“There’s something really sexy about Scrooge McDuck.”
Set “sometime in the very early 80s”, The Last Days of Disco heralds the end of an era and hints at an oncoming catastrophe. While there’s some talk in the film (and actual experience) of sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhoea and herpes, there’s something far worse looming on the horizon. Advertising bod Jimmy (Mackenzie Astin) says to Des (Chris Eigeman), the manager of the movie’s ultra-select nightspot at one point, “I have a very bad feeling about the club, Des – it’s like a meteorite is headed straight for it, it’s going to destroy everything.”
Now, he’s actually referring to financial misdemeanours but there is subtext, I feel. I mean, doorman Van (Burr Steers) informs some of the club’s habitués, “People just don’t go out like they used to. They’re tired; some are sick, strung-out.”
Regardless of what actually caused the death of disco, a palpable threat rears its head throughout the film. For instance, we witness rock music fans prowling the streets wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the legend Disco Sucks. We see footage of ‘Disco Demolition Night’, held during a baseball fixture at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, during which a box of disco records is blown up. Cue an unanticipated riot. (This event actually took place in July of 1979 but this is a film, not a documentary – the discotheque is a sort-of Studio 54 that is located in a nearly New York.)
The Last Days of Disco has resonance today, not least because the root cause of the unrest could be seen as growing anti-‘other’ sentiment. Discos were considered by more conservative folk to be a breeding ground for ‘deviancy’ – homosexuality, for example. And the music genre in question actively – but by no means exclusively – involved the participation of people from Black American and Latin cultures. As for disco music itself, many deemed it as unnatural, machine-like – the antithesis of ‘proper’ music.
All of this notwithstanding, this 1998 drama, the third from Whit Stillman (before he embarked on an extended movie-making hiatus), isn’t some kind of anti-racism/homophobia treatise – the above-mentioned circumstances are rather obliquely inserted into the narrative.
Not unsurprisingly, Stillman makes films about what he knows; i.e. the lives of preppy Americans. Nevertheless, it comes across that he’s a big fan of disco. Born in 1952, he’d have been the perfect age to fully embrace that particular music and nightlife scene. And there’s no doubt he’s speaking through assistant district attorney Josh (Matt Keeslar), when he makes the following rallying call…
“Disco will never be over. It will always live in our minds and hearts. Something like this that was this big, and this important, and this great, will never die. Oh, for a few years, maybe many years, it will be considered passé and ridiculous. It will be misrepresented, caricatured and sneered at, or worse, completely ignored. People will laugh about John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, white polyester suits and platform shoes and going like this *strikes Travolta-as-Tony Manero pose*. But we had nothing to do with those things and still loved disco. Those who didn’t understand will never understand. Disco was much more and much better than all that. Disco was too great and too much fun to be gone forever. It has got to come back someday. I just hope it will be in our own lifetimes.”
It’s deeply ironic, then, that Josh plays such a significant part in the club’s closure, something that equates to the apex of what is so important to him on a personal level.
Disco plays a big part in the film even if it’s not usually the subject. If we’re not watching scenes set in the unnamed but highly exclusive nightclub, the characters are looking forward to their next visit and feeling anxiety about the possibility of not getting in. And the music itself… the film’s songs are impeccably chosen, with a particular emphasis on Nile Rodgers-Bernard Edwards-produced material, which is just as it should be. (And I love it when Chic’s Good Times is used properly, as it is here – it can signify halcyon days, of course, but it’s also a great song to point up life’s bittersweet moments.) And there’s something about disco music that lends itself well to both drama and comedy – its heightened aesthetic, the marriage of discomposure and positivity that is governed by a mathematical sense of timing.
In the film, disco tunes provide the backdrop to the lives of a bunch of Ivy League/Hampshire College graduates that are, mostly, trying to scale the professional ladder with varying degrees of success. The storyline mainly focuses on Alice (Chloë Sevigny) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) but there are a bunch of characters that pass in and out of the narrative. The Last Days of Disco is as much concerned with the fluidity of relationships as it is about upwardly pointed 20-somethings frequenting an elite nightclub.
It’s also about how our lead characters try to fit in, which means that sexual liaisons and the search for solid relationships are not necessarily mutually exclusive and are, in fact, often messily entwined. (Oh, and the film touches on money laundering, drug dealing, living with mental illness, socialising-as-career advancement, among other things.)
Alice comes across as a genuine sort of person and as such, she isn’t naturally inured to opportunists that want to bed her and rivals that want to undermine her. And while she’s not as forthright as Charlotte (and certainly not as conniving) she’s no wallflower – she’s more of a listener, an observer. She’s our point-of-view character and is trying to figure people out and understand how life works. And so Josh is a much better match for her than likeable yet shifty Des, whom Jimmy describes as, “a person of some integrity” except in his “relations with women.”
So The Last Days of Disco is a relationship drama, a film that charts a transitionary phase, during which college days have only just been left behind and when dreams and aspirations are still very much alive and personal freedoms are being further explored.
And as with Metropolitan and Barcelona, Disco is a very talky movie. For one thing, there’s a quite lengthy discussion about the real meaning behind Lady and the Tramp. Actually, there are a lot of references to comic-book/animation properties, such as Spider-Man, Green Hornet and Bambi – and yet another Disney mainstay, which is quoted at the top of this review. And while Disco is a drama, it’s also comedy and the repeated gag about Jimmy being kicked out of the club because owner Bernie (David Thornton) hates advertising people is pretty funny. (“That’s like something out of the Nazis!” says a dumbfounded Jimmy in one scene.)
Really, there’s a lot going on in the screenplay, which means that the film might seem to lack focus. Essentially, Stillman pours into it his young-adult life experiences and his pop-culture influences. And the narrative strands, when tied together, provide more than enough combustible material to blow a loosely based social collective wide apart. Everyone comes out of it relatively unscathed (well, anyone that really matters) with ambitions recalibrated and newly asserted.
I like that Stillman has Alice and Josh, the film’s most unadulterated characters, come together at the very end – and they don’t have to say a word. They walk the walk while others talk the talk. Actually, they do more than just walk – they dance. Dancing’s good, it’s positive, it’s life-affirming and it’s contagious. And so the very last sequence, which runs into the closing credits, sends a chill down my spine and puts a smile on my face just thinking about it.
Elektrical Turbulence 