With the growing popularity of hip hop in the youth culture, there can be noticed a growing number of films appearing in the cinematographic industry depicting the in-demand sub-culture. Being more than just a music genre, hip hop can be fairly called a way of life that thousands of young people found close to their spirit. So the ways it looks like in real life and in movies really differ and thus hip hop is usually a controversial topic for discussion. This paper is thus going to reflect on how authentic hip hop is represented in cinema in terms of its two essential parts, namely race and class. The films I will be comparing are “Street Dance” and “Save the Last Dance”. To support my argument I will be using sources from dance and race studies. The key terms that I am going to use citing the scholarly sources are race, identity, class, authenticity.
The first film under analysis is “Save the Last Dance” by Thomas Carter. Shot in the US in 2001, the film is a teenage melodrama about a white girl whose life one day changes forever due to the death of her mother. Instead of a big future in ballet and a happy life with the childhood friends, Sara, the main character, gets a broken dream in the suburb of another city with the unknown environment and a strange culture. What happens is she one day finds herself assimilate into the hip hop culture, she has never heard before.
Sara starts dating the black young man who introduces her to the culture by teaching her how to dance and behave. Sara’s best friend, his sister, makes her communication in the new school easier. Overall, the film shows the difficult way Sara passes in order to not only get back to her ballet dream but also master hip hop. “Save the Last Dance” aims at demonstrating how hip hop becomes the part of the main character’s life in a way that it let her upgrade the skills she already had and become unique among dozens of other ballet dancers.
In a dance world with its strict genre borders, Sara finds her own space where ballet interacts with hip hop, and this new approach created by her life experience brings her another chapter in life with the new emotions and possibilities. By mixing the cultures and breaking the stereotypes, Sara proves that there exist no race and class borders in hip hop, and anyone who follows his/her dream may become an excellent dancer.
The second film under consideration is “Street Dance”, a 2010 British film directed by Max Giwa and Dania Pasquini. This film has much in common with “Save the Last Dance” though depicts the less tragic circumstances and the less disadvantaged group and environment. The film demonstrates the loving interracial couple – two young people are in charge of the hip hop dance crew. One day the couple splits and the attention gets focused on the white female who is left and betrayed and has to be the only leader of the crew which turns out to be much more difficult than it seems to.
The film demonstrates the emotional struggle of Carly, the main character, where passion for hip hop wins over the desperateness. At the beginning of the film, Carly does not believe she is able to lead the crew and be innovative in terms of dances because the members of the crew give up on her one by one and no one believes she is going to make any good change. The point when she needs to interact with the ballet dancers seems to be the most crucial one – the plan seems impossible and all the dancers, both hip hop and ballet, do not support her at all. Finally, Carly overcomes her fears and doubts.
At the end of the film, the audience can notice the evolution of the main character – the new Carly is a confident girl whose endless love for hip hop is testified by the innovative approach to creating the performance based on the elements of both hip hop and ballet. Such a courageous act ends up by taking the first place in the competition and winning over her ex-boyfriend who turned out to be in charge of another crew.
“Save the Last Dance” and “Street Dance” are dance films with the positive message for the youth; they motivate, inspire, and promote nothing but being persistent in what the individual does. Still, the authenticity in terms of reflecting the real hip hop culture is rather doubtful. Due to the fact that hip hop is heavily tied to race and class, it is possible to demonstrate the films’ primitiveness on the example of the issues mentioned above.
Firstly, both films choose the main character to be represented by the white female. Such choice is awkward when considering hip hop. “Many will agree that hip hop’s authenticity is represented by the young black male” (Jun 10). Not that it is impossible for a young white girl to succeed in this dance genre but it is very uncommon that she is better than her black environment. Both films offer their audience the idea that the main character does not only dance as well as her black partners – she dances even better than them.
Such choice is determined by the targeted white teen audience, but not the reality where the typical representatives of the hip hop culture and the best dancers are black males. It is curious that “Street Dance” even opposes the white characters to the black ones. While the white characters are all positive (Carly, the ballet teacher, Carly’s new boyfriend), the black ones are mostly negative (Carly’s ex, The Surge, the members of Carly’s crew who left her).
The attentive spectator might notice that “Save the Last Dance” and “Street Dance” demonstrate the evolution of the white and black characters in absolutely different ways. “As the film demonstrates, however, racial transformation is restricted to non-black characters only” (Arzumanova 3). The white one develops if he/she stands his/her ground no matter what while the black one evolves only in case he/she is able to compromise with the white and accept his/her predominance or, at least, equity. It can be clearly seen that the films do not provide the authentic view on the racial terms of the matter. The directors of both films chose to demonstrate the hip hop culture with the white predominance.
The following factors testifying of the absence of authenticity in the films concerns the class. The directors seem to provide the utopian positive message that there exist no class barriers, and the young person only has to follow his/her dream. In reality, a huge part of hip hop representatives cannot stand the influence of the suburban community and are connected with drugs and, sometimes, violence. “There is pressure to ensure that the product reaches the largest possible audience, which, in the case of the US, is white people” (Sachs 96). Being oriented on the audience that knows the hip hop culture only casually, the films offer the beautiful picture without getting much into details what the suburban life and class barriers really look like and how hard they turn out to be for those who experience them.
In “Street Dance”, it seems absurd that the teacher in the prestigious ballet school would come up with the idea to let her students be followed by a young hip hop dancer. In “Save the Last Dance”, it does not look authentic at all that almost the only white girl at school from another city gets so well in such a short period of time with the suburban environment which was absolutely new to her. Claiming there are no class borders, the films motivate the teen audience to be courageous in following the dreams no matter what. So as a teaching technique, such lack of authenticity can be considered reasonable. But in terms of depicting the real hip hop culture, the films are primitive.
The only thing that seems authentic in “Save the Last Dance” and “Street Dance” comparing to the real life hip hop culture is the suburban environment. The directors managed more or less to convey the atmosphere of the environment where hip hop was born and the social class the hip hop representatives typically belong to.
The films’ choice successful choice of ballet as a point for comparison in order to highlight the class difference contributed to the authentic depicting of what poor conditions the hip hop representatives usually have for their development. Ballet is a “representation of the dominant classes, and therefore, is ascribed to be a high art” (Boyd 69). The directors of both films managed to create the typical images of the ballet dancers and their way of life opposing them to hip hop.
Mixing the opposite genres in the end also looks authentic due to the contemporary tendencies in the dancing world to combine the styles that seem to never fit together. Though one may never find the hip hop elements in ballet, it is rather widespread today to insert the ballet elements in the hip hop performances. So such approach of the directors of “Save the Last Dance” and “Street Dance” can be considered authentic.
Being one of the dominant cultures in the US, hip hop has found its way to cinema and, as any other popular phenomenon, has both good and bad depictions. Depending on the intelligence of the targeted audience, films on hip hop differ and while there are a lot of epic motion pictures that made the cinematographic history and can be considered the examples of authenticity, there are still dozens of those that are aimed at the teen audience which is only able to see the tip of the iceberg. “Save the Last Dance” and “Street Dance” are one of the latter films – they cover the topic in the utopian way, offer the unrealistic decisions and demonstrate absurd situations.
Works Cited
Arzumanova, Inna. It’s sort of Members Only: Transgression and Body Politics in “Save the Last Dance”. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen, 2014. Print.
Boyd, Jade. Dance, Culture and Popular Film: Considering Representations in “Save the Last Dance”. Feminist Media Studies 4.1 (2004): 67 – 83. Print.
Jun, Grace Shinhae. Moving Hip Hop: Corporeal Performance and the Struggle Over Black Masculinity. University of California, San Diego, 2014. Print.
Sachs, Aaron Dickinson. The Hip-Hopsploitation Film Cycle: Representing, Articulating, and Appropriating Hip-Hop Culture. University of Iowa, 2009. Print.
Sanchez, Tani. Understanding Black American Aspects in Hip Hop Cinema. Sentia Publishing, 2015. Print.
