It’s crap.
Not as a movie – Baz Luhrmann certainly knows how to write and direct – but as a Belonging text. Oh, yes, there are certainly elements of Belonging in the text, but there are elements of Belonging in nearly every text; it is one of those concepts that are impossible to avoid. But the crux of the narrative does not rest on the belonging or not belonging of any of the core characters.
Let me explain. If this movie was – as the Board of Studies would have us – a Belonging text, then the main character would start the movie not belonging to a group he wishes to belong to and end it belonging there, or the other way around: belonging to a group, but leaving it at the end. This does not happen in Strictly Ballroom.
In Strictly Ballroom, Scott begins the movie an outsider to the Federation, a dancing organization, and beloved by the crowds. His main goal throughout the journey is to dance his own steps with Fran. His motive is his love of dancing. At the end of the movie, he is pressured into dancing the regulation steps, but at the last possible moment chooses to dance with Fran. He ends the movie an outsider to the Federation and beloved by the crowds.
Fran, the other main character, begins the movie an outsider to the dancing community but a definite member of her own Spanish community. Her main goal is to get Scott, it is implied in the line “You know how difficult it was to get you to dance with me in the first place” that she only stuck with dancing in the first place was to get Scott. Her motive is to find love. At the end of the movie, she’s a fancily dressed outcast of the dancing community, but an outcast nonetheless, and she still belongs to her Spanish community.
Every text, every story worth its salt, has a problem that needs to be solved and – aside from television shows - requires the protagonist to change an aspect of themselves to fix it. The aspect that changes is almost always - including this movie - linked with the theme of the text itself. Looking at my shelf beside me: “The Lord of the Rings” has Frodo, an innocent and sweet hobbit who becomes tough and somewhat ruthless to destroy the ring; “Up”, where a curmudgeonly old man tries to recover his sense of youth by going on an adventure, but in the end discovers that it is his relationship with others that make him feel young; “Serenity”, where Mal thinks he can solve all his problems by running from them, finally finds a cause he is willing to die for; Die Hard 3, where Bruce Willis begins the movie on a path to self-destruction and only survives because he realizes his estranged family still need him.
A protagonist of a belonging text has to begin as one thing and end as another because that is one of the archetypes that we, as audience members, come to expect, and this movie is nothing if not archetypical. A link leading off from the Wikipedia page of this movie tells of how Luhrmann "knowingly plays with stereotypes and cliches" to give the audience the movie they want.
If you have a movie about the Ugly Duckling, or the Cinderella, or the Quasimodo, or as a good example Shrek, or any number of unfortunate but good hearted outsiders who desperately want to be accepted by society (whether, in the case of Shrek, they know it or not), then to have a movie that ends with them still alone and unloved is a really soulcrushing movie.
I'm not saying that a good filmmaker can get away with doing this, in fact I'm certain its been done. (Possibly something with cowboys.) But to do so is a defiance of audience expectations that grinds at the audiences nerves. Audiences like being defied if the ending that results is a good one, but if everything seems set for a happy ending right before the protagonist changes their mind and goes right back to how they were at the start, then the audience feels cheated.
So with that in mind, how does Scott Hastings change himself to solve the problem of not being allowed to dance the way he wants? It is not by changing an aspect of himself related to Belonging, it is by defying authority. Not the communities that he belongs to – notice how everyone from the beginning was rooting for him – but a figure of power, in the form of Barry Fife.
From this, I conclude that Strictly Ballroom is a Power text – not a belonging text. It does, I admit, contain a lot of belonging themes, but belonging themes do not make a belonging text. This can be seen in (another movie on my shelf) Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Anakin clearly belongs on Tatooine, where he has friends and family and by the end of the movie is a local celebrity, being the first human to win the Pod-race. He is taken from that place of security to an unfamiliar world, where he sticks out like a sore thumb, dressed in simple home-spun clothes in front of the flashy and spacy Jedi Council. Two movies later, Anakin’s outsider-ness makes him mistrust the Jedi, to the destruction of all. But Star Wars is NOT a belonging text. Nor is it relevant to this essay, so I’ll move on.
With the idea that Strictly Ballroom is a Power text in mind, consider how the narrative pans out. Scott Hastings defies the traditional power structure at the beginning of the movie, when he dances his own steps. The powers that be smack down on Scott, giving the regional title to that guy with the white hair. His mother exerts her power on him, making him apologise to his dancing partner and uses his love of dancing against him, as a way to force him to conform. Then he meets with Fran who, although inexperienced as a dancer, shares his passion for creativity. When he goes to her house, he is surrounded by people he does not know; yet becomes accepted among them using the power of dance as a uniting force. When it becomes clear that Scott will not bend to the will of the Federation, the Federation Chief lies to him, making Scott change his mind by making up a story about his father, who the audience knows is a sorry sap in the present. Scott is suckered in by the story until his father shows how it was all a lie. Then the final showdown between Scott and the Federation Chief occurs, where the Chief decides to simply ban Scott, full-stop. However, the crowd, who love Scott’s dance style, decide to ignore this, and give him a clap that he can dance to. Chiefy dude falls over for no apparent reason, everyone dances, curtains.
Scott’s journey is one of going from powerless to powerful, by defying Barry Fife. This can be seen in the way that the movie is structured as a narrative. If you have a protagonist who belongs with the crowds to the hatred of the restrictive Federation, who ends the movie beloved by the crowds with the Federation Chief on the ground sobbing, then no transformation has taken place in regards to belonging; no lesson has been learned about conformity or individuality and thus the message of the movie does not rest on the main character's conformity or individuality, but rather about his ABILITY to be conformist or individual as he wishes. The crux of the movie is therefore not on belonging or not, but on the protagonists power to choose his own path, and when at the end of the movie, Scott chooses to continue dancing despite there being no music and despite being already disqualified, then the lesson he has learned is one of defying power, and the movies theme is also one of power.
The final showdown also cannot be explained as a showdown between belonging and not belonging, because Scott always belonged to the crowd, and the queen bee of the popular crowd equivalent that Scott tries to join is not grudgingly accepting of him, but sobbing in shock. The climax of the movie can only really be seen as a power battle between Scott’s popularity and Barry Fife’s authority. If it were a Belonging Text, then Barry would be shown all along as being everything that Scott is not – popular and orthodox; but since this is a Power text, Barry is shown in the finale as authoritative and powerful, whereas Scott is shown as powerless to stop Barry, that is until his father and the crowd intervene.
Power and belonging are related, it is true. Because power is one of those unavoidable things, and you could analyse virtually any text as being based around powerplay, and how power changes hands. But it is the crucial element – the element of the protagonist that changes for the protagonist to succeed – that defines the main theme of a movie. A character's transformation throughout a text could revolve around their morals and ethics, or their reclusiveness and their extroversion, or their sense of pragmatism being replaced by idealism, or their sense of self esteem being boosted by their quest, or any number of character flaws or character situations being fixed by trials and tests. What I am saying is that Scott's character flaw is not that he does not belong - he remains stubborn and steadfast about that from start to finish - but his ability to be manipulated by those around him, and his own personal sense of power as compared to his foe, Barry Fife, Federation Chief.
I am not the only one who thinks that Strictly Ballroom is a power text, it seems. On the HSC-Online website dealing with Strictly Ballroom, Scott’s struggle is told as a “David and Goliath” story. The word Power, on all three sub-pages, is used 6 times – all in the direct context of authority. The word Belonging also appears 6 times, as it appears twice in the heading of the three pages. In the actual text itself, it doesn’t appear. So even on the HSC Online support pages for Strictly Ballroom, there is no evidence given that Strictly Ballroom is a belonging text.
Strictly Ballroom – although containing definite Belonging elements – is clearly not a belonging text because Scott does not belong at the beginning, does not belong at the end and is perfectly happy with the difference. However, his Antagonist has gone from a state of power - the Federation Chief and a respected and powerful man - to a state of disgrace, when his disqualification is pointedly ignored by a crowd of hundreds of people. His mother no longer has sway over him, and Scott is assumedly free to follow his own path as a dancer. As the main thing stopping Scott furfilling his goal - dancing his own steps - has been the power of his mother and Barry Fife, it is clearly a power text. Although there is plenty to write about in a HSC question on Belonging, Scott’s belonging or not belonging is not the crucial issue, but the impetus. You could very easily replace Scott’s nonconformity with, I don’t know, his love of wearing green shoes and the plot would continue almost exactly the same – his mother in tears over his green shoe wearing, Barry Fife warning him about his father’s tragic green shoe tale, etc. etc. Scott Hasting’s non-conformity is a MacGuffin – something that drives the plot, but is otherwise entirely arbitrary, and thus the movie Strictly Ballroom is a story of Power, not one of Belonging.
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