Page 115 - A Handbook Genre Studies in Mass Media

CHAPTER 4

one of Tony’s buddies. To get the good things in life, like a Mercedes or
Cadillac, requires that “somebody get screwed.” Another friend tells Tony
that his uncle Nunzio got his Mercedes by driving his partner out of busi-
ness. A third member of the gang adds that it is all a pipedream anyway;
people like them will never have the money for the good things.
And yet Saturday Night is not a thoroughly pessimistic film. The mu-
sic does not represent mere escape from the working-class world of the
1970s. It offers at least the possibility that Tony’s world can be remade
into one that provides a life of honor, grace, excitement, and style. It also
suggests that escape from working-class Brooklyn is a struggle and that,
even when successful, a high price must be paid in terms of what is left
behind. Stephanie’s plight illustrates the enormous emotional costs of
upward mobility. In a telling scene, she breaks down in front of Tony and
tries to make him understand what a difficult time she has had making it
in the world of upper-middle-class Manhattan. “I didn’t know shit, man.
I had to learn things.” She is referring not simply to learning her job as a
secretary, but how the middle-class people she works with talk, act, and
think. Implicit is the idea that Stephanie has left too much of her former
world (and former self) behind. If Tony desperately needs her support
and vision to make something of himself, she needs his lack of preten-
sion and energy in order to retain some connection with the class and life
she so desperately wants to escape. The movie thus contains a complex
message regarding the ideal of “making it”: while desirable, perhaps even
necessary, mobility is fraught with perils, the most important of which is
that one can leave strengths as well as weaknesses behind.
Significantly, Saturday Night returns to many of the popular themes
of 1950s youth films: getting out from under the family, making it on
one’s own, dealing with peer pressure. This makes the counterculture
films of the 1960s “flower generation” all the more anomalous. How-
ever, unlike Jim Stark in Rebel, Tony makes no attempt at reconciliation
with his father. His father’s fate is sealed, and his own seems uncertain
at best. Like Jim, he rejects the gang, and gets “serious” with a girl. He
grows up. But what sort of world awaits him? What sort of relationship,
for that matter, is he in for? Jim and Judy, Rebel tells us, will make it as
long as they remain “sincere.” Implicit is the sense that the world is full
of hope and opportunity.
However, none of the characters in Saturday Night Fever is able to
make meaningful connections between past and future, between the self
and others. Tony seems shaken, if not broken, at the end of Saturday Night.

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