Movie Review of Strictly Ballroom

It’s quite an impressive movie about dancing. I am amazed by the fact that most of the actors are not professional dancer, but I could see the enthusiasm and concentration.

There are three main components in Social Influence which are conformity, compliance, obedience. These three different types of social influence appear in different scenes. I will try to explain the presence of three theories in sequence.

Conformity

If we observe the ballroom dancing in another perspective, it is one kind of conformity. It has set rules asking people to follow. Obviously we know that most of the people follow the rules of the Australian Dance Federation. They want to win. They want to win so no one dare to be different. The settings and social norms make them conform. In the ballroom settings, social norms require dancer to dance “formally” and by rule. However, I think there’s still good in conformity. If everyone dance their own moves, how to compete with each other. We have to aware of the conformity, but the rules help us to be organized.

Conformity level is higher when there has confident confederate. In the first half of the movie, most of the people excluding Fran and Scott have no courage to dance in their own style, especially when the president Barry Fife is so confident and powerful.

Lastly, the scene of applause from his father Doug is a good example to show how minority could influence the majority. As a minority, his father shows great confidence and consistency in his applauses. They are loud, firm and clear.

Compliance

Normally there are three factors which are mood, reciprocity and giving reasons would develop compliance.

At first, Scott is not convinced under the authoritative influence of his mother. However, Barry presented in his mother’s ballroom. Mood and Giving Reasons factors are applied. Barry did not persuade Scott in the very beginning, but he told him a fake story to trigger his emotion. At the end of the story, he “beg” Scott to win the champion in order to help his own father to realize his dream. In this scene, Barry used foot in the door because story telling is a small request, but asking Scott to join the competition with Liz is a larger request. However, the technique was used in persuading Scott could be considered as door in the face. Most of the people got tough and required Scott to follow the rules and dance with Liz or Tina, but the atmosphere suddenly became soft and sentimental in this scene.

  

Obedience

There is one scene to show that Fran was threatened by Scott’s mother Shirley and others. It could be explained why Fran was influenced by three reasons which are proximity, group pressure and strength of the pressure.

In the famous Milgram’s electric shock experiment, we could know that physical presence and separate room could impact individual decision. In that scene, Fran and they are alone in the dressing room. Their physical presence gave Fran a huge pressure as well. It even involved touching when Shirley was dragging Fran into the room.

By considering the amount of people present, there are 3 versus 1. The strength of their orders was so determined and forceful as well.

Why do people dance?

There is a research found that dance is related to confidence, mate-selection and social bonding.

From a very practical point of view, dancing can help people to get in shape, express emotion and even establish relationship. However, if we look at dancing from the existential perspective, dancing might be a mirror that could reflect who you are. Scott is a passionate and open-minded person. We could describe his characteristics by only comparing the way his and others’ dance.

Sometimes words are insufficient. We look at the male lead Scott. Sometimes we might feel his words are less expressive than his dance. His dances were full of energy and emotion. For some people, dance is a better way to express themselves.