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Billy Elliot

Plot Overview

Set-Up

In the opening scenes, director Stephen Daldry establishes the conventions and characters of County Durham in the United Kingdom. We meet Billy’s family and are introduced to the historical context—the 1984-5 UK Coal Miners’ Strike which Billy’s father (Jackie, a widower) and brother (Tony) take part in.

Jackie sends Billy to boxing lessons to "toughen up". This introduces one of the film’s main conflicts: Jackie’s insistence on Billy being masculine. This becomes an issue when Billy is more interested in dancing than boxing!

Confrontation

Tension rises when Billy continues secret ballet lessons. While Jackie believes that ballet is a "girl's" sport, Billy can’t see the problem. So, Billy continues lessons in private with his ballet teacher, Mrs Wilkinson, training to audition at the Royal Ballet School!

Over Christmas, Billy’s best friend Michael comes out as queer. Billy accepts him and teaches him to dance so he can express himself! As Billy teaches Michael, Jackie catches them, but this time is in awe of Billy’s talent and vows to help his son.

At the same time, the Miners’ Strike is reaching its peak. To help pay for Billy’s audition in London, Jackie returns to work and is berated for "scabbing". Eventually recognising he can’t go back to work, he sells his wife’s old jewellery to raise the funds.

Resolution

Finally, we reach the climax: Billy’s audition in London. He's under-trained and has poor technique. He underperforms and lashes out at another student in frustration.

The audition panel seems unimpressed with him. But as Billy goes to leave, they ask him one last question: how does he feel when he dances? He gives a moving speech about the power dancing brings him and the panel seems more inclined towards him, but give no indication of his success.

Billy receives his letter from the Academy revealing he got in. Jackie, ecstatic with joy, runs down the streets of Durham dancing and crying!

Epilogue

In the epilogue, set 14 years later, we learn that Billy has become a successful dancer.

Jackie, Tony, and Michael gather to watch Billy perform Swan Lake. The final shot is of his father crying in the audience—a real tear-jerker. The end!

Three-Act Structure

Okay, so now we’ve covered the plot, let’s learn about how it’s divided up into three separate acts.

The three-act structure is used often in narratives because of its simplicity. It makes a story easy to follow and allows a satisfying build-up of tension that is resolved by the end.

The three-act structure involves three distinct segments: the set-up, confrontation, and resolution. It forms an arc of tension and conflict, starting at the low point of the set-up and travelling upwards through the confrontation to a climax to be resolved by the end of the film.

It also includes an inciting incident, a mid-point and a climax. Let's explore each of those within the overarching sections!

Set-Up

First, the set-up. This is where the characters and ideals of the story are introduced, and the audience gets little hints as to what’s going to happen later.

In Billy Elliot, the set-up introduces County Durham. We also learn some of the film’s key ideas: the value of masculinity, the importance of the UK Miners’ Strike and Billy’s passion for dance.

The set-up also includes an inciting incident: a plot point that happens early on in the film that causes the rest of the story to spiral. In this case, the inciting incident is Billy switching from boxing to ballet in secret. Without this incident, the rest of the story couldn’t play out as it does.

Confrontation

The confrontation marks the point where tensions escalate.

It includes the mid-point: the middle of the film, where everything develops. Problems are rising, but we haven’t quite reached the climax. In Billy Elliot, the main confrontation is Jackie discovering Billy dancing and forbidding him from continuing.

Resolution

Billy Elliot’s resolution includes a lot of friction. First, Billy is found to still be dancing. Then, once his father comes around to that problem, there’s the craziness trying to raise money for his trip to London.

The tensions build into the climax: the point of the movie where everything is at its most intense. This is the moment where he gets to the audition, and it doesn’t seem to go well. This plot point is finally resolved when he is accepted into the ballet school. Basically, the resolution is when everything goes wrong and then everything is fixed!

Epilogue

Not all narratives have one, but Billy Elliot's epilogue is important. The epilogue is the final few scenes of the film set many years later, where Billy has become a famous ballet dancer.

The epilogue shows the final stage of development for each character—Billy becomes a ballet dancer, Michael embraces his sexuality and Jackie sheds a tear and shows emotional vulnerability at his son’s performance.

Human Experiences Explored

The Pursuit of Creativity as a Means of Achieving Personal Growth; Determination

It is through his pursuit of ballet that Billy is able to achieve personal growth for both himself and his family. This idea unfolds in a highly linear fashion, as we see Billy as initially hesitant and somewhat reserved, before becoming more engaged in ballet, and ultimately embracing it completely. His family largely undergoes a similar process of personal growth, as they move from viewing Billy’s pursuit of ballet as something to be embarrassed by to recognising his immense potential and accepting it.

The character’s transformations are encapsulated within the final scene, as the shot of Billy leaping into the air, captured in the light, represents his personal growth, while the close-up of Jackie’s face as he cries similarly reveals just how much he has changed, as he recognises his son’s talent and grieves for the difficulties he placed him under when he was younger.

Gender Expectations; Prejudice and Social Pressures

The prevalence and destructive power of gender expectations are explored thoroughly throughout Billy Elliot, but so too are the ways they can be negotiated and even overcome. At first, Billy’s family are militant and indeed violent in their attempts to indoctrinate Billy into the hyper-masculinity that characterises the town and its broader context – it is symbolic that Jackie urges him to box, itself a violent sport, as a way to secure his masculinity. Similarly, the uncompromising nature of Jackie and Tony’s masculinity is reflected through Jackie’s impassioned dialogue “Lads do football or boxing or wrestling. Not ballet.”

Billy’s pursuit of ballet is thus presented as a subversion of gender expectations, and while it would be reasonable to expect him to be exiled from his family given his father and brother’s attitudes, that they actually come to embrace his passion for dance and support it is reflective of how gender expectations can be dismantled, in turn revealing just how reductive and problematic they are.

How ballet allows Billy to break free from the pressures of gender expectations is conveyed through the long shot of him dancing through the alley way with the ocean in the background, which represents the scale of opportunity, while the bricked walls of the houses that surround him on both sides symbolise the oppressiveness of the town.

Loss; Grief

From the outset of the film, we are aware of the fact that Billy’s life is marked by loss. The notions of loss and grief are explored in two different ways: there is the economic suffering currently afflicting the town, and the loss and grief experienced by the Elliot family following the death of Billy’s mother. The way in which the two overlap is communicated through the wide-angle shot of Billy and his grandmother walking in the field towards his mother’s grave, with the coal factory in the background.

Moreover, the close-up shot of the family sitting at the kitchen table serves to emphasise the mother’s absence, and the way in which it bears down upon the family unit, and in doing so is as oppressive as their poverty is. The piano then serves to symbolise the mother’s continuing presence in the house, but it is how the characters interact with it that reveals how they deal with the grief. This sense of loss and grief somewhat fades as the film continues, as Billy’s determination and his family’s eventual support for his dreams come to overshadow any sense of hopelessness. Of course, this process comes to a climax when Billy receives the letter of acceptance just as the miner’s strike is ending.

Key Takeaways

And that’s it! We’ve started pretty simply. From here we’ll be deep-diving into Billy Elliot, and taking our understanding much deeper.

Billy Elliot has a three-part structure: it begins with the set-up, rises to the confrontation, then peaks and falls in the resolution.
The set-up introduces the main characters and tensions of the film.
- The main tension established is between Billy’s passion and the town’s values.
- The film's inciting incident here is when Billy secretly switches from boxing to ballet.
The confrontation is when tensions escalate.
- The mid-point of these tensions is when Jackie discovers his son wants to be a dancer and forbids it!
The resolution builds the tensions into a climax, then resolves them.
- Billy Elliot also gives us a happy ending in the epilogue!

And that’s it! Catch you next time!

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