Saturday Night Fever (film)

Identification Motion picture

Saturday Night Fever captured the ethos of the 1970’s when young people faced a changing social, cultural, and economic landscape and shifting values.

Date Released in 1977

Director John Badham

Key Figures

• John Badham (1939-    ), film director

The 1970’s was a transitional decade—one in which young people tried to find new values to replace the traditional ones that they had abandoned. Saturday Night Fever reflects this search for identity and a better life in the person of Tony Manero (played by John Travolta), a nineteen-year-old man from a working-class family in Brooklyn. The film, based on a 1975 article by Nik Cohn titled “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” tells of the struggle that Tony undergoes in trying to reconcile the traditional values of his family, friends, and community with the shifting cultural territory of American life and values. As Tony attempts to release himself from the mediocrity of everyday life, he finds self-fulfillment in his talent for dancing. Although Tony has a rather pedestrian job as a clerk in a paint store, he is intelligent, charming, and self-confident. His quest is the quintessential American quest to become better off through his own efforts and talents. It is dancing that helps Tony negotiate this terrain.

Family, Traditional Values, and Loyalties

It was in the 1970’s that the American family began to change, with the traditional two-parent household giving way to households with one parent and the proliferation of single people. Tony’s family is a traditional one in which Tony’s father assumes dominance over the other members of the household—Tony’s mother, little sister, grandmother, and Tony himself.

Tony is comfortable with his friends at the beginning of the film. However, as he becomes embroiled in an ethnic war with some Puerto Ricans and then sees that a talented Puerto Rican couple is denied the top prize at the disco dance contest, he begins to see that traditional values can no longer guide him in the world but instead result in aggression and self-deception.

Economic Recession

Economic recession was the backdrop of the 1970’s—the condition that defined and constrained what was possible for American families to achieve. Tony is the only wage earner in his family. His father is an unemployed construction worker whose place as head of his family is put in jeopardy by his failure to provide. The tension created by the father’s situation and consequent negative assessment of Tony’s achievements underscores the difficulties of the decade.

Tony works hard, and his boss makes note of how Tony charms his customers and offers him permanent employment for the rest of his life—an offer that underscores the possible fate that Tony could end up living a life not notably different from that of his father or his friends. When Tony is offered a raise, his news is met with his father’s sarcasm at the dinner table, and this kind of response becomes one more incentive for Tony to try to make a change. Another opportunity for change comes when Tony’s fortunes within his family and his view of himself begin to shift as a result of the return of his older brother, Frank, Jr., a priest.

Changing Religious Values and Sex Roles

The 1970’s were a time of religious disaffection. Church attendance plummeted as young people considered establishment religion irrelevant to their needs and to the solution of social problems. One aspect of this disaffection was the exodus of many young priests from the Roman Catholic Church. When Frank, Jr., arrives home and announces that he has left the priesthood, he sends his family into a tailspin.

The film also demonstrates the dilemma of young people trapped by traditional religious values in a changing world when Tony’s friend Bobby can find no way out of marriage when he gets his girlfriend pregnant and is forced to marry her because of the dictates of his family and church. Unable to resolve the problem on his own, Bobby turns to Tony for a solution, but Tony fails him. It is Bobby’s fall from the Verrazano Narrows Bridge that opens Tony’s eyes to the futility of trying to hold on to outdated values.

One of the profound changes to emerge in American society in the 1970’s was the shift in sex roles as a result of the rise of the women’s movement. There was a constant clash between traditional relationships and the as-yet-undefined new relationships between women and men. Perhaps the most profound change in Tony’s way of seeing the world comes from his association with Stephanie, a twenty-year-old woman whom he sees dancing at the disco on Saturday nights.

At the disco, Tony is a celebrity and a hero because of his dancing abilities, and he is courted by many different women. The most persistent is Annette, whom he rebuffs. It is clear from his interchanges with Annette that Tony holds very traditional views about women—they are either for marrying or for having sex. It is Stephanie who changes Tony’s view about women.

At the end of the film, when Stephanie has made the move from Brooklyn to Manhattan permanently, Tony seeks her out and asks to be friends. The idea of being friends with a “girl” represents Tony’s willingness to see women in a different light and to move toward values more in line with the realities of the changing world.

Impact

Perhaps because it dealt so intimately with many of the decade’s issues, Saturday Night Fever became a top-grossing film in 1977. It launched the film career of John Travolta, who was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor, and reinforced the fame of the Bee Gees, whose original score brought disco dancing to nationwide prominence. The film also influenced fashion, making popular the white polyester suit that Travolta wore in the film. Saturday Night Fever remained an emblem of the 1970’s because of the careful integration of so many themes emerging from that decade.

Bibliography

Grau, Andree. “Saturday Night Fever: An Ethnography of Disco Dancing.” In Dance, Gender, and Culture, edited by Helen Thomas. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. A critical paper emphasizing the film’s approach to disco dancing.

Jordan, Chris. “Gender and Class Mobility in Saturday Night Fever and Flashdance.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 24, no. 3 (Fall, 1996): 116-122. Explores the tension between the sexes in the light of the American value of success and the role of middle-class models in the success of working-class people.

Keeler, Greg. “Saturday Night Fever: Crossing the Verrazano Bridge.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 7 (1979): 158-167. A critical study of the film.

Stewart, Gail. The 1970’s. San Diego, Calif.: Lucent Books, 1999. This book explores the issues and movements of the 1970’s, such as the Vietnam War, environmentalism, feminism, and racism—issues that are central to Saturday Night Fever.