Text: "Daleks have no concept of elegance." "This is obvious." "You are wearing flares! You cannot conquer the universe with disco fever!"

“The gang rape scene on the drive to the Verrazano Bridge is so ghastly, that I honestly feel the need to give trigger warnings to any sexual assault survivor who hasn’t seen Saturday Night Fever and I seriously wondered how distressed Donna Pescow must have been when filming this.

What makes this scene so palpable, horrifying, and downright triggering is how totally normal it is.

Double J, Bobby C, and those other assholes Tony hangs around don’t have a “look” to them. They are of totally average height and build, they’re not 6'3" MMA fighters who could easily overpower a 5'6" woman. They’re not particularly handsome, or creepy-looking. You couldn’t pick them out of your average college campus, large office, city street, or police line-up. They are just so blatantly mediocre and not unique at all, which makes it so much realer because Hollywood has a tendency to make on-screen rapists seem specifically intimidating and creepy, a total stranger with douchey-looking facial hair who slips roofies into drinks at clubs like 2001 Odyssey. Saturday Night Fever got it right in that it’s more likely to be someone you know, a friend of a friend, that guy you want to like you because he’s close to the object of your affection.

Annette is literally crying as they laugh, and Tony acts like nothing huge just happened. He’s as annoyed as one would expect someone to be when they had to wait longer than they’d thought for a Quarter Pounder at the drive-through. He even insults her after it’s all over.”

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Nevertheless, there’s really some kind of social undercurrent in how Saturday Night Fever gets presented as this fun and carefree retrospective of the disco era, a romp full of John Travolta dancing, rather than the intensely dark subject matter it actually covered…and the fact that the origin story which led to the script was complete bullshit. And if anyone wants an example of how insidious rape culture is, and an example of how its very premises also collapse in on itself, look no further than this movie.”

I don’t remember anyone ever telling me there were rape scenes in Saturday Night Fever. Or maybe no one who had seen it remembered them. And perhaps that says as much about rape culture than the film itself.

This pieces sums it all up completely. It’s nuts the disjunction between the created imaginary of this icon of pop culture and the reality of the film. it speaks to how fucked up our society was and still is. im really disturbed after watching