Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s - Staying Alive

Rocky III trumpeted Sylvester Stallone as a director able to divine bracing imagery out of noise. His style is a rough jumble of telephoto snooping, grimacing close-ups and pop video assembly. In that sense Sly is the perfect choice to chronicle Tony Manero's plunge into fleeting, plastic fame. Staying Alive picks up a couple of years after Saturday Night Fever with Manero struggling to break onto Broadway.  

Remembered as a misbegotten sequel, Staying Alive does come on like a toothless retooling of its predecessor, deleting an extended cast and any associated grime in favour of all-consuming exercise. Dancing is no longer Manero's release, it's the totality of his experience. Even serving drinks in some yuppie beer hall, Tony slinks rather than clods, weaving in and around the boozed up dancers like a self-satisfied snake.  

As Manero is consumed by dance, so too is Staying Alive. Stallone shoots long, dreamy sequences of practice and repetition. John Travolta's coiled, sinewy body is dwelled upon to a fetishistic degree. Stallone painting an immortal record of this lithe, actualised form, his eye hovering somewhere between a Jane Fonda jazzercise vid and Shinya Tsukamoto's all-consuming love of musculature. 

Staying Alive's certificate may be family friendly but Manero is still the exact same arch, emotional manipulator he was in Fever. Everybody is grist. Every encounter, no matter how personal, is transformed into an opportunity to climb. Manero himself seems only dimly aware of this coercion while Stallone's film is not only non-judgemental, it depicts his power over women as a positive. 

Manero's emotional abuse isn't just tolerated, it's the ability that facilitates his crowning glory - having successfully fucked his way into a starring role in some absurdly expensive interpretive dance nightmare, Manero hurls his leading lady aside to perform a wholly unsanctioned dance solo. The stage director's objections die in his throat, drowned out by an audience screaming their approval. 

Saturday Night Fever promised a positive change in Tony. We left that film assured that there was a chance that he might be able to evolve to the point where women registered as actual people, rather than just something pliant he gets to jab his dick at. Staying Alive has no such pretensions, it doubles down on a venal little lizard that will do or say anything to get his shot at fame. 

Saturday Night Fever

An intensely pessimistic film in which nobody gets what they want. It's hilarious to think that Paramount saw the soundtrack album sales and thought slashing out a gang rape and all instances of the word cunt would somehow make this film palatable to the Grease crowd. As a prank it's up there with releasing Only God Forgives at the height of Summer (I know of a few people who popped in expecting something in the same vein as Channing Tatum's Fighting). Saturday Night Fever isn't an uplifting love story, it's a succession of punishing events in which people are forced to shut up and eat shit.

John Travolta is Tony Manero, a coke thin lizard with a rubbish job and a worse family. Manero's one bright spot is a weekly, financially debilitating, trip to the local disco, the 2001 Odyssey. Once inside Manero talks like a Mod and dances like a God. Crowds part, slinking back to the club's corners to admire Manero's cavorting. Manero is selfish and self-involved, but somehow the praise he receives in the Odyssey doesn't bleed over into how he conducts himself in his civilian life. Although by no means meek, there's a certain reticence to his behaviour.

The quiet futility of his job, not to mention some outright aggression from his parents, keep him in a holding pattern. Manero compartmentalises his abilities as if slightly embarrassed by them. The status they confer is transient, they're not helping him put any food on the table either. Manero judges himself by the limits his parents embody, he knows they won't care for his talents so he doesn't dare share them. He's serious about the craft though. The finale dance off sees Manero and his partner Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney) drifting into a dreamy stupor that simulates the tranquillised fizz of love. The local crowd lap it up. Tony knows it's all bullshit, so he hands his prize off to an electrified Latin dance couple and tries to force himself on a disinterested Stephanie.