Laura Brannigan died this past August, at the early age of 47, of a brain aneurysm in her bed in Quogue. I was saddened to hear this. Laura Brannigan gave us the song "Gloria." Not "Gloria" the Van Morrison song, "Gloria" the Laura Brannigan song. It went platinum in 1982 and was notably featured in the movie Flashdance.

Flashdance (tagline: "What a feeling.") is a movie about the making and breaking of people with big dreams. "Gloria" plays in the scene in which Jeanie, the ice-skating friend of Alex, the Jennifer Beals character, gets her big break but blows it by wiping out in that spectacular way only ice skaters can (gasp-inducing sound of skate edge catching ice to launch jump followed by moment of slightly off-kilter spinning in air followed by extremely painful-looking skid of bare thigh and ass along ice). Though her friends are murmuring "get up, Jeanie, come on, Jeanie, get up," from the stands, Jeanie sits broken, on the ice, as the song "Gloria" reverberates in the frigid rink.

If we begin to unpack Flashdance (and I would like to suggest here that Flashdance has not been unpacked enough by film critics and semioticians to date) we see the ice-skater subplot as a kind of might-have-been, a cautionary tale to be redeemed by the main plot of the film. The ice-skating friend falls down and doesn't get up. This moment is both a foreshadowing of and counterpoint to the moment when Alex falls down and does get up, in the climactic ballet school audition scene.

Though she performs her avant-garde dances to an unappreciative crowd in a strip joint and supports herself as a welder by day, Alex gets an audition at a fancy ballet school, through the connections of her boyfriend, a presumably influential boss-of-people-who-weld. Perhaps he is a merchant of welded things? What is the correct title of the rich people in the welding cities of the world? Is it "robber baron?" Alex's boyfriend is a modern-day (well, mid-1980s) robber baron, one who prefers the company of much younger women who wear the bow tie and upper third of a tuxedo shirt and nothing else to a dinner date.

In a memorably lit room, before the requisitely stony faces of the foreboding ballet school admissions board, Alex begins her unorthodox and electrifying dance routine but falls down after the first few bars. "Can I start again?" she asks, registering the painful mix of hope and devastation any eighteen-year-old welder with a heart of gold and a furnace of raw, untrained dance potential would feel if she had just fallen down in a heap during her once-in-a-lifetime shot at the training that could catapult her from the unsavory stage of the strip joint, where her femininty is sold as a commodity, to the stage of the opera house, where it will be respectfully exalted. She starts again and dances the piece to completion, culminating in an unorthodox and electrifying tumbling sequence I was urged by my parents not to try to recreate in our living room without a stunt double.

The audition scene has since been immortalized shot-for-shot in a J.Lo video, used to teach the welders how to strip in The Full Monty and referenced with typical HBO Original Series genius in a dream sequence in the second season of Six Feet Under, in which Claire, who is applying to art school, places herself in the audition scene and then dreams that her limbs are grotesquely snapping off while she tries to perform. The Six Feet Under reference in particular demonstrates that the Flashdance audition scene occupies a niche in our cultural memory. The scene serves as a receptacle for and articulation of anxiety about performance, judgment, failure, and paralysis. It also provides us with the narrative possibility of overcoming these fears in a way that culminates in an electrifying tumbling sequence.

We can read Alex's "getting up" at her audition not only as the literal resurrection of Alex, the dancer, but a symbolic re-creation of Alex, the woman. The physical act of her falling indicates that she is a "fallen" or "incomplete" woman, a notion confirmed by Alex's unladylike occupation, marginal place of residence (a loft), suggestive outfits and sexually liberated behavior, and ownership of a menacing, masculine dog, . She seeks entrance to the ballet academy, but she also seeks entrance to the more legitimate self-expression--within more legitimate paradigms of femininity--that the ballet academy offers.

When Alex gets up in the audition scene, she is reborn like a phoenix from her old life along the margins, to her new life inside more conventional forms of dance and womanhood. In the final scene, the Robber Baron brings Alex flowers and ties a feminizing celebratory bow around the menacing dog's neck, representing the neutralization of Alex's shadow masculinity. To further enforce the parallel stories, Jeanie--the permanently fallen woman--is left by her comedian boyfriend after she falls down on the ice. She receives neither the big break nor the romantic love that will rescue her from obscurity, poverty and lonliness.

The soundtrack to the audition scene and the final scene that immediately follows is, of course, "What A Feeling." "What A Feeling" is an exuberant ode to the familiar theme of triumph over difficult odds. "Gloria," in contrast, is a much darker work. Tying "Gloria" to the character of Jeanie while "What A Feeling" belongs to Alex further emphasizes their opposite fates. While "What A Feeling" is about a woman's re-creation, "Gloria" describes a woman's undoing.

For those of us looking for a heroine, Flashdance provides one, ready to dance off into the Pittsburgh sunset in her pink satin slippers. But for those of us who would rather sing with--and about--the losers, the underdogs, the broken and the lonely, as well as the paranoid and the unhinged, Laura Brannigan, with "Gloria," gave us an anthem.

Gloria
by Laura Brannigan
lyrics reprinted without any permission whatsoever

Gloria
You're always on the run now
Running after somebody
You gotta get him somehow

I think you got to slow down
Before you start to blow it
I think you're headed for a breakdown
So be careful not to show it

You really don't remember
Was it something that he said
All the voices in your head
Calling GLO-RI-A

Gloria
Don't you think you're fallin'?
If everybody wants you
Why isn't anybody calling?

You don't have to answer
Leave 'em hangin' on the line
Oh-oh-oh Calling GLO-RI-A

Gloria (GLO-RI-A)
I think they got your number (GLO-RI-A)
I think they got the alias (GLO-RI-A)
That you been living under (GLO-RI-A)

But you really don't remember
Was it something that they said
All the voices in your head
Calling GLO-RI-A

Gloria
How's it gonna go down
Will you meet him on the main line
Or will you catch him on the rebound
Will you marry for the money
Take your lover in the afternoon
Feel your innocence slippin' away
Don't believe it's coming back soon

And you really don't remember
Was it something that they said
All the voices in your head
Calling GLO-RI-A