STAYIN' ALIVE

Pablo Larrain’s Unnerving, Brilliant Tony Manero

A stark counterpoint to Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino’s utopian fantasia of messianic cinephilia, this bit of Chilean miserablism (hopefully no longer a pejorative descriptor) burrows underneath the intersection of motion picture idolatry and fascist art making. What emerges is a harrowing masterpiece.

In a watch-and-follow handheld aesthetic – shot on Super16mm with a color palette reduced to a pasty shade of mortar – sophomore director Pablo Larrain’s camera stays closely behind Raul (co-writer Alfredo Castro, who from the three quarter view recalls a Panic in Needle Park-era Al Pacino, all eye sockets and fierce Latin angularity. Shot straight on, he’s Lou Reed at his most disconcertingly blank), as he pursues the monomaniacal quest to become Augusto Pinochet-era Chile’s foremost Tony Manero (John Travolta's iconic character from Saturday Night Fever) impersonator in the waning days of disco.

A local television station holds weekly contests to determine the Chilean equivalent of a rotating cast of American celebrities – at the outset of the film Raul mistakenly shows up at the Chuck Norris lookalike contest – which gives Raul a way of parlaying his Saturday Night Fever fixation into national notoriety and artistic legitimacy. Concurrently, he’s been managing a group of amateur dancers in a series of painfully mechanical reiterations of Fever’s key sequences for paltry, drunken crowds. The Manero character’s effect on Raul’s world is total, bringing him to tears at its tender moments while also inspiring him to commit a string of impulsive, remorseless killings.

Devoutly, studiously attending screenings of the film (his plastic-wrapped imitation of Fever’s iconic white suit takes up the adjoining seat), Raul sets about internalizing each detail and nuance of Travolta’s performance in an effort to assimilate the character entirely. Accurate impersonation is no cheap endeavor, and the jobless Raul shows no mercy in brutally slaughtering innocents who can provide him with the gold chains, television sets and dance floor panels capable of legitimizing his apery. Nor is his masquerade profitable: the television’s grand prize is a scant sum that would scarcely cover the cost of the accoutrements required for Raul’s ardent verisimilitude. There is no benefit to this charade but the opportunity for control.

Lest we entertain the notion that the obsession is with Travolta himself, as a performer, the local theater swaps out Fever for Grease one afternoon (with an uptick in attendance), provoking Raul to throttle the owner against the projector and thieve the cash register. To the aging Raul, Manero represents the immortal, an attainable, perpetual youth. When the permanence of his idol’s grace is threatened by the theater’s crass acquiescence to fickle popular demand, that is, when the constituents of his own identity are exposed as mere pop culture artifacts, Raul can only compensate with violence in an effort to keep his carefully composed self from disintegrating.

“How the financially pinched 70s generation that grew up on TV attempt[ed] to find its own forms of beauty and release,” was how Pauline Kael perceptively described Manero’s original appeal to American audiences (1). In Chile, however, Manero’s pursuit of release and freedom becomes Raul’s template for merciless control and two-bit fascism. Twentieth century despots are famous for their cinephilia, and Raul, underneath the umbrella of Pinochet, parlays his cinematic fantasies into fascistic impulses on the grandest stages available to him, first a decrepit theater, then, briefly, a claustrophobic soundstage (2). Pinochet is the lion and Raul is the termite, but the film makes explicit the mutuality of their gluttonous ambition. Both Larrain’s photographic schema and Raul’s broken features recall cornerstones of Italian Neo-realism, and, most perversely, Tony Manero’s protagonist functions as the Fascist Everyman.

Paradoxically, the more avidly Raul consumes the film, the more carefully he notes the Saturday Night Fever’s most quotidian details, the more he’s unable to comprehend them accurately. A few running jokes have characters arguing with him about the number of buttons above Manero’s zipper or the color of the heroine’s dress in a key sequence. The pathetic equation of Raul’s life: the more firmly he impresses himself upon the film, the greater is his rejection from it, the distance between the two increasing upon every viewing. As he closely inspects a filched 35mm print of Fever, isolating each move and scrutinizing each successive image as a translatable code, the two younger members of his company intrude upon him and introduce an original number they propose to feature in the performance. Disinterested, Raul removes his eyes from the stilled Manero only once, to say that their efforts were wasted, as their steps are “not in the film,” that is, not fit for inclusion because their genesis lay outside of the sanctioned fantasy. Susan Sontag defined the fascist aesthetic as one that “… flows from (and justifies) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude.” (3) Fittingly, Raul’s life is one of performance – embodiment is his art – and his servitude to the idea of Tony Manero and his total control of others encapsulates Sontag’s conception of a binary fascist aesthetic, which in Raul’s case is noxiously based on a misguided ideal of freedom and grace.

Impossibly reticent, the only sound he emits is the shuffle of his footsteps as he ambles through depopulated slums, occasionally stooping to avoid the eye of patrolling military goons. The famous opening of Saturday Night Fever has Travolta’s boots strutting down a Brooklyn sidewalk with The Bee Gees' disco anthem “Stayin’ Alive” on the soundtrack. Tony Manero is without non-source music; consequently, Travolta’s silenced footsteps are translated to the hard grind of Raul’s shoes against gravel roads. Music dominates all the dance sequences of Fever, eliminating all sonic evidence of labor or strain, but Larrain never forgets Raul’s feet and muscles. The ersatz Manero’s attempt at providing the appropriate disco soundtrack to his company’s performances is undermined by the blaring, graceless clapping of their feet against the splintered wooden floor. In keeping with a fascist preoccupation with tightly organized (controlled) bodies, the dancers’ rote memorization of Travolta’s steps renders each performance a perfunctory march.

Pinochet’s coup was CIA-sponsored, and the film contains the implication that Saturday Night Fever itself is also exemplary of American meddling and imperialism. The murderous fascism of both the dictator and the dancer is propped up by the monolithic United States, but Larrain is careful not to suggest that U.S. hegemony manufactures such tyranny outright, at least in this instance. The relationship is instead one of facilitation, not construction, and a less nuanced film (and certainly one by an American filmmaker) would not have realized this. Larrain thus creates a narrative successful at both the interpersonal and political levels while tangibly, though subtly, articulating the interplay between. In fact, the film’s calmest moment – fleeting as it is – features the troupe relaxing after a performance by listening to traditional Chilean music. The sequence quickly devolves into a sex scene of Tarr-ian alienation in which would-be lovers are reduced to masturbating side-by-side and passing out, but the respite of Chilean culture registers with the characters strongly, if only for a moment and followed quickly by further misery wrought by their leader.

The respective realms of lion and termite eventually converge as the two insolent dancers bent on inserting original passages into the performance become budding anti-Pinochet activists, simultaneously wrenching themselves away from two forms of concomitant fascism, the artistic and the political. Raul’s nervousness around the authorities (always crouching, always ducking, always avoiding scrutiny) is never fully explained, but it’s worth asserting that the lion need never fear the termite, but the termite would be advised always to fear the lion, regardless of their commonality. The film ends as the authorities descend upon the theater to interrogate (and presumably execute) the young lovers for the subversive behavior – they’d been finked on by the girl’s mother, who was jealous of Raul’s attraction to her daughter. Blessed with a rat’s sense of impending trouble, Raul slips out the back door in his Travolta garb, headed for the television station.


Tony Manero / Chile, Brazil / Color / 98 min. / Directed by Pablo Larrain / Written by Alfredo Castro, Mateo Iribarren and Mr. Larrain / Starring: Alfredo Castro, Paola Lattus, Hector Morales, Amparo Noguera and Elsa Poblete


Notes:

1 - Collected in 5001 Nights at the Movies. New York: Henry Holt, 1985

2 - Despots seem particularly enamored with movies (or at least we’re enamored with the connection). Kim Jong-Il’s fetish for James Bond is well documented, as was Stalin’s fondness for musicals. Hitler preferred Chaplin until The Great Dictator. The connection between artistic fantasy and political fantasy must be tempting, and these dictators being at the helm of state film industries must make those two arenas less distinguishable. An interesting, cursory overview of Stalin’s command of state cinema (certainly the most prolonged and strongest of a tyrant over a major film industry) can be found at:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3618310/Why-Stalin-loved-Tarzan-and-wanted-John-Wayne-shot.html.

3 – Sontag’s essay, “Fascinating Fascism,” from which these quotes were taken and which is more than anything a far-reaching discussion of Nazi documentarian Leni Riefenstahl’s work and legacy, appears in her collection:

Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Vintage, 1981