Canadian music journalist Andrea Warner's entry in ECW Press's Pop Classics series is a slim volume that tackles a big film with heart and humor. The Time of My Life: Dirty Dancing contains five essays about the cultural and personal impact of the film. Warner (Rise Up & Sing! Power, Protest, and Activism in Music) notes how Dirty Dancing introduced novel elements, in the form of its unconventionally beautiful Jewish protagonist, Frances "Baby" Houseman, who is outspoken and interested in social change, and in the way that a "pressing need for an abortion... drives the action." Warner also offers a ranking of each song on the film's iconic soundtrack and balances a playful bashing of the movie's sequels and stage musical adaptation with a true love and respect for the original film.
The book isn't an uncritical celebration; Warner recognizes the whitewashed, privileged version of social activism presented in Baby's story. As she recounts the struggles of Eleanor Bergstein, Dirty Dancing's creator, to get studio support for a sex-positive movie about a burgeoning feminist who learns the realities of the world via exposure to a botched abortion, she also highlights how Bergstein took from Black and Latinx culture "without acknowledgement or any real engagement with those communities" in the film. "Latinx and Black forms of dance blend together to create the so-called 'dirty dancing' that drives the film, but it's largely performed by white dancers throughout the movie," she observes. Warner's prose reads like a conversation with a friend about all the ways this cultural comfort movie imperfectly captures the human experience in this authentic, frank love letter to Dirty Dancing. --Kristen Coates, editor and freelance reviewer