea what the filmmakers think the "real stuff" is. LSD, burglary, anal sex?

I think that my initial objection towards Grease lay explicitly with the sexual content of the film. When I saw Grease for the first time all the way through, at its twenty year re-release in 1998, the theater was filled with kids. A very little girl, maybe two or three, was wandering the aisles, dancing to the music. I overheard a mother telling her kids that the film that they enjoyed on the small screen is even better on the big screen. On “Inside the Actor’s Studio,” one of the students told John Travolta that she used to play Grease with her friends when she was a little girl. Why is Grease considered to be a kid’s movie? I don’t mean to sound like a CAP Alert wacko, but the picture has references to masturbation (“Where you going, to flog your log?”), oral sex (Rizzo’s disbelief that Frenchy got her name from how she exhales, Rizzo responding to Danny’s suggestion to bite the weenie with the response, “With relish!”) and group sex (Rizzo actually tells the gang that this isn’t a “gangbang”). Those first two, at least, are even incorporated into dance moves on “American Bandstand.” Especially offensive is the casual attitude towards rape. In the “Summer Nights” musical number, one of Danny’s fellow gang members wants to know if “she put up a fight.” A major plot point in the film involves Danny trying to rape Sandy at the drive-in. She splits in outrage and he sings a song about being abandoned and missing her. When he sings at the end, he is on the other side of a “Let’s all go to the lobby” ad, where a hot dog bun invites a dancing hot dog to jump inside her, completing Danny’s failed attempt of copulation.

There’s even more gratuitous creepiness in a subplot involving the host of “American Bandstand” trying to seduce a teenage girl. The PG rating has seemed to indicate to parents that the picture is pretty harmless, but it probably should have received a PG-13 on re-release. Would Annie Hall retain a PG if re-released today? Grease is pretty bawdy stuff. It’s not just the bawdiness that I object to, but the tone and the message behind it all. First of all, the point of putting all this vulgarity in a movie from the fifties seems to be to exploit the naivety and stupidity of all the characters. There are a number of attacks towards their inability to see the big picture. At the end of the picture the principal says that some of them may become a Vice President Richard Nixon, and one of the leather thugs strikes a Nixon-esque pose. One of the girls mentions with horror that her boyfriend tried to put some Tylenol in her Coke. The characters register as so unsophisticated about sex that the film has a very uneasy pedophilic charge to it. The fact that all the actors look more like they are 34 than 17 doesn’t soothe the unease, but only adds to it, reminding very unkindly of the controversy a few years back about the Supreme Court protecting virtual child pornography.

The movie hates hates hates Sandy and all she represents. It doesn’t seem to comprehend the value of chastity or innocence, except to the degree that through the prism of the 1950s, they are antique virtues from another period. The movie sort of gets off on the milkshakes, cheeseburgers and poodle skirts as camp iconology. In the cartoon introduction, Sandy has birds and a fawn help her out with her daily routine. The (modest) satirical digs towards the other central characters seem to be laughing a little more with them than at them. Rizzo sings “Sandra Dee” early in the film, teasing her for being pure, sober and chaste. At the end of the film, following Danny’s unsuccessful attempt to rape her, Sandy sings “Sandra Dee” to herself and realizes that she is unhappy refusing Danny’s advances. She dresses up in leather and fixes up her hair and then goes to see Danny at the “end of the year” school carnival and they dance. Danny tried to become a jock to win her love, but it’s her transformation that sticks in the film, and that transformation makes up the film’s moral background. It celebrates Danny’s values and pisses on Sandy’s. It seems to be selling greaser ethics and greaser aesthetics, articulated early in the film when we hear a sting as Travolta turns around holding a cigarette in his mouth. The film seems to indicate again that the greaser rebellion had the right idea. The movie is selling sexual freedom and individuality, and sees Danny’s transition into athletics as degenerate. The coach is not even a fascist, he’s a cuddly old man. Danny isn’t rebelling against a corrupt system, he’s rebelling against boredom and the “sin of inexperience.” Because the film still sees Danny as a bit of a wimp and his fellow greasers as just seeing the tip of the iceberg, most of these elements do not work. This content with this approach may have better been served celebrating Sandy. It probably should have been lighter and warmer if it wasn’t going to take Danny seriously.

It’s really too bad, as Olivia Newton-John is easy on the eyes, ears and even the mind. You can sense, while watching her, that there is is something going on upstairs. Since I like her so much, there is something profoundly unpleasant about seeing her throw her identity away in order to gain the acceptance of this joker. Her opposite, John Travolta, seems far too nerdy and dim to be effectively sold as a greaser. There's a limp wimpiness to him that suggests that they could have safely given the role to Richard Dreyfuss instead. Watching Travolta in this picture, you reflect that he really has gotten better with age. You can respect him in Pulp Fiction and his immediate post-Pulp Fiction career as being attractive, threatening and even intelligent. In other words, he became a terrific actor later on, and developed a persona much more interesting than himself. I imagine that adolescent girls find the Danny character attractive precisely because he is so enormously unthreatening. The film decides to make him into a soft little teddy bear by making him try and be a jock in order to win Sandy's affection. Given that the film ends with Sandy becoming his whore, this attempt towards feminization feels sort of meaningless.

Jeff Conaway, on the other hand, seems to hint at something potentially more subversive and strange in the Grease universe. He is profoundly ugly, but it's a goonish, cartoonish kind of ugliness. He's an interesting element that's ripe for exploitation in a different movie. I'd transport the character in his entirety to add some color to a slasher movie, a la Friday the 13th: Part 3. A second hint of subversiveness comes when Rizzo tries to sabotage the romance between Danny and Sandy, apparently out of jealousy. There seems to be a Dangerous Liaisons subplot going on here. Were Rizzo and Danny lovers? Has Rizzo given up on love and decided to conspire against those who try and keep it alive, thinking that if she can’t have it, then nobody can? Lots of unasked and unanswered questions are swimming around here. The film desperately doesn’t want to portray Rizzo as a villain, much less any of its characters as remotely complex.

Rizzo thinks that she’s pregnant through the last quarter, maybe third of the movie, and then at the end reflects that she isn’t. This ending feels arbitrary and painfully cowardly. We’re left wondering what the purpose of the whole episode was. Retaining the pregnancy would allow that teenage fucking is exciting but has consequences, and so you have to weigh the consequences before deciding if you are a Rizzo or a Sandra Dee. Or indeed, something in between. But the film seems to be sold on “greaser chic.” Rizzo sings a song about her bad reputation after getting pregnant. She says that “there are worse things I could do,” worse things including being a tease or staying at home and not having sex. So remember little girls seeing this movie, good girls put out!

Even worse than that is the moralistic “Beauty School Dropout” number, where a guardian angel played by Frankie Avalon tells Frenchie that she should go back to high school. Filth, filth, and then a public service announcement about the importance of a high school education. If you ask me, so many people stay in high school that don’t want to, that in this day and age the degree has become downright meaningless. Taxpayers and the public education system would be well off to at least not treat high school education as a moral decision or the wisest decision for everybody and encourage people like Frenchie to find alternative paths.

Of course, I’m treating this obnoxiously hatefully shallow and plastic movie with more seriousness than it really deserves. The humor in the film is flat and obvious. There isn't any wit behind it. There isn't a single laugh in the whole film. And aside from the creepy subtext that the age of the actors gives the film, it makes the film feel overly fantastic. You're constantly taken out of the film when it's a musical anyway, but the age issue seems a tad too much. The musical numbers were obviously done in post-production and dubbed over the soundtrack. They're over-choreographed in a cheap big budget way. It all feels somehow arbitrary, like it's going through the motions. I know that it's not fair to compare the two, but the 1981 big budget version of Pennies From Heaven exploited "cheap big budget"-ness, post-dubbed musical numbers and the feeling of the musical numbers going through the motions, and it was absolutely heartbreaking. On a simpler level, although I am not an admirer of the Fred and Ginger classic Top Hat, I have to admit that those scenes had some charge of electricity to them; they were celebratory. The deadness of the musical numbers can possibly be argued to be Grease’s more grievious sin. They don’t fail quite as much because of the lack of technical ability or energy of execution, although the film was directed by TV veteran Randall Kleiser who makes the sort of films where you don’t know who the director is. The musical numbers in Grease fail because they are entirely devoid of intelligence or heart. The film is cynical right down to its bones and it refuses to ask any questions. All the joy in the picture comes coated with winky irony. It’s joyless because it hates its characters and hates the universe in which they inhabit.

It’s almost strange that the filmmakers never thought of giving Rizzo a musical number involving the coat hanger abortion she would no doubt need if she really was pregnant (or lied about having never been pregnant). The film, of course, has absolutely everything else but something genuinely subversive or operatically (instead of banally) tasteless. Grease is a quiet, hollow sort of rape. It wears a rubber when it has its way with you, a minor courtesy as to not get any mess you. It prefers to eat away at our collective values from the lower intestine out, instead of exhibiting its hatred for us to our face. Not only does the film not compare to American Grafitti, Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Where the Boys Are '84, it doesn’t compare to Showgirls, Bad Boys II, Freddy Got Fingered or How The Grinch Stole Christmas. It’s the banality of evil incarnate. Good god, I hate this fucking movie.

You know, I’ve got a unique position on the concept of art. Art is more of a perspective than a value judgment, and when I use the word I’m meaning that I’m looking at a work’s subject matter and its point of view. Anything that can be thought of in terms of art has a subject and a point of view towards its subject; it can’t help not having one. And so it is appropriate to look at Grease in the same way that we would look at American Grafitti (a far more successful nostalgia piece) or Fast Times at Ridgemont High (a far superior high school sex comedy). The artificiality of the picture, the fact that they made it into a PG-rated musical sex comedy is the point of view the picture takes towards its subject matter. Frivolousness is not a defense towards criticism, it’s a perspective towards a subject. To say the least, it doesn’t measure up. The sex in Grease is dirty, but somehow dishonest. It’s a PG-rated wallow in the muck. A picture like Where the Boys Are has at least some sort of reality and honesty to it. A maturity even. It has a simplicity outside of the thick diseased soup of irony offered by Grease. I eagerly anticipate the fuckwits that inform me that I need to just relax and enjoy the show. This film definitely has to be in the bottom five percent all movies ever made. You’ll be better off seeing almost anything else. I can hardly think of an element of the picture that is all justifiable. If somebody could tell me how cartoons like this in any way represent, define or effectively comment on the human condition it would be greatly appreciated.

Sleaze is the word.