The Gaze at Work: Knowledge Relations and Class Spectatorship

Recently, as I was finishing a book about class in 1970s U.S. cinema, I foundmyself thinking more and more about a particular moment in Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977) that always leavesme unsettled. It occurswhenTony (JohnTravolta) helps Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney) move into a Manhattan apartment, where they happen upon its former owner Jay, a producer Stephanie knows from work and who is, we quickly discern, her ex-lover. At this point in the film, we already know that Stephanie, who hails from the same working-class Brooklyn neighborhood (Bay Ridge) as Tony, is a lower-middle-class striver who self-consciously and anxiously parades her newfound cultural knowledge and half-secured sense of class ascendancy. (Tony’s attraction to and occasional animosity toward her stems in large part from her efforts to distance herself from the world he knows.) Jay’s presence, however, immediately puts Stephanie in her place: he draws attention to her failed attempts at cosmopolitan sophistication by noting her incorrect speech (he reminds her that “no one says ‘super’anymore”) and incompletemastery of cultural references (he chides her for buying the wrong book). Tony, meanwhile, shrinks into the background of the scene, only to confront Stephanie angrily outside about her relationship with Jay. The scene closes with Stephanie tearfully explaining that she needed Jay’s help at her office because she felt out of her depths there—that she was tired of saying “I don’t know” all the time.