A Movie Nearly Every Night: Saturday Night Fever

Saturday Night Fever (1977)
Director: John Badham
Starring: John Travolta, Karen Lynn Gorney, Barry Miller

let's throw those heels on the table and see whose is bigger

The story is pretty simple -- Brooklyn kid trying to break out of his dull existence through dancing at the disco -- but that simplicity and the infamous disco explosion that came out of this movie can almost overshadow the seriousness of what's going on. I mean, honestly, it's easy to laugh at the clothes and the dancing and everything that came out of the hype that still surrounds it, but it's also very touching and real, and when they all get on the dance floor in that big group and dance to "Night Fever" I cried.

Here I am/Prayin' for this moment to last/Livin' on the music, so fine

What have they got outside of the disco? If Tony's house is any example, it's unpleasant. His parents snipe at one another ("You never used to hit me ... at least not in front of the kids," his dad says) and the only one everyone admires is Father Frank, who isn't there. When he comes back, no one knows what to do, so they just sit there, dead on the couch.

the collar doesn't really go with the hair

His friends are only out to make it with girls, drink, fight -- knock up their girlfriends who like communion wafers and then not know what to do because they don't love them enough to marry them. And poor Annette, with her married sisters, who can neither be a good girl nor a c*nt, because neither one will get her any kind of respect from the guys she grew up with (and, according to Tony, she can't be both) -- what's out there for her but to get knocked up by someone like Joey or Double J and end up married and miserable?

"There are ways of killing yourself without killing yourself," he says. It's what he's doing every day in Brooklyn. He's only alive in the disco; the rest of the time he's just "staying alive," marking time, waiting until Saturday to come around again so he can forget that regardless of how he feels about everyone else, he's always going to be looked upon as part of a group of animals. Even Stephanie doesn't know what to make of him at first because he's just another guy from Brooklyn. Is he interesting and intelligent? She doesn't know, maybe, then she thinks about it and says yes, maybe, she doesn't know, maybe.

my friends are liars ... my life ... f**k, what now

But Tony is different and, okay, you can say Travolta has dumb expressions on his face, and if you want to judge him the way Stephanie does, it's easy and it's expected. That's how others see him, so that's how we see him, but that's only at first glance, the simple glance, the "disco movie" glance. If you look again, there's always more going on with Tony. He's always thinking about his future --- whether that's the next Saturday or the next 20 years. Unlike his friends who are out for the quick f**k in the car, Tony always wants more, and he thinks it's attainable until he watches the Puerto Rican dancers beat him at the disco. That's when the darkness really settles.

Up until that point he thought he had a chance, that he wasn't one of the gang, and his first reaction is to give up. He violenty tries to "make it" with Stephanie, fails and realizes that going back, being like the other guys in his neighborhood, isn't an option. He's spent 19 years building himself into something else and it's no use to be what others think he is. It's not honest.

He realizes that he's going to have to work a lot harder to get what he wants, and that means getting out of Brooklyn.