Grease
The title theme song kind of gives away the symbolic meaning of grease: “This is the life of illusion.” This musical comedy is all about not just illusion, but the preference for recognized falsity of illusion over the truth of reality. Grease refers specifically to the fifties “type” that is at the center of the story: “greasers.” Greasers get their name from the stuff they put into their hair to give it unnatural shape; greased hair is an illusion of reality and the even though it is obvious, the girls and guys both prefer it.
Summer
Danny and Sandy meet and fall in love during the summer. Away from peer pressure, Danny was able to reveal his true self and was attractive to Sandy because, according to the song, he was cute and sweet (or, as Rizzo observes, “a drag”). When they meet again in the fall, Sandy sees Danny’s peer-pressure-induced greaser façade for the first time, prompting her to ask what happened to that guy she met on the beach. By the end, however, she has adopted the façade as well, wearing leather and smoking. Summer thus becomes a symbol for truth and reality.
Sandra Dee
Sandra Dee was an actress who attained the peak of movie stardom in a series of films in which she played a virginal, innocent young woman engaging in the most tepidly sexual of romances. As such, she is often used for the purpose of allusion to symbolize the conservatism and innocence of the 1950’s, but what makes her such an appropriate symbol in Grease is the irony and the application. For one thing, Dee’s superstar years were not the 1950’s, but the 1960’s. The innocence of her character when involved in romantic entanglements represents not reality of 1950’s life for young men and women and high school teens, but Hollywood’s false replication and it is that vision of the decade—the Hollywood version and not the real life one—that Grease itself recreates.
Pregnancy
When informing Marty that she might be pregnant, Rizzo shows off a nifty mastery figurative language by engaging symbolism to describe a metaphor for being pregnant.
Rizzo: I feel like a defective typewriter.
Marty: Huh?
Rizzo: I skipped a period.
The Fun House
The musical number in which Danny and Sandy finally reconcile takes place in a carnival funhouse. The kind of attraction in which everything is a little shaky, off-balance or distorted. There’s a giant revolving tunnel. A floor that bounces up an down. The “Shake Shack” that tilts back and forth. There is also a sign on the tunnel reading “Danger Ahead” and at one point two are framed from the shoulders up against a backdrop consisting of windows that look like prison bars. The symbolism of the future of this rocky relationship speaks for itself and quite loudly at that.
