The Travolta Effect

A colleague and I were recently chatting, killing time during lunch coverage, when we do nothing much more than provide an adult presence in the cafeteria and answer the occasional student question.  As it turns out, he and I were born approximately a month apart, so there is no cultural reference we can drop that the other will not get.  Despite being born 1,500 miles apart, we had many of the same experiences and influences growing up.

This says a lot about the power of American media and the Hollywood dream machine.  As recently as a hundred years ago, if you were to speak to someone from East Texas and someone from the well-to-do northern suburbs of New York City, it might have been like comparing beings from two different planets.  Don't get me wrong -- I'm sure there are aspects of our lives and attitudes that might confound each other.  But thanks to large helpings of mass culture, we grew up with the same rock and roll bands, songs, television shows, films and iconic actors.

John Travolta would not top any of my lists, were you to ask me who my favorites are, even though I saw him recently in Pulp Fiction (for the umpteenth time), and his performance, like so many others in that film, is spectacular.  His effect -- or maybe the effect of the dream machine that created his persona -- is undeniable.  When my friend and I discuss the "Travolta Effect," we talk about things like hair and clothes, and how he took us from Kotter to Saturday Night Fever to Urban Cowboy to Grease.  

Apparently John has fallen on more difficult times of late.  Since Pulp, his career has been hit and miss. He made an embarrassing, Dianetics-inspired movie, based on L. Ron Hubbard's book, Battlefield Earth, which may have been the low-water mark.  He's had a few mini-comebacks, including a drag musical (Hairspray) and an animated mega-hit in which he voices a dog who believes he is the super-hero Hollywood has created.

More notoriously, in one of the more lurid stories this past summer, John Travolta was rumored to have received some "questionable" massages from a rather shady masseur named Luis.  Then of course, many others came out of the woodwork to say they, too, had had massages that ended up being much more than a rubdown.

I don't pretend to know any of the gory details of what went on there.  Like my friend, and most men in our demographic, I'm sure, I have turned away from the uglier aspects of John's recent travails.  I did happen to notice that Gotti, in which Travolta will play the title role of John Gotti, Sr., is in post-production.  Barry Levinson is the director, and Kelly Preston, Travolta's real-life wife, plays Victoria Gotti, the spouse of the Dapper Don.

So we'll see.  Maybe Johnny T. has one more comeback left in him.  And who knows, maybe my colleague and I will start sporting shiny Armani suits and smoking big, fat Cuban cigars, and the Travolta Effect will once again be in full force.