“LIVE” FROM NEW YORK, IT’S (POSTMODERN) SATURDAY NIGHT! by Douglas L. Howard

In the final act of Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, Matt Woods’s John Belushi ice skates in his bee costume in an empty rink in Rockefeller Plaza, as Ella Hunt’s Gilda Radner and the iconic gold statue of Prometheus look on.  Wondering if John “ever had nostalgia for a moment while [he was] still in it,” Gilda proceeds to talk about being in the moment and simultaneously being in the future and looking back on it, on “this moment right before [they] went on TV.”  We know that (television) history is waiting for them and that, in a matter of minutes, their lives will change forever.  In a frantic film full of chaos, it’s a conspicuously quiet interlude, one that is all the more moving and poignant as we reflect on the losses of both Belushi and Radner.

It is also a scene that is laden with postmodern irony, one that we could analyze and similarly look back on, as it speaks to our own nostalgic preoccupation with the televisual past as well as the ongoing intertextual relationship between television and film.

Saturday Night takes us behind the scenes, to watch the show behind that very first show in October 1975, as producer Lorne Michaels scrambles to get his cast and crew ready, while studio executives nervously contemplate cancelling his broadcast for a rerun of Johnny Carson.  Lights accidentally fall from the ceiling, cast members like Chevy Chase and Garrett Morris reconsider their careers, Muppet creator Jim Henson repeatedly asks for a script, and a moody Belushi suddenly vanishes shortly after snorting cocaine.  Through it all, Michaels ably navigates his way through the seemingly endless maze of Studio 8H, intent on bringing the show to air, even as he struggles to define exactly what it is.

That Hunt’s Radner would stop in that moment to consider her nostalgia is so meaningful because the film itself encourages and inspires such feelings of nostalgia in the audience.  Ironically, we already are in the future that she imagines, watching the movie and looking back on that moment with her.  In effect, Saturday Night treats us to a happening right before it happens.  We already know how successful the series is going to be, just as we already know how talented that first cast is and what now-famous characters and comedic sketches they will introduce—from Chase’s Gerald Ford impressions to Belushi’s samurai to the Land Shark to the Coneheads to Radner’s Emily Litella, to name just a few.  In many ways, Gilda’s character in the film models the nostalgia that we should feel, do feel in watching the recreation of that night and experiencing it with her, while understanding and appreciating its cultural relevance from our vantage point in the present, almost fifty years later.

The past that Reitman revives, after all, is alive, alluring, and vibrant.  It feels real, as real as the Lorne Michaels quote at the start of the film or the bricks that are being placed on the set or the music of Janis Ian and Billy Preston, both musical guests on that first episode.  The energy, the action, the comedy, the clothes, the costumes, the music, and the names all transport us back to that October Saturday night in Manhattan—but not all of the details in this time travel are accurate.  Consider this piece from Time’s Olivia Waxman, which separates some of the fact from fiction: The Real Story Behind the Saturday Night Live Movie | TIME.  Although Belushi did, as Reitman notes in the article, go “completely missing” before the show, he likely did not go ice skating minutes before he appeared in the opening “Wolverines” sketch.

Vulture critic Bilge Ebiri is also quick to call out Saturday Night in his review (‘Saturday Night’ Review: SNL Movie Feels Spiritually True) for taking such liberties with the truth, which “stand out more in a movie that’s all about the packed intensity of such a short timeframe.”  Nevertheless, Ebiri cannot deny the film’s portrayal of the chaos and “commotion” that must surround a broadcast of the show, as he finally concedes that “Saturday Night might not be factually accurate, but it feels spiritually true.”

For postmodernism, though, this idealized, televisual Saturday Night, with all of its spiritual truths and reenacted inaccuracies, speaks to the dangerous appeal of the nostalgia film, “approach[ing] the past,” in Fredric Jameson’s words, “through stylistic connotation, conveying ‘pastness’ by the glossy qualities of the image” (19).  As fashion, image, and style work together to create a “stereotypical past” and express our sense of what Jameson would call, in this case, “1970s-ness,” our inability to “[fashion] representations of our own current experience” is ultimately revealed (21).  Gilda’s character perfectly encapsulates the postmodern nostalgia film’s dilemma, in this regard, as she sees herself looking back on that moment in Rockefeller Plaza in the future, but the moment that she longs for, as a real moment both in time and the lives of John Belushi and Gilda Radner, does not exist, in the same way that the character of Radner herself is, essentially, a dramatic creation for the film.  If Gilda represents us in the film or models our desire for the past, she directs us to a fictional image as opposed to the real, creating what Jean Baudrillard famously describes as “a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (1).

In its dizzying mix of real, embellished, imagined, and absurd, the film builds toward the climactic moment when Woods’s Belushi and Tommy Dewey’s Michael O’Donoghue run “The Wolverines” sketch and Cory Michael Smith’s Chevy Chase walks out onto the stage and proudly announces, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!”  It’s the point where the movie crosses over from what may or may not have happened behind the scenes to what audiences actually saw that night and to what is a recorded part of television history. But even here, Saturday Night leaves us with a postmodern conundrum because the scene, as it now plays out, isn’t live.  A good portion of the movie, moreover, wasn’t even filmed in New York; it was shot in Georgia.[1]  And, if I’m nitpicking, I didn’t watch it on a Saturday night; I streamed it on a Friday afternoon.  If the cinematic opening of the show becomes the one that we are made to want, is this, again in Baudrillard’s words, the “[substitution of] the signs of the real for the real” (2)?

During his campaign pitch for “the Carousel” on Mad Men, Don Draper tells the Kodak executives that “nostalgia literally means “the pain from an old wound” (1.13).  As the postmodern nostalgia film (re)frames this definition, what if there is no wound and perhaps never was?

In his discussion of postmodern nostalgia in Postmodern Hollywood, M. Keith Booker maintains that films like Grease and American Graffiti function to create “the seeming desire of the 1970s to be nostalgic for the 1950s,” largely because baby-boomer audiences, as adults, “looked wistfully back on their own childhood years in the 1950s as simpler and easier times—or, more accurately, wished that they could” (65).  Along these lines, Saturday Night would have a particular appeal to people who grew up on the early days of the show, when it was just called Saturday Night,[2] and might now long for what seems like a simpler time for them.  For those who didn’t, on the other hand, it could be equally attractive as their only experience of that history, a seductive cinematic experience that, again following Jameson, would take precedence over what is “live” and lived for them.  If Booker is right, in either case, Saturday Night (the film) wants us to feel this wound, however illusory it might be.

According to a recent El País article on Chevy Chase (Chevy Chase, the beloved comedian who was a monster off camera: ‘Not everyone hated him, just the people who’ve worked with him’ | Culture | EL PAÍS English), the set of Saturday Night (the TV show) in that first year wasn’t such an inviting, open, collaborative space.  Eva Güimil reports that Chevy “created a bad atmosphere on a show where everyone competed with everyone else and cocaine was rampant, a terrible combination.”  She also refers to an “atmosphere” of “rampant misogyny.”  For the nostalgic glimpse of Studio 8H and the ‘70s that we get in the film’s hundred-plus minutes, the real times themselves, like our own, were hardly so simple, even, and perhaps especially, after 11:30 on a Saturday night.

This all brings me back to something that I wrote here a few years ago about Zack Snyder’s Justice League and the ongoing blurring of those once clearly defined lines between television and film.  Although Saturday Night is a film, as it romanticizes 1970s television and the goings-on behind it, it goes along with other recent films, like Late Night with the Devil and Woman of the Hour, that also turn to ‘70s TV and combine what happens in front of the camera with what happens behind it to tell their “real” stories.  (Where Late Night shows us how fictional Carson-competitor Jack Delroy killed one of his guests during a Halloween broadcast, Woman is a thriller based on the true story of Cheryl Bradshaw, a Dating Game contestant who picked a serial killer as her date.)  While they come from different genres and have different messages, all three films show us new visions of a televised past that we thought we knew and contribute to that “glossy, stylistic” nostalgia for 1970s-ness that we never knew we needed.  As they open this conversation and make TV their subject matter, they, too, make themselves a subject for CST.

So, if we are in the midst of some cultural trend or we are being sold some nostalgic bill of ‘70s goods, maybe it doesn’t matter if John Belushi really went skating on the ice in his bee costume.  It only matters that we want him to.

SOURCES

Baudrillard, Jean.  Simulacra and Simulation.  Translate by Sheila Faria Glaser, Michigan UP, 1994.

Booker, M. Keith.  Postmodern Hollywood: What’s New in Film and Why It Makes Us Feel So Strange. Praeger, 2007.

Jameson, Fredric.  Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke UP, 2003.

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Douglas L. Howard is academic chair of the English Department on the Ammerman Campus at Suffolk County Community College. He is the co-editor of Television Finales: From Howdy Doody to Girls, co-editor of The Essential Sopranos Reader, and editor of Dexter: Investigating Cutting Edge Television.

 

FOOTNOTES

[1] A list of the shooting locations can be found here: Saturday Night Filming Locations (2024) – 4 Filming.

[2] As Mike Gavin explains the history of SNL’s name (50 fun facts about ‘Saturday Night Live’ for its 50th season – NBC New York), “The show was originally called ‘NBC’s Saturday Night’ when it debuted in 1975 because ABC was launching a variety series called ‘Saturday Night with Howard Cosell.’ When it was canceled after its first season, NBC purchased the rights to the title and changed it during the 1977-1978 season.”