Saturday Night Fever and the unbearable sexism of old guys

After an over 20 some-year hiatus, I recently returned to a movie that was iconic both in my day and in my life.

Saturday Night Fever made an enormous splash when it came out in 1977, propelled vastly by its soundtrack and its portrayal of the suburban disco scene. I was one of those kids, slightly too young to partake yet old enough to know what I was missing, who sat in our smelly local theater, starry-eyed at the story.

What had attracted me at the time was how accurately it reflected a certain tranche of young people I knew. My cousin and his friends, namely. Slightly older than me, looking the part completely, down to the leather jacket, the hair and the disco walk. How I wished to grow up so I could replicate that lifestyle! I never did, for several reasons, the main one being that I was still the wrong gender, and the second one that by the time I came of age, the disco ship had sailed.

Then, in the late 80s or early 90s, a wave of nostalgia engulfed me, and I became very interested in SNF again. I got in touch with one of the film's stars and enjoyed a few years of friendship with her. I also traveled to Brooklyn to visit movie locations. The climax of the pilgrimage was finding the disco and getting to dance on its illuminated dance floor (now barely lit), walking through those recognizable doors with the rhombus-shaped window (“We’re the Faces!”) and enjoying a drink seated on that elevated section.

Not much longer after, I got married, had a son, and disco became the last thing on my mind.

I came back to the movie recently to see how it would resonate with me now.

I still believe it to be an accurate portrayal of a particular brand of young men at the time. And thus lies the problem.  

I have always pondered the unbearable sexism of old men, but I had never looked closely at my generation in particular, just at men. The movie reveals a lot about the toxic environment we grew up in. During this viewing, I was particularly taken by the character of “Annette”, the sweet-hearted girl who ends up being used and abused by the group of men. While younger me related to being a Tony-like person, all along, I was unknowingly Annette, and seeing her plight was incredibly awakening.
 

The women in the movie serve accessory roles: there’s the nice girl who wants to belong, the ambitious girl, the little sister, the moms and grandmas, the pregnant girlfriend who never even makes it on screen, and the various free-loving women who end up dismissed even though everything they’re doing is exactly equal to what the men are doing.
 

Poor Annette is by far the worst of these. She wants to belong. She wants to be seen. She wants a chance. But she’s surrounded by boneheads who refuse to see her as anything but some girl. And when they finally pay attention to her, it’s in the backseat of a car where they ignore her NOs and rape her.

To think that men my age (early 60s) grew up thinking that the movie portrayed “real life” is unbelievable. I keep thinking of this line of dialogue:

— Are you a nice girl or are you a cunt?

— Can't I be both?

— No. It's a decision a girl's gotta make early in life, if she's gonna be a nice girl or a cunt.

Women are reduced to these two things, and I firmly believe that the young men I grew up with agreed with that and possibly still believe that even though they’d deny it firmly.

We like to think that our generation, coming so fast on the heels of the civil rights movement and the late-60s youth revolution that upended traditions, was spared the old sexism that was well and alive in our mid-century childhood homes. Well, no. Either it never went away, and we simply pretended it didn’t exist for a while, or we brought it back single-handedly, like an old, smelly relative that somehow brings a sense of stability to the family.

Our sexism was bred into us and considered normal, even enviable. 

But “I was raised like this” no longer carries any weight. People change all the time, for the better or not, and it is imperative to do so if you can watch SNF unflustered as I was for so many years.