Youthful Desperation & Frustration

Rating: 8/10 (17 May 2005)

"Saturday Night Fever" is an example of a youthful but very real desperation and frustration, ones that permeate all of existence. It is also in many respects a wonderful "time capsule" of the 1970s, and about an often-stereotyped and ignored group in the USA; inner-city, blue-collar white "ethnics" and their manifold and often difficult cultural and socio-economic plights that have not had an adequate and respected public voice, except for being selfishly warped and exploited by the likes of Richard Nixon and George Wallace. Unlike his cluelessly provincial friends and family, daytime Brooklyn paint store worker and nighttime local disco king Tony Manero (John Travolta) is much smarter and far more aware than he initially appears, deeply yearning to escape his limited and gloomy environment, fearing that, like his parents, he will soon be inescapably swallowed up by it.
The character of the seriously unhappy and increasingly desperate on-the-cusp-of-full-adulthood Manero is not a stereotype, as many mistakenly believe, but more accurately, a Weberian "archetype" of sorts (one that in Manero's case might have been created by Albert Camus himself) accurately embodying a general personality in a specific cultural milieu. He is also what anthropologists would term a "marginal" man, unpleasantly caught between his strong Brooklyn Italian-American ethnic identity (one with which he is not entirely comfortable because of what he believes are some of its undesirable attitudes and actions, unlike his friends and family) and the wish to "make it" over the bridge into the wider world of Manhattan (as represented by his honest and kind but rather transparently pretentious friend Stephanie) although unsure of how to proceed. Disco dancer Manero's character is the flip side of that of Soviet spy Christopher Boyce in the 1985 film "The Falcon and the Snowman;" both characters suffer from a profound existential and cynical despair about themselves and their respective and equally shallow (but radically different) personal worlds; worlds deeply infected by the general cultural malaise, lethargy and escapism that dominated the USA in the 1970s, infections which they are trying to personally remedy in some manner, albeit in significantly different (but not in necessarily wise, healthful or rational) ways.
A most important scene in the film was when Tony's favored older brother Frank suddenly decides to quit the Catholic priesthood (a landmark event echoing in the later "Falcon" when Boyce quits the Catholic seminary in disgust) a decision which sends shock waves through the family. It's a poignant scene of shattering disillusionment and utter disappointment; their parents' thin, dreamlike hold on vicarious middle-class respectability is suddenly swept aside, and in the wake of this trauma, the younger and less-favored Tony, to them, becomes just an even more pathetic example of someone going nowhere fast (the lyrics of the BeeGees' gritty song "Stayin' Alive" completely and concisely encapsulate the entire theme of this film.) However, amid the bitter wreckage of these various seemingly solid but in truth quite fragile and dangerous illusions (one among them being Tony's approaching loss of unchallenged dominance on the local disco dance floor) Tony fitfully realizes that he is finally "free" in a truly existential sense, and only then can he leave behind his bleak, dead-end world while still unattached and quite young enough to do so.
"SNF," despite its flaws, is a fine example of gritty, unvarnished, unapologetic, relentlessly politically-incorrect yet thoughtful, open and fascinating film-making of the 1970s--real stories about real people in real situations in real time--a decade which had probably been the finest era in American film.