Saturday Night Respite

Rating: Null/10 (3 October 2009)

"An avowal of poverty is no disgrace to any man; to make no effort to escape it is indeed disgraceful." – Thucydides
"The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it." – Alan Saporta
John Badham directs "Saturday Night Fever". The plot? A group of frustrated 1970s working class youths escape the drudgery of life by disappearing into a world of sex, drugs and the pulsating lights of local disco clubs. One of these kids, a guy called Tony Manero (played by John Travolta), meets a girl called Stephanie, a cute dancer who aspires to greater things.
Being with Stephanie causes Tony to gradually become disillusioned with the life he is leading. Stuck in a dreary job and living with deadbeat parents, Tony finally decides to skip town, drop his loser friends and start afresh. Afterall, maybe he can be somebody. Maybe he can achieve something for himself.
The film ends with Tony and Stephanie living together, both determined to help one another climb the ladder to success. Like most films, "Saturday Night Fever" makes the mistake of suggesting that some external change in location will bring about some internal state of happiness, but perhaps its ending isn't meant to imply change. The film hints that this couple will forever be stuck in a rut.
Directed by John Badham ("War Games"), "Saturday Night Fever" is of course famous for its soundtrack and its groovy dance scenes. Yes, Travolta's portrayal of Manero comes across as being a bit camp nowadays, but this doesn't hamper the film. Virtually every shot, every cocky pose he strikes, is iconic.
Ironically, beneath the film's razzle-dazzle is one depressing movie, very much akin to the gritty "kitchen sink" and "New Wave" dramas churned out by British and French film makers in the late 50s and early 60s. This kind of murky social realism would prove influential on Hollywood directors, giving birth to a string of neo realist Hollywood films in the late 1960s and 70s - though most masked depoliticization behind faux grit - arguably the most interesting period of American cinema.
What's most interesting about "Saturday Night Fever", though, is this: most films within this genre align their song and dance numbers with their audience's own desires. IE - we celebrate those succeeding on screen because we secretly yearn for that special brand of Hollywood escapism. The audience's act of escaping drudgery via cinema then becomes, in theory, the on screen act of Travolta escaping his grimy life via dance. But "Saturday Night Fever" short circuits this fantasy at every turn, the film incrementally peeling back its disco lights to reveal a world of rape, drugs, suicide, class based frustrations and violent race wars. There is no escape, and the audience is always aware of what exactly its craving's are consoling.
In this way, the film highlights the urgency with which man clings to easy, manufactured escapes. More importantly, the film demonstrates how the frustrations of the working classes are built up and then channeled down the social hierarchy, animosity misdirected and aimed at equally or less unfortunate people. Travolta articulates this during his "cycle of s**t" speech toward the end of the film, in which he explains how his father's bitterness at having lost his job causes the old man to "take a s**t" on his son, who passes "the s**t" on to his Italian friends, who passes "the s**t" on to the Mexican gangs etc etc. The film's cure to this cycle of animosity is a kind of working class brotherhood. It suggests the forging of an empathic connection, born of collective suffering, between all men. Recognise the basic antagonistic struggle in which we are all caught, and join forces in a sort of mutual struggle.
8.5/10 – The 70s were odd. Even the silliest films had a kind of social urgency or attachment. Nowadays we have "Slumdog Millionaire" and "High School Musical", then we had "Rocky" and "Saturday Night Fever". Is it because films then seemed to be about real people, or because today's people aren't really real?