Midnight Cowboy (1969) dir. John Schlesinger, written by Waldo Salt
The traditional buddy movie form transposed with a re-imaging of the degraded cowboy stereotype who comes to Times Square with the dream of being a heterosexual male hustler. “...a discourse that would be the memory and the practice, or in short, the life-story of tact itself.”
-Michel De Certeau
One the most iconic of Hollywood’s rendering of Times Square as the location (personification) of society’s ethnic and sexual degeneracy. Much has been written about this film as an expression of an American anxiety about the failure of the White Man (cowboy) to make the world right in the face of the escalating Vietnam War and urban racial tensions around the country. The ghost of John Wayne and the idealism of the classic Western film haunts the film in the character of the young, naïve Texan Joe Buck looking to “make it” in the big city (literally sexually and figuratively, in terms of money). Only, the great surprise here is that making it for John Buck means becoming a successful male hustler (an exploitation of the genre expectation). Awarded 1969’s Academy Award for best picture, Midnight Cowboy seems to embody the dominant white, male Protestant culture’s anxiety about both heterosexuality, male power and race during a time of political and social upheaval on the heels of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination and the deeper engagement in the futile and senseless war in Vietnam.
Heralding a 1970’s independent resistance to Hollywood genre, this film, which might appear to present itself as a classic buddy road movie, engages in questions of public and private space. Significantly, as a film dealing with various kinds of illicit sexualities, public buses are the mode of transportation rather than the standard genre’s automobile. In the project to make visible types of sexuality outside of the heterosexual monogamous married norm, I would argue the film uses the metaphor of public transportation in and out of the “crossroads of the world” as a metaphor for social, physical needs for which the crowd and the gritty realities the urban environment allow for. This space of anti-repression, or at least of a working through of the liberatory effects of interclass contact, as Delany would describe it, leads to a deeper questioning of the performance, representation and the construction of ‘normative’ masculinity (as the trope of Joe Buck who wears the costume and the confused ethos of the cowboy exiled from his rural western environment). Subconsciously, the film also engages in a kind of elevation of the liberal democratic ideals of Christian charity and masculine friendship as well as the confrontation with the disempowered, crippled, ethnic Other.
-S.T.
-S.T.
Note: don’t miss the dig to Hitchcock and his perverted sexual fixations, in the scene with Joe Buck and the creepy English fetishist --- he looks and sounds an awful lot like Hitchcock... is the idea here that the Hitchcock horror film is agitating and in some way has shifted our notion of masculine power? Or are they just calling out a repressed homosexual fetish in that other type of movie?
