Page 114 - A Handbook Genre Studies in Mass Media

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

smile that is not quite a sneer. He is on top of things, very much awake
and alive.
But the lyrics undermine his cocky attitude, suggesting that survival
requires more than mere stylistic expression. “Somebody help me,” sing
the BeeGees, not only contradicting the visual image but the song’s
rhythmic base, which is fast, sharp, steady, aggressive, and confident.
The lyric is also self-contradictory, containing pleas for help that are im-
mediately undercut by the refrain, “I’m stayin’ alive.” As the sequence
closes, Travolta picks up his step and moves out of the beat as he heads
into the paint store where he works and, for all he knows or cares at age
nineteen in Brooklyn in the mid-1970s, will remain working.
The opening sequence of Saturday Night raises and dashes possibili-
ties, suggesting that this is a multilayered film and, by extension, that the
way these white working-class kids from Brooklyn view the world, is
also filled with contradictions and inconsistencies, hopes and resignation,
fearful ignorance and, occasionally, poignant insight. Tony and his gang
are not “slobs,” “hoods,” or “greasers”—at least not on Saturday night,
when they glide into the disco, nodding to the girls, slide into their table,
calling themselves “the faces.”
Who is Tony Manero? He works in a paint store, still lives with his
family, hangs with his buddies, never gives any thought about going to
college, and at least once a week (more, when he has the money) dances
at the neighborhood disco. He is an extraordinary dancer (at least the
disco crowd thinks so), who lives an otherwise very ordinary and often
painful life. Except for dancing, his life consists of little more than a se-
ries of constraints, pressures, and frequent failures. He has always been
pegged as the no-good in the family; his mother even insinuates that he
is somehow responsible for his brother leaving the priesthood. He pays
room and board to his father but, as his father makes clear, that doesn’t
mean he gets any extra liberties at home—he still has to show up at the
dinner table every night and eat with the family. When Tony gets a raise,
his father, an unemployed construction worker, demeans his achievement
by telling Tony that the extra money “won’t buy shit” these days.
Unlike the 1940s musicals, the popular musicals of the 1970s (which
includes Car Wash, as well as Saturday Night) do not turn the problems
of everyday life into excuses for song and dance. The illusions of the
1940s and early 1950s concerning peace, individual opportunity, and
prosperity—which sustained the fantasy of life-as-music and music-as-
celebration—are all but gone in the 1970s. “It’s a dog-eat-dog world,” says

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