I don’t like disco. Hell, I don’t really like dancing, to be honest (much to the chagrin of my wife and people with beating hearts everywhere). But still, I wasn’t that far into “Saturday Night Fever” when I started to ‘get it’—both 'get’ the story and disco, which almost seemed neat by the film’s end.
“Saturday Night Fever” follows Tony Manero, a young, 19-year old Italian-American man from Brooklyn. Between his harsh family and low-paying hardware store job, Tony toughs it through his week. But when Saturday comes, he heads down to his local disco club where he, with confidence, charisma, and the hottest new moves, is the clear ‘king’ of the dance floor. Awestruck by new character Stephanie Mangano’s dancing, he convinces her to enter a dance competition with him. As they rehearse, petty gang violence, family drama, and Stephanie’s challenging, expansive worldview forces Tony to question his impression of himself and dancing. A personal tragedy pushes these feelings over the edge as he spends a night assessing what is important in life.
Beneath the story of friends grooving to impress on the dance floor (in an attempt to lure women to a backseat), is an exploration of social currency among young adults. In real life, Tony is just a malcontented middle child in a dead-end job (literally selling paint in a hardware store, a cosmetic feature in a business of construction/maintenance), while among his friends, he's a king. But he's a loser—a 'painted' loser. And when Stephanie gushes about how neat and cultured her job in Manhattan is, Tony begins to realize this. Seeing a Puerto Rican couple perform better than him and yet place second splintered these cracks further and the tragedy of Bobby C. shattered what was left. Tony hung his self-worth on the dance floor—to realize that this just wasn’t important required reflection and, in his friendship with Stephanie, atonement.
Admittedly, disco music and culture is not the only part of the film that’s aged poorly. I’m not sure why I found myself explaining away racist remarks as an honest character-choice for the era, but found the film’s comfort depicting rape as particularly cringey (it went back to that well twice, and in really gross ways). But apart from that, I found myself connecting with a story about a young man who has tied his identity and worth to something he is simultaneously surpassed at and yet learns is unimportant. It’s perhaps something many of us go through—be it in dancing, or travel, or seeming edgy/arty/woke, playing/knowing sports, or knowing everything about a hobby/movie/franchise, or even through amassing ‘roller coaster credits’.