Saturday Night Fever and the Loss of the Middle Class

Saturday night fever and the loss of the middle class

One of the most popular films of the 1970s was “SNF”. Many people all over idealized its music and lifestyle. Two of the main characters were regulars on popular TV shows (Welcome back kotter, and All my children). This movie is a reflection of the interests of the American people during the 1970s. People did not mind and most cases wanted to be distracted from the major political issues of the time, such as the recent war in Vietnam and resignation of Richard Nixon among other things.

One of the first things you notice about Saturday Night Fever is the mass marketing. It seems that every shot has some sort of add for Coca-Cola or Marlboro somewhere in the background. Perhaps during the time of the film’s making was the beginning of the current advertising craze we are experiencing today. The movie also exploits the dance craze that was taking place at the time with nonstop current and young hits by artists such as the Bee Gees. However likeable the film is it sometimes feels like you are watching an extended television commercial. In short this movie has two major drawing cards that made it very popular, its music and its actors.

There are a few aspects of the film that I had a response to. The first is Tony (the main character) being as well dressed and having the sensitivity of a woman, this feature is also at the expense of the woman in the film who are treated very harshly and in some cases not taken seriously. Another aspect of the film that I had a response to was the lead female character’s ambitions and goals of trying to be a part of the upper class. These two aspects seem to suggest a sort of role reversal which is becoming more prevalent to American society still to this day. While the elements of innocents such as the music and dancing are a reflection of American society so are the violent elements such as the movie’s two rape scenes.

Violence and profanity had just recently become acceptable in movies. There is no evidence of censorship whatsoever, this would not be tolerated just a few Years earlier. This is a reflection of yet another change in American society indicating that people felt that violence is just an everyday part of life and the old ways of Hollywood were changing to reflect the times. Still today it seems what we (especially our children) are exposed to gets worse and worse.

What Saturday night fever demonstrates superbly is the changing ideas of what it meant to be successful, the relationships between man and women, and leaves a strong impression of the changes in class, racial, and sexual violence.

At times Saturday night fever acts as a mirror to what working class society was going through at the time. Family had a very strong ties and stuck together during these times, however as a group found it difficult to deal with the constant stresses of urban life. The father who is supposed to be the head of the family is a construction worker and had been unemployed for over 6 months. Tony is a worker in a local family owned hardware store, and at the beginning enjoys his job, even earning a promotion. Tony however realizes his life as a salesperson is not as an exciting a future as he would like. The film shows Tony’s future on a very visual level by showing older employees while having the boss yell at them and lecture Tony about his future.

Nobody in the film displays any social or class connections in relation to their employment situation. You cannot tell from looking that the family is on the verge of financial collapse becides from the dialogue. Tony’s mother had been a stay at home mom with nothing more on her resume than “house maker”, there is a scene in which she cautiously mentions to the husband that she wants to start job hunting, this is in sharp contrast to the new York city working girl Stephanie. Stephanie is proud to have a job in the city while Tony’s mother is more afraid to offend her husband than to be broke. The film quietly depicts the worsening recession of the time as to not spoil the theme. You can see how unemployment weakens the power of the working class as a whole and how the psychological toll can be disastrous. That is the main feature of this film, to give the depiction of the working class having something to escape to. “As the real wages of working-class men have declined, their families have become increasingly dependent on the earnings of women.” (Gilbert, Page 117)

In contrast to the film’s depiction of working class society, Saturday Night Fever also has a glamorous side. While in the club, those who are average joes can be powerful as well, the dance floor becomes the social environment rather than “the real world” and your success is based off of your dancing skill rather than your check book. The appealing factor of this during the time is that in a time and place where you are a nobody from nowhere you can become powerful. By the end of the film Tony has learned that the only way to really escape his reality of being stuck in Brooklyn doing the immature activities his friends find entertaining is to move on to a life in Manhattan with the chance of upward mobility. “Tony Manero, the lead in the immensely popular and decade defining film Saturday Night Fever, declared his loser buddies in Brooklyn to be all “assholes back there” before escaping to upward mobility Manhattan” (Cowie, Page 17)

Chauvinism is one of the main character traits of the film, both patriotically (Italian American) and sexually. Saturday Night Fever exceeds what was acceptable during the 1970s when it comes to profanity, it uses racial and sexual terms that were outrageous for the time but now are part of everyday life. This brings the question of; will another 40 years bring the street talk of today to the big screen? There are scenes depicting the racial tensions of the time, one of which is when tony and his friends set out to get revenge on a Puerto Rican gang. Tony and his friends smash up the Puerto ican’s club but get knocked around in the process, only to find out the next day that they went after the wrong gang. The look on the faces of tony and friends seems to say something about the stupidity of their violent act and to make them seem immature. There are two scenes of rape that tony is involved in even though tony comes out of both of them while not looking like a bad guy. The first scene, he gets kneed in the groin and in the second he witnesses a rape occurring but does nothing to stop it besides have a look of sadness. Saturday Night fever does not portray the complete picture of 1970s life, however it’s characters and writing present an accurate depiction of what life for the working class was like.

Works Cited
Gilbert, Dennis “The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality” - Wadsworth Publishing; 6 edition (September 27, 2002)
Cowie, Jeffrson “Stayin ' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class” -New Press, The (September 7, 2010)

Cited: Gilbert, Dennis “The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality” - Wadsworth Publishing; 6 edition (September 27, 2002) Cowie, Jeffrson “Stayin ' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class” -New Press, The (September 7, 2010)