Yes, Grease was deeply problematic – but it was ahead of its time, too

For over four decades, Grease has been the word that you heard, the singalong at every wedding, the costume for any dress-up party and the go-to school holiday movie.

Like the Beatles, the law of relativity and onion going on top of sausage sandwiches, Grease exists in the world without question; it is a part of who we are collectively and socially.

Iconic but too problematic? Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta in Grease.Credit: AP

For those of us born after its original release, the teenagers of Rydell High always felt as real as the more contemporary coming-of-age characters in films like Clueless or Looking for Alibrandi. Yet as tributes flow in for Olivia Newton-John following her recent death and the 1978 film climbs its way up streaming viewer lists again, re-visiting the film I spent hundreds of hours watching as a child and experiencing it through adult eyes for the first time was nothing short of bizarre.

I can still recite the lyrics to Summer Nights as easily as if they were my phone number or address, and Danny and Sandy’s jive choreography from the school dance competition still feels as familiar as it did all those years ago when I would practice non-stop in my grandparent’s living room and ignore the countless requests for me to stop rewinding and pausing so much that I’d warp the videotape and break the remote control.

But like so many other films of its era, Grease is filled with small moments and casually dropped lines I’d either never heard, not remembered or simply failed to understand at the time, that in 2022 stand out like a cheap polyester Pink Ladies jacket and made me question if I was actually watching the same movie.

There is, of course, the moment in which the T-Birds ask Danny if Sandy “put up a fight” during their summer romance in Summer Nights and later, the declaration that Kenickie’s car would be “a real pussy wagon” that girls will “cream” over in Greased Lightnin’.

Then there are the smaller scenes that happen in passing, like when one of the T-Birds positions himself under the seats of girls to stare up their skirts without knowledge or consent while his friends look on laughing. Or later, when Marty casually mentions to Rizzo that a male adult spiked her drink in a bid to take advantage of her.

There’s also the overly simplistic depiction of female characters in Sandy and Rizzo. When I was little, you either dreamed of being Sandy Olsson, the stunningly naive Australian whose purity, kindness and perfectly set blonde hair would make you the envy of any girl in school, or you aspired to be Rizzo, a dark-haired defiant queen of one-liners with a penchant for chain-smoking and chewing gum.

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 Dropout, there 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.

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 it’s 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 Grease, even when its car inexplicably ascends into the clouds never to be seen again.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.