In the gleam of sweat on bare shoulders, in the sudden snap of a strobe-lit pirouette, in the promise of escape built from steel and longing — there lies Adrian Lyne. To talk about Lyne is to talk about seduction of the flesh, of the image, of aspiration. And no film of his is more emblematic of that glimmering double edge than “Flashdance” (1983), the movie that brought post-industrial Pittsburgh into the realm of myth and gave the American Dream a pulsing synth beat.

Born in 1941 in Peterborough, England, Lyne began his career in British advertising, where his keen eye for sensual imagery and visual storytelling emerged. His early work directing commercials, particularly in the 1970s, earned him accolades for stylistic flair and emotional punch — qualities that would define his feature film career.

Lyne made his feature debut with “Foxes” (1980), a raw and moody look at teenage girls coming of age in Los Angeles. With smoky interiors, nocturnal wanderings, and emotionally exposed performances — especially from a young Jodie Foster — “Foxes” established many of Lyne’s aesthetic signatures: chiaroscuro lighting, atmospheric music, and a fascination with the tension between youthful vulnerability and adult desire.

That Lyne is British — and emerged not from the American studio system but the world of UK commercials — adds a layer of remove to his American dreams. His outsider status allowed him to approach Americana with fascination. Like Antonioni filming Los Angeles in “Zabriskie Point,” Lyne renders the U.S. as a hyper-image, a space of performance rather than reality. Pittsburgh becomes mythic because he understands how to make it appear worth believing in. His America is a projection stylized with outsider precision.

Lyne didn’t invent the dance-as-redemption trope; he repackaged it for the MTV generation, stripping it of its last traces of grit and hanging it in a gallery of chrome and Vaseline-smeared light. He gave us “Flashdance,” a film that owes as much to commercial advertising and the perfume of soft-core erotica as it does to cinema.

But suppose you squint past the fog machines and silhouettes of legwarmers. What you find is more cunning and more hollow: the shell of working-class struggle replaced by a music video dreamscape, a promise of transcendence whose cost is always off-screen.

Yet “Flashdance” didn’t arrive from nowhere. It was born from the embers of the 1970s, already fascinated with the tension between working-class bodies and stylized movement — ordinary people performing extraordinary rhythms.

Echoes from the Disco

Before there was Alex Owens (Jennifer Beals) in “Flashdance,” there was Tony Manero (John Travolta), strutting down a Brooklyn street to the beat of the Bee Gees. “Saturday Night Fever” (1977) cracked open the disco floor as a crucible of class frustration and masculine yearning. Tony, trapped in a dead-end job and a suffocating culture, danced for momentary freedom.

What many forget is that “Saturday Night Fever” was based on a piece of journalism by Nik Cohn, “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” published in New York magazine. Though later revealed to be fictionalized, it gave the........

© Arkansas Online