I’ve been putting it off but I’m finally going to bite the bullet and talk about Saturday Night Fever. Robert Berens inserting a reference to the film into the car scene of his first episode Heaven Can’t Wait has bothered me for a long time, because it’s such a dark film and none of the scenes that take place in the Impala in the film are… good. And there are several pivotal scenes in the film that do take place inside an Impala, just like there are in the episode.
The most uplifting of the scenes of Tony Manero inside the Impala deal with his friendship with a woman. In fact, the film is in a way an inversed romance. An anti-romance. The main character and the female lead do not end up together, they end up beginning a friendship. So I’ve chewed on the subtext. Because in the episode, there were clear indicators of romance. The episode was literally coated in pink.
In the scene, Dean calls Castiel ‘Tony Manero’ as he unbuttons his shirt. On the surface, he’s telling Castiel not to open so many buttons, as it’s not the 70s anymore. Showing off one’s chest isn’t in vogue anymore.
But on the subtextual level, knowing Dean’s default position of projection, there are two ways of interpreting the scene. Either Dean feels as though Castiel is the Tony to his Stephanie (and it would not be the first time that Dean is associated with the feminine), or that he is straight up projecting and feels as though he himself embodies Tony Manero in this moment. Not Tony Manero to Castiel’s Stephanie, but Tony Manero to any hot guy in his fucking car.
Tony Manero, you see, was bisexual. This is heavily implied in the subtext of the film. And the subtext of the film is very similar to the kind of subtext that Supernatural has been doing all the decade long. Gazes, close friendships with men. Composition. Set design and direction. One of the most blatant indicators is, in fact, in set design: Tony has three prominent posters in his room. Two are very erotic posters of Sylvester Stallone and Al Pacino (and Dog Day Afternoon, in which Al Pacino’s character is married to Chris Sarandon’s pre-op transsexual character, had come out two years previously, it might be added). One is a very sexy and famous poster of Farrah Fawcett.
But the posters in Tony’s room are positioned so that while he’s preparing himself, it’s the two male posters that he sees. The female poster is by the door, so that when ever his father comes into his room, that is the poster he sees. And in fact we see on two separate occasions his father ogling over the Farrah poster, perched at Tony’s door. The Farrah poster is also the last thing Tony sees when ever he leaves his room for the outside world.
To remember what he’s supposed to project to the world, you see. To remember what a guy like him is supposed to want.
But alone in his room? That’s not what he wants. What he wants is this:
But this is subtext. It’s well-known subtext, but still subtext. Why should this film be important regarding the topic of Dean Winchester’s bisexuality?
Saturday Night Fever is, to my knowledge, the first major motion picture to explicitly use the word ‘bisexual’ in it. There may have been a few others preceding it, but they were not nearly as famous as this film that came out at the tail-end of the era of ‘bisexual chic’ of the 70s. And in the film, it is used following a scene of Tony’s friends making fun of him in front of Stephanie for his crass manners.
Tony: “Tell them about the people come into the office. that’s what they wanna hear, tell them that.” Stephanie: “Oh, you know who came in today? this guy, David Bowie. he comes in, has this Astrakhan…” Joey: “He’s a faggot.” Double J: “He’s a half-faggot, man.” Tony: “Hey, relax! come on. sit down.” Stephanie: “You mean he’s a bisexual.” Double J: “Yeah, he swings both ways. men and boys. (we hear a couple girls in the background laugh) What’s so funny?”
You’ll notice that Tony does not participate in the ribbing, but is very quiet during the exchange. Tony is caught between two worlds in more ways than one. His is a world torn apart by duality.
What the episode establishes is that Dean Winchester has seen the film Saturday Night Fever, and it left profound enough of an impression on him that his subconscious recalled a reference to it while he was under all kinds of duress in his life. This is not a reference he dropped with intent, but one that slipped out – not unlike the one on the ‘toe-shoes full of crazy’ reference he dropped while distracted in Out With The Old, before he recognized his slip-up and rebuilt his facade for his brother with ‘hot tutu-on-tutu action’. This is something that bubbled out of Dean’s subconscious in that moment.
It is the upsetting nature of the Impala-scenes in the film that have bothered me in trying to figure out Berens’ motivation for the reference. But the conclusion I have to make is that he was not paralleling the scenes in the episode and in the film so much as inverting them. He was inverting the scenes because Castiel is not Stephanie. He is not someone Dean pretends to desire in his perfunctory heterosexual masculinity, but deep down inside wants as a friend. But although Castiel is not Stephanie, Dean and Tony have a lot in common.
Dean has seen Saturday Night Fever and it left an impression on him. The question we must ask ourselves is what about it in particular affected him.
Here’s an excerpt from K. P. R. Hart’s Queer Males in Contemporary Cinema: Becoming Visible:
“Directed by John Badham…”
Who is, incidentally, the same John Badham who directed:
The work that went into this post is appreciated. To realize that John Badham has directed 2014-2016 episodes of Supernatural is something of a revelation. The art of film includes so much that is unspoken and Supernatural is a beautiful example of this – it almost makes me wonder if it would be less of a creative well for the writers and the directors who have left subtextual Easter eggs throughout the years, should an aspect of a character (in this case Dean’s sexuality) become acknowledged outright, therefore losing the inherent ambiguity that allows them to play with it so much and so often.
It’s not the only ambiguous element on the show, so maintexting it wouldn’t necessarily mean losing the show’s signature polysemic fashion of the storytelling. I’ve been meaning to write a proper post about this for a long while now, but I see the show intentionally striving to write the story so that it’s like Led Zeppelin’s In Through the Out Door album cover (and Led Zeppelin is very important both to the show and to the show’s creator):
The album had alternative covers that contained the same scene shot from different perspectives, emphasizing different aspects of it. And which ever cover people got for their album, that’s what they thought the cover was. People receive narratives from different perspectives and our own experiences determine what parts of the story we pay attention to, what about it speaks for us.
All of those album covers were real, and there are many different but legitimate ways of understanding the story of Supernatural. I don’t want to take away from anyone else’s story while I’m enjoying mine.
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