Step Up; A cinematic look at the cultural paradigm

their relationship only works while their scholastic/life goals coincide
the "natural rhythyms" of the street must improve the stultified, prescribed traditions of the upper class


Step Up (2006) is the story of an art school student getting ready for her Senior Showcase while a white boy hip hop wanna-be minor street thug performs community service. Naturally they will interact and become a couple, but several interesting themes develop along the way.
To start with, the stakes are fascinating. For the female particularly it represents a true role reversal. For generations the cultural battle has been in favor of furthering the education of females. They have traditionally been undereducated and college or university education has been presented as the tough to reach dream. In Step Up the dream is instead to avoid college by garnering an appointment with some dance company, although which company is never revealed. It is enough that in a world where the abstract "education" has become God that in this movie her dream can only be achieved by avoiding Higher Education. It is telling that the applications to Brown and Cornell are a bone of contention between our young heroine and her mother. Not content with the subtleties, they even have the explicit line, "Well, it looks like you will get your dream after all" said to the mother by the daughter after her dance partners go down in flames. The battle lines are clear: the mother dreams of a solid education for her daughter while her daughter cares nothing for the book learning and wishes only a career on the stage.
The stakes for the male lead are at teh far end of the spectrum. He already has the dance skills, although only in a "streetwise hip-hop" manner that remains ignorant of classical dance moves and/or names for the moves. He, however, has no education and for him the stakes are two-fold: first, to get the girl and second to be accepted into the Academy of Arts. In other words, in stark contrast to the female goal of avoiding education the rosy outlook for his future is directly tied to furthering his education.
This point and counter-point is a continuing theme throughout the movie. If one scene shows our male hero at home then the next scene must show her at home. If he is shown practicing his craft of stealing cars or working the basketball courts for money then she must be shown practicing her dance steps. This allows the movie to provide a blatant point-counterpoint that is meant to show the tragedy of both lives as one story reflects the other.
For instance, both protagonists have lost their father. For the white suburban girl the father died tragically of cancer if I recall correctly. For the urban black (conveniently played by a white although his closest friends are all black) the when, where, why and how of his parents disappearing (and he is without either parent, living in a foster home) that part of the story is unimportant. It is enough to know the parents are not there, nor are they expected to be there. Unlike the white suburban parent whose departure must be framed as tragic the expectation is that suburban hip-hop kids have a parent missing as a matter of course.
To further illustrate the assumed and expected disconnect between the "nuclear family" and the urban youth one needs look no further than the relationship between out hero and his closest friends...who live with their single mother. Again, what happened to him is unimportant (in the context of the movie and establishing "who" each character is) and is simply assumed.
The existence or status of the parental relationship is, however, expanded on through continued use of the his life-her life artifice. In one scene our erstwhile male role model walks into the apartment, undersized, unsanitary, and crowded. Returning from his court date he has a brief war of words with the foster father, a man never seen shaven, without a beer in his hand, or out of his chair. The foster father asks the foster mother, "So what did he get?" By asking her instead of the guilty party it is clearly illustrated he is persona non gratis. Our hero replies, "What do you care, you get your check every month." Thus the sole role of the male parent is to drink and get money and the child learns nothing from him.
To show the parenting skills shown towards the female, suburban girl we then see her and her mother at opposited ends of a table that is too large for the two. Few words are exchanged between them and those are only meant to show that, while the surroundings might be opulent, the basic relationship is just as twisted and at odds as that of the foster family. In each case the child is seen by the parents as what they can get for themselves rather than someone to be nurtured and helped: for the urban male he is a dollar figure, for the suburban girl she is a chance for her mother to live vicariously through her in a scholastic sense. Neither is shown as having value outside those bounds.
Nor does the romantic relationship have any value outside the context of her search for a future in dance. When they work together on the routine they become more and more romantically involved. By contrast, when her former partner returns to replace the male hero, his ouster from the practice also ends their romantic relationship. Their relationship only works so long as they have the dance and her future to keep them together.
Everything about their relationship relates to the dance. She holds the position of power as the instructor, guiding him through the most basic steps and terminologies.


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