The white suit and the bridge
Tony Manero’s week exists so that Saturday can burn it down. John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever, released in December 1977, follows a Brooklyn paint-store clerk from Bay Ridge to a club called 2001 Odyssey, where the floor lights up and the week finally agrees to look at him. John Travolta had been a television face. Here he becomes a line of movement. The camera sits on the floor with him, which is the whole moral of the dancing: for four minutes the room has a center, and the center is a kid who will be ordinary again when the record ends.
The film was born from Nik Cohn’s New York magazine piece, “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” published in 1976. Cohn later admitted that much of the reporting had been invented. The movie outlived the lie because Badham, who replaced John G. Avildsen early in the shoot, filmed desire and meanness as if both were documented. Karen Lynn Gorney’s Stephanie is not a prize. She is a route out, and she knows it before he does. The famous white suit is a costume for a life that does not fit in daylight. Under it, the film keeps class, boredom, and a death. Disco, in this telling, is not a smile. It is a weekly country with a border.
Robert Stigwood asked the Bee Gees for songs and got a climate. Stayin’ Alive walks. Night Fever circles the mirror ball. How Deep Is Your Love and More Than a Woman give the slower rooms their pulse. Yvonne Elliman’s If I Can’t Have You and the Trammps’ Disco Inferno widen the cast. Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb did not invent Bay Ridge. They invented the temperature at which Bay Ridge could be believed by people who had never seen the Verrazzano except on a poster. The soundtrack sat on the charts long enough to become the memory of a decade that had not finished happening.
Nirvana is the dance; when the music stops, you return to being ordinary.
(Pauline Kael, The New Yorker, 1977)
What the poster sold was joy. What the film keeps is the parking lot, the slurs, the friend who does not make it off the bridge. Travolta’s solo, held in a long take, is the sequence audiences cheered, and it is also a trap: the cheer is the character’s only reliable wage. Badham understands that a dance floor can be a workplace. The pills, the back seat, the fight, are not interruptions of the music. They are what the music is spending. When the picture was later trimmed for a softer rating, it proved how much of its reputation had been a misunderstanding. The harsh cut is the true one.
Disco was declared dead within a few years, often with a cruelty that had little to do with records. Saturday Night Fever refused to die with the joke. It remains a film about a body that knows more than the life around it, set to songs that still rearrange a room. The white suit hangs in the culture like a relic. The bridge is still in the story. Between them, the Bee Gees keep counting the steps, and Travolta, impossibly young, still hits the mark before the light goes out.
