54: Let the Good Times Roll

A new year, an older movie—1998’s 54, the tale of one 19-year-old’s whirlwind experience at the mythical Studio 54. When I put it on, I never expected the film to dovetail so well with the concerns of my new podcast with Sam McIlhagga, Death Is a Photograph, on which we explore the aesthetic and cultural ephemera of the “end of history.” Our first season on Gen X has brought us back to a question again and again: how did the 70s shape the imaginary of youngish Xers?

The 90s, Gen X’ first decade of cultural influence, if not dominance, gazed over its shoulder at the 70s time and again. The Criterion Channel’s new program, “The ‘90s Do the ‘70s,” confirms this and offers a veritable feast for Sam and me. 54, which is among these offerings, gives the whole game away. Mark Christopher’s first studio feature drips with nostalgia tinged with occasional regret. It captures the 70s’ ongoing influence on the 90s, even as it tried to push away and define itself.

We open with a mainstay of 90s film: voiceover narration avec montage. Shane (Ryan Philippe), then a teenager from northern New Jersey, ponders late 70s catastrophe. Just as the film relents on its brief survey of Carter’s malaise, we see lines of cars at gas stations and Shane working as an attendant, filling up cars. He dreams of dancing at Studio 54, where he will eventually get a job and experience the Boogie Nights-like (1997) ups-and-downs of 70s nightlife.

The movie itself is fine—an enchanted, though ringing, indictment of the fraud, sexual misconduct, and rampant drug use of 70s club culture, full of 90s mainstays like Salma Hayek, Neve Campbell, and Mike Myers. The very fact that Studio 54 occupies such a huge place in Shane’s imagination (and therefore the film’s) speaks to the wistful ways in which young Xers envisioned the fun times of their youth, those they just barely missed out on. Christopher, born in 63 and therefore a very young Boomer, was just the right age to yearn for (without perhaps ever going) to) the famed club. For all the horridness, economic and otherwise, of the late 70s, it represented freedom, a release of inhibition, the calm before the Reagan storm.

Scenes in the club are lavish, and, as I understand it, true to life. A huge crescent moon swings from the ceiling, people have sex around the dancefloor, celebrities dart around, taking drugs, making vapid promises to the hopeful barbacks, coat girls, and bartenders. The garish lighting contrasts with the empty-eyed gaze of most clubgoers. Everyone is happy and no one is.

Here, Christopher expresses the complicated relationship so many Xers had to this period of their youth. It captures their imaginations, defining the horizon of the knowable—there used to be partying, real partying. At the same time, that joy contains the seed of its own destruction—the owner’s theft of club profits, the deaths due to drug abuse, the zombification of the clubgoers themselves. The 70s mean escape. But they also lead directly to the stultifying period in which the Xers then lived. The Boomers are to blame. But they also enjoyed freedom, liberty now at best sidelined, if not impossible.

Should you check it out? Yes, 54, for its occasional issues properly conveying its narrative (I saw the theatrical cut; there’s also a director’s cut that many say is better), it’s a rich, complicated watch. At the same time, it’s of immense sociological interest, a key to one way in which nostalgia operated for a then-ascendent generation. Free now—on the Criterion Channel.