Grease: Together Forever?
By Anne Marie Feld Lowell
“Tell me about it, stud.”
— Sandy Olsson (Olivia Newton-John) in Grease (1978)
This is the story of two screenings. The first takes place in the summer of 1978. Like everyone else at my elementary school, I’ll stop at nothing to see Grease. My sister and I run across six lanes of freeway traffic in barrettes and bell bottoms to get to the theater in the shopping center near our house. We do this partly because it shaves a minute or two off the walk, mostly because we aren’t smart enough to be afraid.
Tickets are two dollars, the same amount as our weekly allowance. We buy popcorn and Dots that stick in our teeth, teeth already filled with mercury and silver. The Dots time-release sugar into our systems as we stare up into the screen, waiting—as we always did with movies—for escape, for our lives to change.
Grease, the movie, was a lot like those Dots – brightly colored, delicious and ultimately terrible for us. Pauline Kael, who wrote about it for the New Yorker at the time, called it a klutzburger, and it’s apt – corny, cheesy, hammy – pick your own food metaphor for over the top. But I loved every minute. I wanted it all for myself: first love on a faraway beach, romance, car chases and jealousy-inciting dances with hot people from rival high schools. I wanted to go away with a beautician friend and live the ultimate American dream – the head-to-toe makeover. I wanted to leave the port of sweet for the ocean of sexy, returning with kohl-rimmed eyes, permed hair and skin-tight, black leather clothes. I wanted to smoke cigarettes and grind the heel of my stiletto into the chest of a lovesick boy. I wanted to transform my crushes into my puppets because that’s what winning at love looked like and I wanted to win. I was ten years old.
I won’t go into how many years I lost to the idea that love was just lust-plus-conquest, but I will say that it’s a big number, and leather pants and jackets played a role. But this is not that story.
Flash forward, thirty five years later. I’m watching Grease again, this time, sprawled across a mid-century sofa in my living room in California with my fourteen-year-old daughter. We marvel at the casting (most of the high schoolers are played by people in their thirties) and spot the one kernel of truth in the movie: Stockard Channing belting out “There Are Worse Things I Could Do,” a song that was almost cut because the producer thought it was too depressing. Still, I can sing every word of the soundtrack, and do, which makes the teenager next to me cringe visibly, enough to squash my very strong desire to dance along with “Greased Lightning.” When my daughter laughs, it’s at the movie’s absurdity, not its jokes.
Grease is a fossil, not of the 50s, when it's set, but of the 70s, when gender roles were still highly polarized, onscreen at least—good girls, bad girls, nerds and jocks. You can see glimmers of women taking some power: choosing not to drop out of high school, going out instead of sitting home alone waiting to be invited. But my daughter, born 25 years after the release of the film, finds the whole thing ridiculous. “Why would she even be with him? He’s such an asshole,” she says, firmly, sensibly, over a cup of black tea later. She thinks about these things far more deeply than I did, which is her generation’s blessing and their curse. It would never occur to her to perm her hair, which is, at the moment, French braided in a circlet. With her blue flannel shirt and ripped jeans, it’s very Heidi-meets-Kurt Cobain.
In Grease, Coach Calhoun says, “The rule is: all couples must be girl-boy,” but to my daughter, traditional, binary gender roles are wildly obsolete, even potentially violent. She’s a girl who would rather practice calligraphy than have a makeover, who prefers her pearls made of tapioca and her cars electric. Smart. Complicated.
“It was a different time,” I say.
“It was a dumb time.”
“Yup,” I concede.
While I still feel the draw of oversimplified teenage attraction in John Travolta’s desperate vibrato and Olivia Newton-John’s sweet trills, I’m grateful for evolution. Grease would never get greenlit today. Its closest cousin is probably Prom, in which a non-gay man plays a gay man in a movie about gay rights, which actually brings some aspects of “progress” into question. But for the most part, the best musicals have moved in far more thoughtful directions — like the anxious and sad Dear Evan Hansen or the winning-is-work-you-love ending of La La Land. Less shallow, less saccharine, more like artisanal cheese from pastured cows than Dots. I’m not sure the ten-year-old version of me would have liked either of those musicals, but the mother in me loves them.
Anne Marie Feld Lowell was raised by books and movies. She has written about film for Netflix, IGN, and E! Online, and about parenting for the New York Times, Babycenter, Great Schools, and Edutopia. She also teaches writing to kids through The Intuitive Writing Project and has the best job in the world—running an elementary school library. She lives in Northern California with two teenagers, a cat-sized dog and her husband, whom she met at a film festival.