My Love and Hate Relationship With Grease

I am going to preface by saying I love the 1978 Grease starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John like I love cheap chinese. The soundtrack is a piece of my childhood and I love the 50s but the plot is inexcusable. It’s the kind of musical you watch with a tub of Edy’s Double Fudge Brownie ice cream. 

The movies main characters are the Pink Ladies and the T-birds, Rydell High’s cool, popular kids. Throughout the movie it shows them bully the school’s “nerds” like it’s comedy. One of the Pink Ladies, Jan, is portrayed as the “fat character”. Jan is a healthy weight but she is always shown eating and at one point her love interest even goes as far to say, “I also think that there’s more to you than just fat.” I could point out so many issues about this movie. It is so objectifying, it borderline supports sexual harassment through most of the male characters, or how the girls are held to such a double standard. 

I haven’t even got to the actual plot, the love story is completely and utterly toxic for any teenager or even adult to watch. Sandy is this sweet and innocent character who falls for a nice guy at the beach (Danny) and that’s where the sanity ends. She unbeknownst to them, she moves to his school their senior year. They inevitably run into each other at school and he is a totally different person because he has to act cool around his friends. He is a jerk to her and tells all his friends a ton of lies about the summer and it’s innocents. Like all high school relationships he gives a half effort apology and they get back together. He takes a pause on stealing car parts for his friends to try different sports to win her over but inevitably he is too primitive and masculine to be able to play any contact sports so he ends up running track for her. Throughout the movie he dances with an old flame named Cha Cha at the school dance leaving Sandy behind, and makes unwanted advances multiple times. This sparks an idea for Sandy. She decided to totally change who she is, she invests in leather pants and takes up smoking and leaves her morals behind. The whole idea of the movie is changing who you are completely for a significant other in high school.

 The movie ends with them leaving in the car the boys practically stole and driving into the sun. Not the sun set, the sun.