Why Saturday Night Fever, both the movie and the soundtrack album, have held an irresistible fascination for me for my entire life is something I’m only now beginning to understand. When I saw the movie as a child, it “creeped me out” completely; in particular, the scene in which one of the characters falls to his death from the Verrazano Bridge in Brooklyn gave me nightmares. This was unusual; I’ve always been a fan of horror movies. But, for some reason, that scene was so desperate, so haunting, and so vivid that I still can’t escape chills when I think about it. Looking objectively, as an adult artist, at Saturday Night Fever, I think I understand why the movie gives me so much discomfort. The lives of the characters in the movie are pitiful and pointless, and are thusly more frightening than anything Dario Argento could dream up. Lives lived for nothing, tossed away at the drop the hat, and passions become thin gauze to hide terrible, black spiritual emptiness; that’s why the movie gives me chills. That the movie, as a pop culture phenomenon, seems so innocuous (people think of John Travolta’s ridiculous dance moves, the schmaltz of the soundtrack album, which we’ll get to shortly) is part of the reason it’s so creepy. This is a movie that was a huge popular success, yet everyone in the movie but Travolta has been relegated to near-complete obscurity. Without being unduly romantic and/or fatalistic, I think this has to do with the fact that the vibe of the movie is so horrendous, so chilling, and much more insidious than anyone’s ever come out and said. The spiritual emptiness of this movie isn’t just creepy; it’s evil.
I know the way this post is titled skirts the ridiculous. Yet, I will insist upon this: if you listen to those famous Bee Gees songs from the soundtrack album (Night Fever, You Should Be Dancing, More Than a Woman, How Deep Is Your Love), and you listen intently for the sound of the dreadful spiritual emptiness I’ve been describing, you’ll hear it. Is it jaw-dropping to think that songs which everyone laughs at could actually be, for want of a better word, Satanic? It is. But remember (and this is half tongue-in-cheek); it’s the Devil’s best trick to make you believe he doesn’t exist. Actually, the creepiest song on the album for me is Yvonne Elliman’s If I Can’t Have You. This is the song I associate with the guy-falling-off-a-bridge scene. If you pay attention to the lyrics, they present obsession-bordering-on-psychosis. That, combined with the kitchen-sink production and a few great hooks, makes the song heartbreakingly bleak but completely unaware of its own bleakness. It’s a mean, nasty, brittle little piece of Hell, disguised as an upbeat disco pot-boiler. There’s also a cocaine vibe to the whole album which reeks of the 1970s, and of the fact that coke is often used to disguise awful spiritual emptiness. “Night fever, night fever; we know how to do it,” is the coke ethos in a nut-shell. But that this ethos is infernal is not something the Bee Gees wanted you to know, because on the surface it’s enormously seductive, as evil always is. The album didn’t sell 25 million copies for nothing.
That both the album and the movie are schmaltz, “not-art,” is also interesting. There’s a level on which any work of art that knows itself to be art is wholesome and comforting. The artist is trying, in however bleak a fashion, to do something noble, to create something worthwhile. When garbage is put out just to rake in bucks, you can get levels of creepiness that art doesn’t offer. Crassness, especially the raw crassness of this movie and these songs, is more deeply creepy than the darkest Goya or the most abject moments of Sartre. This stuff wasn’t put out for a noble reason, and its’ darkness is partly that it was meant only to seduce people into spending their money on it, which they did. But the blackness that was captured here was captured by accident, and it’s a specific level of “lowness” which art can’t get to, which only schmaltz can reach. This makes the whole thing even more horrendous, and more fascinating. Are there lots of Tony Maneros in the world? There are, but an artist will always try to show something redemptive, either about Tony, or about the lessons that can be learned from Tony. The movie just throws him out, into a vapid world, where he lives a vapid life in which even the exciting bits are tinged with lust, destruction, death, and carelessness. The Bee Gees songs are laughable specifically because they represent this emptiness so well. But that they lead straight into a grave is not something you find out until the gang hits the Verrazano Bridge.
So, this is conclusive: specifically because it couldn’t care less about anything but money, schmaltz can actually reach levels that art can’t reach. A dark movie, made by dark people, for dark reasons, could still be art; a movie that couldn’t care less about its own darkness can be nothing but schmaltz. If you laugh at the Bee Gees, remember how many people bought this album, and absorbed the vibes this stuff was putting out. Without getting moralistic about it, the whole phenomenon of Saturday Night Fever is terrifying, from back to front, and that everyone thinks its funny only makes it more evil. But I, being an artist, see something redemptive; that this kind of schmaltz can teach us lessons about places we can never get to, can never reach. Would we want to or not is another question.
9 comments:
Dear Adam
I never thought of the Bee Gees as particularly satanic but now that you mention it...
Actually there are some strange parallels with the Beatles. For example both have now buried two out of their four band members. Speaking of money, a man from Bristol (UK) has now survived for a year on zero money. He lived by foraging in woods and supermarket skips and says that he has never felt healthier or happier.
Best wishes from Simon
Simon,
"The Bristol Trick": I love it!
Adam
This reminds me of the analysis of a Paul West novel in J. M. Coetzee's "Elisabeth Costello": have you read it? But in that case, Coetzee's Costello is talking about the relationship that a work of "serious" literature has to evil.
It also reminds me of coming back from a Sun Ra concert in Oakland to the Stanford campus, where there was a party going on next door with lots of Madonna tunes. After the depth and breadth of Sun Ra, Madonna felt so empty.
At first I thought something was wrong with the people listening to Madonna, but within a few days I realized that the listeners were not the problem.
Andrew,
The Coetzee book was one I started and never finished.
As frivolous as Madonna is (and I like the comparison to Sun Ra), I think she doesn't have the level of cocaine emptiness that makes the Bee Gees so distressing.
Ray of Light, I thought, was actually interesting. And now Madonna is a confirmed Kabbalist, so who knows...
Adam
I'm not sure I meant that Madonna was the problem. I'm not sure what the problem is, exactly, but in moments like that one, it feels like a problem. :-)
Appropriate word verification: comas.
agreed that the bee gees and the film is at the he(ar)t of it, schmaltz. it was conceived as an exploitation movie to capitalize on the disco craze, which by '78, the scene was dying from its own excesses.
however vapid and empty manero's life is becomes, i think, redeemed at the end of the film. manero rejects the idiocies and violence of his friends and rejects his 'win' from the dance contest because he's a local disco dancer, and the very fact that the winning couple are puerto rican that causes racism to rear its ugly head. these are all things manero rejects.
by the end manero returns to the girl who has spent the run time of the movie as a fake person attemtping to redeem herself thru the false front of name-dropping and by taking night courses in typing. manero returns to this girl and in the cold light of morning she asks, 'can you be friends, ever be friends, with a girl'? at that point, i think, manero begins to long road of maturity.
i love this movie, and i love the soundtrack. sure these were produced for the money. that does not make it satanic or even less than art.
adam, you make an interesting note in your conclusion, that something can be redeemed from the black, cold heart of schmaltz. that is one of the reasons i find explotiation movies utterly fascinating. even argento made movies, in his own unique fashion, for the money. most spaghetti splatter movies, fulci is a case in point, created their cinema with one eye on the u.s. box office. yet, these filmmakers become visionary in spite of the dollar signs in their, and their producers, eyes.
disco as a spiritual wasteland? okay, but we should also recall that the sex pistols were formed and recorded by a man who only saw pound notes in the sky.
Richard,
True enough. I also have to admit that I haven't seen the movie SNF all the way through in some time. If Manero begins the long road to maturity at the end of the movie, I'll have to rethink some of the things I've said.
I do think the vibe of the movie and the Bee Gees stuff is crass and disturbing. But it's fascinating and compelling too, and I'm still exploring the reasons for why I find an exploitation film interesting.
Thanks,
Adam
Dear Adam,
Kitsch doesn't make you FEEL anything...it has no genuine emotional affect whatsover other than one's mind recognizing a creative work's insincerity in possessing the pretense to convey truth....that's why it's defined precisely AS kitsch. And that is why it's only value, despite either it's status as blockbuster success or forgotten obscurity, is as a derisive object of camp laughter.
SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER gave you chills because you FELT something deeply enough, powerfully enough, disturbingly enough, REAL enough, from it's fictional vision, that you have tried to define it for yourself, however confusingly, for the better part of your life.
That only comes from the greatest works of art.
Barry Miller
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