Saturday Night Fever

The Multicultural Disco Scene

Disco was a multicultural phenomenon. The music drew from funk and soul styles, Latin salsa music, and the AM rock popular in the suburbs, for an audience that was primarily black, Latino, or gay. The signature syncopated electric bass line was featured prominently alongside soaring (and often reverberated) vocals and the steady “four on the floor” bass drum beat. The first article about disco music and disco clubs appeared in the September 1973 issue of Rolling Stone, and WPIX-FM in New York City aired the first disco radio show the following year. In contrast with rock music and the protest music popular with the counterculture movement, disco music was meant for dancing.

British journalist Nik Cohn was assigned to cover the New York disco scene—the capital of the scene, along with Philadelphia—by New York Magazine in 1976, the result of which was the article “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night.” The story was published as fact, and the rights were bought almost immediately, forming the basis of Saturday Night Fever.

Years later, Cohn admitted that the story was fabricated; he knew little about disco and less about the American working class that he covered in the story, and had in fact based the characters on his British friends from the 1960s. Knowing that the disco subculture was fashion-conscious, he drew on his experiences in the Mod subculture more than a decade earlier and based his story on a series of educated guesses.

The film draws a contrast between the two lives of Tony Manero (played by Travolta), an Italian American in a working-class family. In the disco, Tony reigns supreme. He has friends, he is admired and pursued by women, and he experiences the pleasure of being excellent at what he does best—dancing. At home, however, he is the black sheep in his family compared to his brother, a priest, which is a circumstance that hardly changes even after his brother quits the priesthood. He deals with parents who respect neither him nor each other and endures the drudgery of a dead-end job that seems unlikely to provide him with the means to move out of Brooklyn and into the suburbs, as he dreams.

Sexual and Racial Tensions

The movie also explores the sexual and racial tensions of Brooklyn in the late 1970s. Tony's popularity in the club gives him access to women, and the popularity of his “tribe” leads to them feeling entitled. Tony attempts to rape his dance competition partner and soon after witnesses a gang rape by his friends. Another friend deals with the pregnancy of his devout Catholic girlfriend and the prospect of a shotgun wedding.

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