'I Will Survive': the ridiculous and the sublime

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/31/i-will-survive-ridiculous-sublime

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For the first four months of the school, we were serenaded in our house about a dozen times every day with the 1978 disco standard "I Will Survive". This has been courtesy of our ten year-old, who may not have the life experience for an anthem of defiant independence, but definitely has the pipes.

She's not a Gloria Gaynor type, exactly – more like a midget Ethel Merman. A real belter, this kid. When she finally got to perform what she'd been rehearsing, at her grade-school variety show, 400 grownups reacted in the first half-dozen bars as if they'd been Tasered.

Then they started clapping in time with the beat. Wives gave husbands dirty looks. Third graders were doing that sassy-black-girl thing with their necks.

Old Dad had a tear in his eye, I must say. Perhaps, someday, I'll even get that melody out of my head. Meantime, permit me to remind you of Freddie Perren and Dino Fekaris's chorus:

Oh no not I! I will survive! Oh, as long as I know how to love, I know I'll stay alive. I've got all my life to live, And I've got all my love to give, I'll survive, I will survive! Hey hey …

Here's the thing about "I Will Survive". Let's just say that the rest of the disco era – the music, the fabrics, the hair, the platform shoes, the mirrored balls, whole lot of it – was a sin against God and man. Let's just stipulate that as a given. But there are two artifacts that transcended all the vulgar rest: Saturday Night Fever, in which John Travolta was simply phenomenal, and "I Will Survive". Inspiring. Dramatic. Catchy. And, let's face it, a great beat and easy to dance to.

It also had something else, seemed to me, something I could never quite put my finger on. Whatever this thing was, that mysterious power had the capacity to capture the imagination well beyond melodrama of the lyrical plot. But if it was so transcendent, exactly how? Sometimes, it requires a change of context for these mysteries to be revealed.

An example: about 20 years ago, some New York ad people who either cared deeply about society's refuse, or maybe just had a great idea, took a camera around and recorded homeless men and women singing "New York, New York.". Once again, it's a great song in its own right, but when you see vagabonds singing about "those vagabond shoes" and a man on a bed of trash singing about "the top of the heap", you can't help but clench at the irony.

More to the point, you also can't help but confront the truth that these folks are just people, who know the American songbook just as well as you do. Whereupon the song, and street encounters with the homeless, are never the same again.

Context.

So, on Saturday, my wife was out of town. My daughter was at a sleepover. I was alone in the house, which means one thing and one thing alone: documentaries! Through the miracle of Netflix streaming, I settled in with a 2008 film I'd had queued up for just such an opportunity. The film, by New York Times reporter Andrew Jacobs, is called Four Seasons Lodge. It is about a summer colony of elderly men and women during their annual month in the Catskill mountains. What they have in common, apart from age and deteriorating bungalows, is that they are all Holocaust survivors. Each of them had lost their entire families in the camps.

The movie is heartbreaking and poignant and inspiring and adorable, in all the ways you'd expect. The narrative thread is that the proprietors of Four Seasons Lodge, themselves elderly survivors, have reached their limit. We watch all the beautiful and painful group interactions with the knowledge, shared by the ensemble, that this year will be the last – the last chapter in their from-scratch postwar lives. They eat, they play canasta, they laugh, they cry, they bear witness, they suppress memories, they kibbitz, one last time. And on Saturday nights, they go to the showroom for some of the cheesiest entertainment ever recorded on film. The Catskills are where survivors go to live and kitsch goes to die.

"You know what l'chaim means?" asks one goyische singer to a room full of Jews. "It means 'to life'. And that's where my ex-husband is, in Sing Sing, for l'chaim!"

Ba-dump, bump.

All of the foregoing is for the purpose of telling you this: as I write this, I am myself in a bit of a Saturday night fever, because of how the movie ended. I won't tell you what became of the Lodge; that would be a spoiler. But as the credits rolled, we got to witness yet one more showroom act. It is a singer organist, whom I shall not name to protect the innocent, performing the most limp and soulless rendition imaginable of a 1978 double-platinum hit titled "I Will Survive."

It took all the strength I had not to fall apart, And tryin' hard to mend the pieces of my broken heart. And I spent oh so many nights just feelin' sorry for myself, I used to cry But now I hold my head up high.

And it is as if I'm hearing the song for the 300th time in four months, but for the first time in my life. Context. And the tears just won't seem to stop.