Page 113 - A Handbook Genre Studies in Mass Media

CHAPTER 4

edness itself, gave way to a sense of impending disaster and a pervasive
survivalist mentality. Social institutions, especially the family and the
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school, which had defined the relations between the generations, imbu-
ing adults with moral authority, underwent, in the fashionable phrase, a
“legitimation crisis.”
If the great American celebration collapsed in the early 1970s, dividing
the period since World War II into “high expectation” and “low expec-
tation” sub-periods, the youth culture genre may be subdivided in like
fashion. In spite of their differences, Rebel Without a Cause and Alice’s
Restaurant are both “high expectation” films. Saturday Night Fever and
The Breakfast Club are “low expectation” movies—again, their consider-
able differences notwithstanding.
By the mid 1970s, these optimistic impulses had all but disappeared
from the American youth film. Tony Manero and his friends in Saturday
Night Fever face a world of shrinking opportunities in which, to get
ahead, or just to stay alive, one has to “dump on” somebody. Adults are,
at best, wandering in search of meaning (as in the case of Tony’s older
brother, a lapsed priest).
Like his father and the other men who work with Tony in the paint store,
adults are defeated and cynical. Tony’s world may offer little opportunity,
but he faces its limitations with dignity, grace, and style. It is instructive
to consider Saturday Night as a musical, meriting some comparison with
other American musicals. Think of Gene Kelly “singin’ in the rain” in the
1952 film of the same title or in American in Paris (1951). He dances his
way through adversity, despite how little it matters that he is a painter in
the latter film, set in the confident early postwar years. Tony can dance,
but the fact that he works in a paint store makes all the difference in the
world of falling expectations of the late 1970s.
Saturday Night Fever is arguably one of the most pessimistic popular
musicals ever made. The music permeates the film. It is inside the char-
acters, especially Tony; it punctuates the action and both complements
and contradicts the action. In the opening sequence, John Travolta as
Tony Manero, is filled with music as he walks down a crowded Brooklyn
sidewalk to the rhythm of the BeeGees’ “Stayin’ Alive”; he even swings
his paint can to the beat. The scene suggests that “staying alive” means
being in touch with one’s musical sense and more basically, a particular
aesthetic style very similar to that defined by the early Elvis Presley
and Marlon Brando—and James Dean. Travolta owns the street while
he is walking, eyes half closed, glancing from side to side with a cocky

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