COMMENTARY : ‘Fever’ Is Staying Alive for a Reason : Movie Will Likely Strike a Chord With Generation X

Pop culture has a way of poking you in the ribs sometimes. My most memorable poke came a few years ago watching the Farm Aid concert on television with an old friend when suddenly his teen-age daughter walked into the room and, pointing to a scraggly Bob Dylan, shouted “Eeeuuu!”

So much for the raptures of the counterculture.

Now that “Saturday Night Fever” has been officially enshrined as a Midnight Movie--it’s just opened at the Esquire in Pasadena for an indefinite Saturday run--will it too provoke pokes of recognition? When it came out in December of 1977, it left thick platform heel marks on the Zeitgeist. But will this post-hippie, pre-yuppie disco-ized fever dream still play today?

Midnight movie crowds are almost exclusively teens and twentysomethings, so clearly someone must have had the bright idea that late-’70s kitsch would connect up with Generation X and voila --a “Rocky Horror Picture Show” for the ‘90s.

But midnight movies can’t be willed into cultdom; they either strike the appropriate generational chord or they don’t. If “Saturday Night Fever” succeeds on the midnight circuit, it will be because it keys into the twentysomethings’ ‘70s kick and--a better reason--because it’s still great fun.

Most of it stands up remarkably well--especially John Travolta’s performance, the sinuous, turbocharged disco numbers, Norman Wexler’s slangy slyboots dialogue, and the mostly Bee Gees soundtrack (though--was it Chevy Chase who first said it?--the Brothers Gibb in full cry sound like a chorus of porpoises in heat). Also, what was sweetly absurd about the movie when it came out--the way it crunched disco euphoria with bleeding-heart working-class-hero romanticism--still seems sweetly absurd today. From the start, the movie’s ardent kitsch was central to its charm. Not taking it too seriously allowed you to take it seriously--as a heartfelt spree with a beat .

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Besides, “Saturday Night Fever” stands up better than a lot of other pop cult curios. Checked out “Easy Rider” again lately? It deserves to be screened continuously in a Natural History Museum wildlife exhibit marked “Hippies--the Paleolithic Era.” A movie isn’t necessarily bad if it wears its era on its sleeve, but faddishness dates fast.

The disco set pieces in “Saturday Night Fever” are too wired and entrancing to be faddish--or merely faddish. Disco has been dumped on for so long that it’s possible Generation X-ers will glom onto this movie just to shake their booties at snooty Boomers. And they’d be right.

Hollywood hasn’t yet done much with twentysome-things, probably because most of the films in which they’ve been featured--from “Singles” to “Slacker” to “Bodies, Rest & Motion”--have not been hits. But even when those films were listless and dinky they sometimes captured the generation’s funky anomie. The kids in some of these films have a bedraggled wit: Their radar picks up the hypocrisy in all those thirty- and fortysomethings who regard them as poor relations--the undeserving scions of the Summer of Love.

The kids from Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge in “Saturday Night Fever” have some of the same birthmarks as the current crop. Here’s how Nik Cohn described them in the 1976 New York magazine cover story on which the film is based: “They are not so chic, these kids . . . Indeed, the cults of recent years seem to have passed them by entirely . . . In many cases, they genuinely can’t remember who Bob Dylan was, let alone Ken Kesey or Timothy Leary. Haight Ashbury, Woodstock, Altamont--all of them draw a blank . . . The sixties, unlike previous decades, seemed full of teen-age money. No recession, no sense of danger . . . But now there is shortage once more, just as there was in the fifties. Attrition, continual pressure. So the new generation takes few risks. It goes through high school, obedient; graduates, looks for a job, saves and plans. Endures.”

This rap sound familiar?

In “Saturday Night Fever,” Travolta’s Tony Manero is 20 and has a dead-end job in a supply store and lives with his belligerent parents, who hold up his older brother, a priest, as a shining example. The only time he feels special is when he’s shimmying over at the 2001 Odyssey discotheque on Saturday nights; he’s not only transfixing on the strobe-lit dance floor, he’s transfixed, too.

Dancing is serious, essential business--more essential than sex even. (Tony complains to one of his buddies, “You make it with some of these chicks and they think you want to dance with them.”) Dancing is his way of effacing his humdrum life and giving himself top billing in his own high-style romantic whirligig. He dresses up for the part with all the pomp and preparation of a toreador--he’s got to be lethal or he’s nothing.

Disco is the perfect music for Tony and his buddies because, as you listen to it, it also seems to be effacing its sources--mainly rock and rhythm and blues. It blurs its roots into a rhythmic synthetic, and the beat goes on and on, unvarying, mesmerizing. This is a music that gives you time to complete your fantasy transformation.

There’s also no rage in disco, and that makes sense for Tony’s generation, too. Their rage is there but it’s damped down, puzzled. Rebellion takes the form of escape--of release on the dance floor. Tony may have the Dean-Brando swagger but he’s really a primped softie who pines for his hard-to-land dance partner and a life in Manhattan. (In “Staying Alive,” the highly regrettable sequel to this film directed by Sylvester Stallone, Tony, bulked up to Rambo proportions, became a Broadway dancing star.) Travolta has a rare quality in this film: He makes decency rapturous. His mumbly inarticulateness doesn’t fool us--we understand that he saves his eloquence for the dance floor.

“Saturday Night Fever” came out at a time when the conglomerate era of movie company ownership hit its first big stride. (The version being re-released is the original R-rated theatrical version before trims were made to tone down the raunchiness.) From a commercial standpoint, everything clicked into place with this film. It was a cross-over bonanza for the movie and the record business. (The soundtrack album actually grossed four times as much as the movie.) There’s an element of corruption in all this packaging and cross-fertilizing; it’s one of the things about “Saturday Night Fever” that doesn’t make you moony now because so much of what has stifled creativity in the movies since then has come from precisely this sort of conglomerated mega-merchandising mind set.

But it wasn’t “Saturday Night Fever” that wrecked the movies. Actually, it combined the energy of movies with the energy of pop-rock music and dance in a way that’s never been adequately followed up--except, occasionally, in the rock video arena.

Young audiences may find the rock-video connection a user-friendly way to ease into “Saturday Night Fever.” (It’s like a rock video with real depths of feeling.) And the ‘70s kitsch? Well, maybe it can seem exotic if you weren’t around then. The twentysome-thing revival of bell bottoms and platform heels and crop tops and all the rest of it is all-of-a-piece now with the top-selling best-of-the-’70s albums and the cult of the “Brady Bunch.”

Is this ‘70s devotion a put-on or the real thing? Probably a little of both. But there’s vitality in some of that kitsch, and, besides, part of what’s fun about pop culture is how the kitsch of one generation becomes the received wisdom of the next generation, or the one after that. To see “Saturday Night Fever” again is to exult in the sheer recyclability of pop culture. Maybe the film can even accomplish the impossible--get the Boomers and Generation X-ers on the same side.

At least for one midnight out of the week.