The story of Tony Manero Essay - 1886 Words

The term disco often brings to mind, images of polyester suits, coordinated choreography and flashy disco balls. John Badham’s 1977 cinematic classic Saturday Night Fever capitalized on those images to help mainstream society relate to this growing subculture. John Travolta’s portrayal of Tony Manero, a down on his luck heterosexual male, who uses disco as a means of escape from his everyday life, helps to demonstrate Hollywood’s encroachment on this growing cultural phenomenon. What Badham’s film fails to explore is the history of disco; the influence that it had on underground society in the United States. The story of Tony Manero lacks the colourful history of this musical tradition. For example, the film does not explore the†¦show more content†¦After the Stonewall Riots in 1969, gay Americans began to develop a new collective persona and disco offered them a foundation on which they could build that identity upon. This collective identit y was most commonly shared in the discothà ¨ques themselves. The gay community quickly realized the importance of establishments that serviced gay cliental and while organizations like the Gay Activist Alliance existed to fight for gay equality on a political level, discothà ¨ques helped them fight for cultural equality. As the decade progressed, the sophistication of the gay club scene grew tremendously. Disco soon became â€Å"the most effective tool in the struggle for gay liberation†. Soon, the gay community began to move away from brothel style clubs and started to develop a discothà ¨que culture. With this shift, came a change in the way the gay community approached disco music and its lifestyle. By shifting the focus of clubs away from sex to music and dancing, the gay community began to develop a more diverse form of culture. These new clubs that focused on music helped to foster a greater sense of legitimacy which could be seen in the collective resistance of disco music at the time. Artists like Carl Bean, whose cover of Charles Harris’s song â€Å"I Was Born this Way† which was one of the first songs to explore gay sexuality in such open terms, helped to unify homosexual men.Show MoreRelated Comparing the Dance of Life in My Papa’s Waltz and Saturday Night Fever643 Words   |  3 Pagessociety. It symbolizes tradition, family, bonding, and entertainment. In almost every decade of the twentieth century, a different style of dance prevailed. In the 1970s, John Travolta brought disco dancing into the spotlight with his portrayal of Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever. Through his depiction of this character, John Travolta shows the monumental effects of dancing. Literature can also artfully explore the effect of dance on people. Theodore Roethkes My Papas Waltz dramatizes a specialRead Morestayin alive Essay1348 Words   |  6 Pagesof the narrative touches on the rise of the New Right while another tracks t he breakdown of working-class cultural idols. New Deal liberalism and the growth of a New Right founded upon a white working-class cultural conservatism are both not a new story. In Stayin’ Alive, the essential catastrophe of the 1970s was not only the Watergate incident, stagflation, racial conflict, and the local scuffles over the Vietnam War, however; In Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive, the 1970s essential catastrophe was