Keep Me Dancing

Tony Manero, which is running at NWFF, is set in 1978 and concerns a 52-year-old Santiago man, Raúl, who is obsessed with…

… Saturday Night Fever:

…a movie that’s set in its moment of time, 1977.

The main character of Tony Manero, Raúl, sees in the hero of the disco film everything he wants to be. Raúl’s obsession with Tony, however, turns him into a killer. Each person Raul kills gets him a step closer to that impossible, unreachable point where he is one with the object of his desire.

One way to read Tony Manero is this:

Set in 1978 in Santiago, Chile, during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, Tony Manero, co-written and directed by Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain, follows the psychotic exploits of Raúl, a man in his fifties obsessed with impersonating John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever… Bludgeoning to death all those he deems an obstacle, Raúl is meant to be a stand-in for Pinochet.

This reading makes “an impoverished, disoriented man bent on living in the image of an American cinema icon” equivalent to “a CIA-backed dictator ruling at the behest of the US and Chilean ruling classes.” The critic at the World Socialist Web Sit, Joanne Laurier, completely rejects the meaning or point of this reading.

This is way off. Chile’s principal problem is not cultural imperialism, but political and economic imperialism. The director believes that “Raúl’s actions are also the actions of the system which taught him to base his expectations in everything that is alien to us.” If only Raúl—and Chile—were not in the clutches of Hollywood!

But that reading of Tony Monero (as a critique of cultural imperialism at the end of the 20th century) is not misleading: it very much points us in the right direction. Look behind this reading and you will find the most rewarding understanding of the film, which is this: The economic background of Saturday Night Fever is the same as the economic background of Tony Manero.

As the Marxist geographer David Harvey explains in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, the neoliberal program that was to dominate the 80s, 90s, and our current decade, began first (or were first implemented) in Chile and New York City.

First, Chile:

The opportunity for neoliberalism to come in from the cold arrived in the early seventies, when General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the revolutionary government of President Salvador Allende in Chile and invited the “Chicago Boys” that had been waiting in the wings for years to manage the economy. With the population stunned by the coup, the “Chicago Boys” went about the task of swiftly dismantling the Keynesian and developmentalist compromises that underpinned one of Latin America’s most advanced industrial economies.

With a Year Zero mentality akin to the Khmer Rouge, they forced Chile’s overnight transformation into the free-market “paradise” prescribed by Friedman, a believer in seeing crisis as an opportunity for radical restructuring. It was, however, a paradise that could be created only with massive repression—and an even greater dose of repression was necessary to radically liberalize neighboring Argentina, where tens of thousands were murdered and over a hundred thousand were tortured by a murderous military regime that gave a free hand to free-market radicals to restructure the economy.

Second, New York City:

But in the midst of this [fiscal crisis in mid 70s] there emerged a cabal of NY investment bankers and leaders of major financial institutions (led by Walter Wriston of Citibank) who refused to roll over the city’s rising debt. This, as intended by the leaders of finance, forced the city into technical bankruptcy.

In the wake of the crisis and the subsequent bailout… the financial elites now in control of city finances… The effect, Harvey argues, “was to curb the aspriations of the city’s powerful municipal unions, to implement wage freezes and cutbacks in public employment and social provision (education, public health, transportation), and to impose user fees… “

…Harvey is [not] out of line when he suggests that this development represented a “coup by the financial institutions against the democratically elected government of New York City, and it was every bit as effective as the military coup that had occured earlier in Chile”.

Meanwhile, Gerald Ford’s Treasury Secretary, William Simon (a supporter of the military coup against Allende in Chile, and later a head of the super-conservative “Olin Foundation”) strongly advised the president to withhold federal support to the deep fiscal crisis in New York City. (“Ford to City: Drop Dead, was the headline in the New York Daily News”). The idea here was that if any bailout of the city should occur, it should be seized upon as a political opportunity to restructure it in ways amenable to those who were appalled by the gains made by social movements in the city throughout the 20th century.

What does all of this mean? The different worlds that Tony (New York City) and Raúl (Chile) inhabit (they are not subjects or citizens but inhabitants—more about this in another post) are going through the same economic transformation. The banks that are reshaping NYC are also reshaping the Chile. Tony flees this hellish world (urban decay, crime, limited opportunities, increasing racial tension) into a paradise of disco music and lights; Raúl sees this on the screen. He really, really sees what Tony is doing and begins to build a paradise he can flee to (disco dancing, clothes, floor). At one level, there is the question of cultural imperialism; at a deeper level, there is the theme of escapism and a critique of neoliberalism and its devastating effects on cities and whole countries.