Why No One Gets that Saturday Night Fever (1977) Wasn’t a Love Letter to Disco

Being born in the 1970s, I was too young to see Saturday Night Fever. However, I not only remembered the explosion of disco but knew that this was the movie that started it all. The connection wasn’t hard to miss. One year disco wasn’t a thing, and the next thing you knew, posters of John Travolta in the famous leisure suit were everywhere and all you heard was disco music.

For decades, I avoided the movie like the plague. I’m not really a disco or Travolta fan and besides, I figured the movie would be nothing more than a string of musical numbers. At some point, however, I caved in. It seemed kind of absurd to consider myself a film buff, yet not have seen one of the most iconic movies of the 1970s. So I finally sat down and watched it.

When it was all over, I was absolutely gobsmacked. This was Saturday Night Fever? The movie that launched the disco craze? How? Sure, there were many great musical numbers with fun choreography and awesome clothing but at heart, the movie was wall to wall sleaze drowning in gang violence, rape, racism, misogyny and suicide. Plus, it was depressing as hell. How on earth could this movie have launched a dance phenomenon?

I found Saturday Night Fever’s legacy even more baffling considering that Tony Manero, who was propped up in real life as a sexy gigolo and disco king for both women and men to swoon after or emulate, was anything but admirable. He was working a dead end job with no real ambition in life, destined to wind up as an unemployed bum like his father or working as a low level grunt at a paint shop well into middle age. In his spare time, he drove around doing nothing except get high, pick fights with gang members and score pussy with his racist, misogynist friends.

Tony was also a chauvinist pig. He did nothing when Annette was gang-raped in the back of his car, then said the worst possible thing you could say to a rape victim after the act. He tried to rape his dance partner, Stephanie, because he was outraged that she never made any effort to put out. Lastly, Tony was an immature, self-centered narcissist. He was completely oblivious to the plight of his friend because he cared more about winning a stupid dance competition than helping someone in an emotional crisis. Tony Manero couldn’t have been less of a role model yet somehow, movie audiences not only idolized him but wanted to be or meet someone like him.

The most shocking thing of all about Saturday Night Fever is that it wasn’t even the love letter to disco that everyone made it out to be. If anything, it was the opposite. It painted disco nightlife as a vain, superficial scene that was only about looking cool, wearing the right threads and having the right dance moves. But most importantly of all, Saturday Night Fever was suggesting that disco was becoming an activity that losers like Tony Manero were losing themselves in in order to escape from the real world and the reality of who they were. So the movie, rather than trying to make the scene seem oh, so cool and attractive, was trying to expose it as a form of mindless escapism, not celebrate it.

Given everything I’ve said so far, how on earth could the public have gotten it so horribly wrong about what Saturday Night Fever was trying to say and do? Especially regarding the famous leisure suit? For so many people, the famous image of John Travolta striking a pose in the black and white suit marked his status as Disco King and symbolized everything that was sexy and cool about disco. That was the suit that got everyone to say, “I want to be a disco king just like Tony! (Or at least meet a hot, sexy guy like him on the dance floor!) Let’s go to one!”

What everyone seems to have missed is that the night Tony Manero wears that suit marked the end of his love affair with disco and exposed him for the poser and loser that he was. The night he shows up to the club in that suit was supposed to be his big moment, the moment when he wins the dance contest, claims his title as king of the dance floor and “scores” with Stephanie. Instead, everything that could go wrong goes wrong. First, he shows up with a bandage on his face, so he looks like crap. He’s also feeling like crap because he just learned that he and his friends had beat up a rival gang for no reason.

He eagerly waits his turn for the dance competition expecting to blow everyone away, then watches two couples make him and Stephanie look like a pair of rank amateurs. This completely blows his illusion about himself as an amazing dancer and king of the dance floor. Things go from bad to worse when he unfairly wins the contest because he’s Italian-American. This is when he learns that the local scene, which had propped him up as a local celebrity, had never really cared about his dancing skills; all anyone had cared about was that he was one of them. This is also the first time Tony is disgusted by the racism of his neighborhood, since he knew that the Puerto Rican couple, who had been awarded second place, had won first place fair and square.

Later, Tony blows his chances with Stephanie by becoming sexually aggressive, then verbally abusive when she refuses to give in to his advances. Understandably, she walks out on him in disgust. Finally, the debauched lifestyle Tony and his friends have been enjoying takes a dark turn–Annette is raped under the influence, and Bobby, also under the influence, kills himself. Now he realizes what trashy lives he and his friends have been leading and that much like the middle aged guy working at the hardware store or his deadbeat father, he is on a fast track to nowhere. He also realizes how messed up his priorities were, that instead of being so concerned about looking good at the disco, he should’ve been looking out for his friend and planning his future.

After a horrible night rife with humiliation, heartbreak and tragedy, Tony is forced to come down to earth after living in the fantasy world of disco for so many weeks and face the reality of who he is and where he’s going in life. In case the audience didn’t get the point that reality had come crashing down on him, the movie had him in the iconic suit slumming it in a filthy graffiti-riddled NYC train car in the scene after his friend dies. You may think that the point of this scene was just for story’s sake (as in, he needed to take the train out to Manhattan to see Stephanie). But no. It was also so that the movie could have a clever scene symbolizing the turning point in the movie when Tony’s disco fever grinds to a screeching halt.

Before this pivotal scene, Tony–whenever he was in his disco clothes and looking his best–was always shown against the glamorous backdrop of glittering disco balls, snazzy dance floors and beautiful people in designer clothing. That backdrop represented the bubble Tony had been living in as part of the disco scene where he could avoid the ugliness of his circumstances, his friends and himself.  When the horrible events in the third act happens, the disco bubble bursts. Tony finally waking up to reality is symbolized by him wearing his most stylish disco outfit to date in the movie, except instead of him being backed by the glittering world of disco balls and dance floors, it’s backed by the real world of a dirty, grimy NYC subway car.

This scene was also there to show that Tony had unequivocally quit the disco scene. Until this moment, he had been so meticulous when it came to his disco outfits, he wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing one this spiffy on a NYC subway train. Not only would a suit that nice have been too good for public transportation, he would’ve worried too much about getting it dirty or wrinkled, especially since it was made out of white fabric. After he decides to quit disco, he couldn’t care less about the suit, even though it was probably the most expensive one he had ever bought. In fact, he cares so little about it that he later pulls the collar up around his neck. This moment is the film letting audiences know that he’s not only quit disco, he’s never, ever going back.

This entire subway scene wasn’t so short or ambiguous that people could’ve blinked and missed it. It is what it is, Tony not only becoming disillusioned with disco but leaving that and his entire world behind in Brooklyn to make something better of himself. Yet somehow, it’s as if 1970s audiences didn’t see this scene at all, or maybe did see it but refused to acknowledge it. All everyone seemed to have done was clung to the now iconic image of Tony making his signature disco move in the white suit during the dance competition, as if the movie had ended on a high note.

Again, how on earth could the public have gotten it so horribly wrong about any of this? The reason goes to the heart of why Saturday Night Fever, however entertaining, is a deeply flawed film. In a nutshell, the movie is about Tony’s unhealthy obsession with disco. To get the audience to try to understand why a low life like him would fall in love with it, the movie worked hard to prop it up as glamorous and sexy so that they would be immersed in the disco scene as well. All the characters in it wore stylish designer clothing; the dance choreography was second to none; and the best disco artists of the period were used for the soundtrack.

Unfortunately, the movie did such a good job of propping up disco that it glamorized everything about it, even those negative aspects it was trying to expose. In fact, Saturday Night Fever glamorized disco to such an extent that dance clubs in real life made the vanity and narcissism of the film part and parcel of the experience. On the disco scene, the most important thing wasn’t your dancing; it was dressing to impress. Designer labels, the coolest fashions, and metallic fabrics were the rage; the flashier you looked on the dance floor, the more popular you were.

Real life dance clubs also encouraged mindless escapism. Going to the disco became less about simply enjoying a night of dancing than it was about completely losing yourself in the hypnotic beats and swirling lights until the outside world melted away and you came stumbling out of the club hours later wondering where the night went.

As if glamorizing escapism and narcissism wasn’t bad enough, Saturday Night Fever also confused audiences into thinking that the sex and drug scenes were part of what made disco cool. At Studio 54, the infamous nightclub that became as much as a phenomenon as the movie itself, patrons were encouraged to indulge in as much coke, booze and free love as they wanted–no questions asked. The crazy irony of it all is that the hedonism in Saturday Night Fever wasn’t supposed to have had anything to do with disco; those scenes were there to show how self-destructive Tony and his circle of friends were and show what empty lives they were leading. The movie even underscored all this by having their sexing and drugging end in tragedy (with Annette’s rape and the death of Tony’s friend). Yet audiences saw those scenes as an extension of the disco lifestyle, rather than a statement about Tony’s dead end existence.

Another thing that Saturday Night Fever did was overplay Tony’s positive traits. Tony is in reality a complete and total loser. However, he’s also an exceptionally sexy, good looking charismatic dancer with decent fashion sense. It’s his strengths that are the reason why he becomes the nightclub favorite, and which later causes him to chase the highs of disco nightlife. The more people fawn over him, the more he wants to bask in the glory of being disco king and the more he gets carried away with the entire lifestyle until he completely loses perspective.

When the terrible events in the third act happen–especially when Tony tries to force himself on Stephanie–this was when the audience was supposed to realize that in spite of his positive attributes, he was never anything more than a low life creep and pig. Unfortunately, just as it did when it glamorized disco, Saturday Night Fever did such a good job playing up Tony’s sexiness, charisma and dance skills that the reality of him being a complete and total loser was lost on the audience. Instead of seeing him as a punk who had a lot of growing up to do, all everyone focused on was him being a sexy hunk with cool moves who wowed all the ladies and was the epitome of 1970s macho.

Saturday Night Fever’s failure in trying to convey its message reminds me of Quadrophenia. I don’t really like the movie all that much, but it did a better job of what Saturday Night Fever was attempting to do. In that film, we see the protagonist become completely enchanted with the Mod lifestyle, only to learn that it was a shallow scene filled with poseurs that he was using to escape from his problems. While it captured the coolness of Mod perfectly, Quadrophenia never glamorized it to the point where audiences were sitting there wishing they had been a part of it all. Sure, the movie in a way led to a sort of mini Mod-revival when it was first released, but the fact that the revival never became the type of international phenomenon that disco did is a testament to how little Quadrophenia glamorized Mod.

All of this isn’t to say that Saturday Night Fever is a bad film. It’s just to express my surprise about how a film like this got everyone to run to the disco, when the whole point of it was to show its main character running away from it. It’s very easy to attack the audience for being too dumb to get its message, but nah–the movie’s clever approach of propping disco up so it could later expose it as a fantasy world worked a little too well and consequently, its message got lost in the shuffle.