The title “Strictly Ballroom” itself provides a clue to what message the movie is trying to convey to audiences. From the title, it is not difficult to have a good guess that the movie centers around the background of ballroom dancing where a series of strict dancing rules and steps are highly encouraged and promoted. The main theme of the film emerges when the main character, Scoot Hastings begins his journey to dance his own steps in the Pan-Pacific Grand Prix Dancing Championship despite great social influence, where winning the championship is impossible if the conventional dance steps are not followed.
Follow Your Heart
One of my friends always like to tell me “follow your heart”, which actually means have courage to become the person you want to be and do what you want. However, as we all know that saying is so much easier than doing. There are a lot of factors, especially social factors, pull us from listening to our inner voices and push us into fulfilling someone else’ desires and wishes. Strictly Ballroom has illustrated a real social phenomenon, where people are easy to be affected by the social pressures that community brings to us. Social influence has its strong power to affect and manipulate a person’s thinking, behaviors and emotions. We might not see these powerful forces, but we should at least know that we are vulnerable to these unwanted manipulations.
One of these subtle forces is conformity, which is defined as a change of belief or behavior to accord with others (Myers, 2014). When everyone else is dancing the steps favored by Pan-Pacific competition to be the champion, would you dance the same steps to win? More than likely people would say “yes” if they want to win the competition, and the people say “yes” are conforming to the norm of ballroom dancing. Why people tend to conform? I guess the key is whether a person is afraid of being different, being judged and of bearing its consequence.
Is conformity good or bad?
As for what consequence might occur, conformity will not necessarily lead to bad consequences and conformity could be good or inconsequential. At times conformity could be beneficial for cultural evolution and survival because by being conformist, people imitate the things that are good and useful even they may not know why. Moreover, conformity could be useful when we are not familiar with something or in unfamiliar environment. Dancing is a great example. If you are a beginner and don’t know how to dance, you will mimic how others dance so you will not get embarrassed and in the meanwhile you can learn from others. Similar example can be found in the movie as well – the beginners in the dance studio learn ballroom dancing by following how others dance so that they can be a better ballroom dancer. Thus, conformity could be handy yet useful in such situation where we are not familiar with.
From the movie, we also learn of the disadvantages of conformity, such as the lack of creativity and innovation, the difficulty to go beyond comfort zone, and the loss of individuality. Many people tend to follow what other people do, not because they genuinely like or want to do it, but simply because of everyone else is doing it. When those dance steps are so popular and mainstream, the dancers follow the steps more than likely not because it was their own idea to begin with and they genuinely like to dance like that, but because everyone else is following the steps to win the championship and they don’t want to be the special outlier and lose the chance of winning. A bigger pool of people can mean more diversity of opinion and behavior, more uncertainty, and more likely the majority will take lead in the group. There are times when the fear of what may happen is about to hold us back from persuading what we truly want for, and to fight for the things we want our heart needs to be filled with determination. Like the main character, Scoot in the movie, he fights against the strict competition rules and his aggressive mother to dance his own way in Pan-Pacific competition because he does not want to be bound by the conventional steps. Fran and her family have also become Scoot’s greatest support who always encourage him to dance from his heart.
I guess the reason why dancing was used as the story background in this movie is that dancing symbolizes freedom of expression where dancers can express their emotions through different dance styles and steps. Even there may be obstacles hinder us from expressing ourselves, we can still find the ways to our heart and let our inner voices to be heard if we pluck up courage.
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