How did I get through the past 24 years without seeing Footloose? It was on TV last night. I watched it with my daughter, who likes to dance. When it came out, in 1984, I was in college, and never went to movies, except for free ones on campus. I never would have gone to that movie anyway, probably would have looked down my nose at such popular entertainments back then. Now I see it in a different light. What has happened to this country in the past two and half decades that Footloose now looks positively subversive? The right-wing, neo-conservative take-over of America, that’s what.

Footloose, as everyone but me, before last night, knows, is about a Christian town out in the heartland where dancin’ is against the law. The force behind this ban on fun is the local preacher, played by an imperfectly cast John Lithgow (who is always good, but someone like a young Robert Duvall would have been better).

Breezin into town comes big city transfer student “Ren McCormack,” played by the spiky-haired, pug-nosed Kevin Bacon (the most normal celebrity I have ever met. In the mid-90s I was sent by a magazine to do a piece on his wife, Kyra Sedgwick. He picked me up at the train station in the little town they lived in in Connecticut. Just a nice working actor man.).

Ren, who wears skinny, new wave ties and drives a yellow VW bug (read: post-hippie liberal politics), isn’t used to this repressive sort of atmosphere. Ren’s just gotta dance! The smartest scene in the movie has him quoting Biblical passages celebrating dancing at a town council meeting.

(A few side revelations: a frizzy-haired Sarah Jessica Parker plays a local girl, pre-Sex in the City makeover. She’s always affable. A muscley, hot Christopher Penn—brother of Sean—plays a local hick who Ren teaches to bust a move. R.I.P. And the gorgeous Lori Singer—whatever happened to her?—is slinkily wonderful as the preacher’s wild daughter. This was back when female sexuality was actually palpable on screen. Not any more.)

Do you think Footloose could get made in Hollywood today? I doubt it. “It’s a movie about a town where the fire-and-brimstone preacher outlaws dancing.” Ooooh, that won’t play in the red states. The Pat Robertson contingent might get mad. What was once seen as a marginal sector of America—“crazy” right-wing Christians—is now feared and catered to.

(And by the way, I think Jesus was a badass. I just think he’s misunderstood.)

The most popular movie in Hollywood today is a story about a teenage girl who foregoes an abortion to have her baby. “Juno” is funny, well-written, and clever (maybe overly clever) with lots of snappy pop-cultural references. I laughed. Ellen Page is impossibly cute. The supporting characters are endearingly cranky. But the ultimate message is a reactionary one: abortion=bad. It’s a red state message wrapped up in a blue state container, full of hipster witticisms, making an overall purple package, with broad appeal. And with the beating red heart of an unborn baby inside.

Lost in all of Juno's irresistably cranky cuteness, let's not forget that the Republican Party has backed a constitutional amendment that would outlaw abortion (a little different from outlawing dancing), making both women and their doctors subject to criminal penalties for destroying a fetus. The Bush administration has also denied financing for organizations that support abortion or even mention its availability.

Nobody *likes* abortion. But it's a complicated issue that Juno glosses over too glibly, just as it glosses over all the complicated emotions felt by someone giving up a baby. It’s not cool to be feminist these days, I guess—we’re, like, so beyond that; just like we’re beyond race, right?—but I was also made uncomfortable by the way Juno’s body is so gleefully used for the baby-making needs of this barren yuppie woman (who somehow turns about to be the only really sympathetic character of the bunch; probably because, for all her uptightness, she is complicated, rather than a wisecrack-spewing machine).

Juno endorses the idea of the “woman as vessel,” even as it pretends to make fun of it. Would the allegedly liberal audiences who love this movie feel the same about it if Juno were a poor black girl rather than a poor white one? Oh, but this barren yuppie woman wouldn't want a poor black baby, would she? (And what's with all the "funny" asides about kids popping anti-depressants and sleeping pills? Talk about cynical.)

I think it’s this movie that isn’t cool, dude. It just looks and sounds and maybe feels cool, to some people. I wouldn't want my daughter to see it. I did, on the other hand, feel o.k. about her watching Footloose. She twirled around the room during all the awful 80s dance numbers. "Praise the Lord with timbrel and dance," as it says in Psalm 150.