The message for wannabe Sandy’s was simple. To be the ultimate fantasy and object of male desire you should be thin and blonde, kind and intelligent, come from a good home, wear ankle-length twin sets, respect your body and say no to boys trying to sexually pressure you while also being jaw-droppingly sexy and willing to drive men wild by wearing skin-tight outfits and red lipstick.
For those who looked to Rizzo, things were a little murkier. She was motivated by having fun instead of getting straight-A grades, disliked good girls, brought booze to sleepovers and snuck out windows when they got boring. She could be mean and cruel, but also cuttingly funny and self-aware as she proved in the wistful tune Worse Things I Could Do.
Newton-John’s sweet character Sandy had to learn to become sexy in Grease – a character arc the actor said she didn’t take too seriously.Credit:
As a kind of cautionary tale to girls who saw themselves in Rizzo, she was forced to endure being called “sloppy seconds” by Danny and faced her classmates gossiping about her potential teen pregnancy after she made the seemingly reckless decision to have unprotected sex with her boyfriend.
By the end of the film, though, Rizzo and Sandy are friends and as a reward for making peace with the good girl, Rizzo gets her man and her period.
Before her death, Newton-John discussed how the film had aged and Sandy’s role within that, telling ITV, “I know there were some criticisms about me wanting to change to be like him. It’s a movie and it’s a fun story and I have never taken that too seriously.”
Stockard Channing, who played Rizzo, called Sandy’s evolution of good girl gone bad “a moment of empowerment” for young women of the time and said her own character was “someone who enjoyed sex”, noting the inclusion of such a character onscreen in the 1970s was still relatively rare and positive for women.
So would a film that puts blonde beauty and virginity on a pedestal rake in $160 million at the box office today? Probably not. But would a storyline in which young women make their own decisions about their sexual desire and visual identities in spite of male attention still resonate? Absolutely.
For every nonsensical scene, like a middle-aged man appearing as an angel and telling a teenage girl to go back to high school to continue her studies in the doo-wop Beauty School Dropoutthere are thoroughly modern moments in characters like Mrs Murdoch, the school’s mechanic teacher, a woman who shows the boys everything they know about cars or Frenchy feeling lost about her future and not knowing what career path to take.
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Grease is a film that has somehow managed to last the distance not in spite of its dichotomies, but because of them. Just when you think its dated and reductive and gone too far, a character says or does something so forward-thinking it leaves you feeling shell-shocked. And before you have time to think about it, everybody has burst into song and dance. As a viewer, you find yourself oscillating between cringing one minute and joining the chorus the next. It doesn’t make
sense, but maybe it doesn’t have to.
For all its flaws, it’s hard to imagine a world in which people won’t always be at least a little bit hopelessly devoted to greaseeven when its car inexplicably ascends into the clouds never to be seen again.
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