11. Midnight Cowboy

FOSTER HIRSCH

IN 1969, Hollywood discovered the underground. Easy Rider, Alice’s Restaurant, Medium Cool, and Midnight Cowboy were the box office hits of the year. Rebellious youth and the sounds of the counterculture suddenly became bankable, and the studios rushed into production a spate of films that tried to snare the market that Easy Rider had tapped so spectacularly.

Hollywood’s social consciousness didn’t pay off; by the time they were released, the youth movies seemed dated, historical relics rather than up-to-the-minute snapshots. Trying to cash in on what promised to be a profitable trend rather than treating serious social themes seriously, the films didn’t fool the vast public that had gone to see Dennis Hopper’s landmark road movie.

Midnight Cowboy was grouped with the other hip movies, but its concerns weren’t really social, and its two forlorn protagonists hardly qualified as counterculture heroes. Beneath its vividly depicted world of urban rot, Midnight Cowboy was in fact an old-fashioned romance, Camille updated to the pestilential big city and enacted by two men, a male hustler substituting for the dying courtesan and his fifth-rate pimp corresponding to the doting Armand. (Only this time, it’s the admirer rather than the prostitute who dies.) Because it was the first time, though, that the general moviegoing public had glimpsed the twilight world of the male hustler, the old story seemed new, modern, daring—hence, the film’s reputation as one of the with-it pictures of its time.

The lurid 42nd Street trappings that framed the story of the male friends were revolutionary for a big-budget major studio film. Midnight Cowboy is set in Andy Warhol territory. For the first time, the residents of the Chelsea Hotel, the hustlers, the pimps, the winos, the kooky, strung-out party people, and the kinky losers that crowded films like Bike Boy and My Hustler surfaced aboveground. John Schlesingers tour of the urban underbelly takes place on the same streets as Warhol’s self-titillating campy escapades. Only this time the big city weirdos are cleaned up a little for mass consumption, and there’s no self-parody. No one in Midnight Cowboy is putting us on; unlike the Warhol floor shows, Schlesinger’s film is played “straight.”

Female prostitutes have been recurrent figures in popular movies, but the notion of a man who sells his body has always seemed subversive. (It still does. Joe Buck didn’t make male whores respectable; producers weren’t drawn to his type even after the enormous success of Midnight Cowboy.) In 1969, Joe Buck and the grimy, dank world he moved through were startling, and even James Leo Herlihy, who wrote the novel, was surprised that the film was as frank as it was and as faithful to the spirit of his own work.

Prestige movies had never before explored the American lower depths in quite this way. The flophouse hotels, the grungy bars, the abandoned tenements supply most of the backgrounds for Joe Buck’s sexual odyssey. But the cowboy’s quest to conquer the women of Manhattan also takes him to penthouse apartments and luxury hotels, and Joe is an outsider in both worlds. To him, as well as to Schlesinger, the city is hard, alien, corrupt. New York on film had seldom looked so grim and plague-ridden before, and part of the film’s tension—its challenge for mass audiences—was in its depiction of the American Big City as a desolate and nightmarish wasteland.

It wasn’t only the settings that introduced a new level of realism in American movies—Joe’s sexual encounters were franker and more open variations on the figure of the muscular male who had wandered disguised through some of the work of the fifties. Tennessee Williams’ studs, William Inge’s beautiful male animal in Picnic, actors like Brando and James Dean and Paul Newman were all testaments to the almost magical power of the sexually potent male. Inge’s and Williams’ heroes, though, satisfied and soothed and “saved” women, and their obvious appeal to homosexuals (their creation, in fact, by homosexual writers) was discreetly overlooked. The fifties weren’t ready to consider what William Holden, stripped to the waist, his muscles rippling, might have been able to do for some of the frustrated men of that small, tight Kansas town.

Joe was the first big-time movie hero whose emphatic sexual presence was acknowledged as possible salvation for men as well as women. Joe Buck, cowboy from the sticks, was a more direct embodiment of the homosexual dream hero than any of Tennessee Williams’ sultry male models. Joe is the ideal figure in a certain kind of homosexual fantasy: he’s the butch fag, a particular sort of homosexual’s dream of what a real man is really like. The supreme manly man, the perfect stud, Joe is in fact the exact counterpart to the midnight cowboy who is presented as the birthday gift to Harold in The Boys in the Band. As Joe sadly discovers, his cowboy image turns on men more readily than women. His naive, country boy dream of servicing all the hungry ladies in the big city turns sour when he learns that it’s the men who are more likely to come on to him.

Joe’s two encounters with males were, of course, the real reason for the film’s X-rating: Main Street audiences had never seen anything like the sex in the balcony scene, in which a frightened student goes down on Joe, or Joe’s “date” with a nervous nelly mama’s boy.

Identifying masculinity with rugged cowboys, Joe is horrified by the idea of men sleeping with other men, and he never once confronts his own possible latent homosexuality. Admiring his own physique, looking appreciatively at the poster of Paul Newman which seems to be one of his most favored possessions, Joe might well graduate to enjoyment of other men in the flesh. But he can’t get beyond worshipping Newman from afar; for Joe (as, perhaps, for most of his audience), being queer is still the disease that dare not speak its name.

The character’s fear of exploring his own sexuality is shared by the director and screenwriter, and the reticence stamps the movie as distinctly pre-Gay Lib, a tentative rather than full-scale confrontation with the subject of masculine selfdefinition. Midnight Cowboy is a genuine landmark in the treatment of sexuality on film, but it is not a totally liberated treatment of the city at night. It’s a movie that can’t help raising the consciousness of its audience, and at the same time it’s a picture that needs its own consciousness raised. Schlesinger peeks into, but he doesn’t completely open, the closet.

The movie shares its hero’s skittishness about being gay. It presents homosexuais as crazy (the religious huckster pimp with his stable of boys); as guiltridden (the boy in the theater vomits in the john after his encounter with Joe, so disgusted is he by his desires); as prissy (the aging mama’s boy). The homosexuais are cartoons, and their world is presented as loathsome, intolerably isolated—as, indeed, the perfect complement to the neon soullessness and the gritty impersonality of 42nd Street.

Since the twilight world of gay men is presented as so foul and soudenying, it’s no wonder that Joe doesn’t want to admit any possible similarity to the men he services. The most shocking and most unexamined moment in the film is the character’s gratuitous cruelty to the older effeminate man who has picked him up. Why does Joe react so ferociously? Is it because he sees in the man a distorted and ugly part of himself? Is he, in lashing out at the helpless and pitiful man, denying something in his own nature? To dismiss Joe’s violence as simply a healthy heterosexual male’s disgust with an effeminate male is to neglect suggestions that the movie has thrown out about Joe all along.

The friendship between Joe and the street-wise Ratso who takes him in is possible because it’s based on a denial of homosexual attraction. Joe and Ratso are manly buddies who’ve decided to set up house together for the sake of convenience. It isn’t until the last scene, after Ratso dies on the bus, that Joe is able to express his feelings for his friend physically. Protectively, he puts his arm around his dead buddy, cradling him—a gesture he was not capable of when Ratso was alive. The two outcasts play at being he-men. When there’s tension between them, Ratso accuses Joe of being a fag. At his harshest, the city-smart Ratso tells the green country boy that, up here in New York, his cowboy getup is strictly “fag stuff.”

The two characters don’t necessarily have explicitly homosexual feelings for each other. But the possibility does scare them; they set limits to the way they relate to each other. Like Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, they seem to want to prove to themselves that men can have a deep feeling for each other without being homosexuals. Of course male friendship can be deep without being physical; but the movie never acknowledges that it can be physical without being impure.

Joe and Ratso are just good buddies, then. They’re each other’s best friend, and each other’s only friend. Neither one is successful with women—Ratso because, unshaven, crippled, louse-ridden, he’s unfit for normal heterosexual гоmance, Joe because—well, because why? Joe doesn’t make it as a stud for women, and the movie never lets us know the real reason. Are Joe’s difficulties with women connected to the traumatically concluded affair with his home town girl friend? The girl back home was clearly the town tramp, and the movie fleetingly suggests that both she and Joe were raped by a gang. Their relationship, at any rate, is presented as something impure, and the memory of its sordid outcome is a recurrent nightmare to Joe.

Joe’s two encounters with women customers are played for laughs. The episode with Sylvia Miles is decidedly anti-romance; neither character is interested in post-coital commitments. And the after-party shack-up with Brenda Vaccarro is ignited only when the sad-eyed career girl accuses Joe of being a fag.

Joe has fond memories of his grandmother, but his one really pure relationship is with the bum who befriends him. Male friendships are not uncommon in American films: consider the Howard Hawks films that celebrate male comradeship and competence. Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid paid more attention to each other than they did to Etta Place. In Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda were soulmates as well as traveling companions; women were relegated to incidental and virtually anonymous sex objects. The buddies on the road or the he-men in adventure genre has included a phobic repugnance to the possibility of sex between two men. In Deliverance, a vigorously defensive man’s man of a movie, sexual expression is foisted on half-wit hicks; the sexual feeling that might have existed between Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight is thus transposed to characters who are obviously perverts, unmistakable social misfits. More sensitive than the other American films depicting nonphysical male “romance,” Midnight Cowboy yet contains the suggestion that sex between Joe and Ratso would be an outrage on their masculinity. And behind that notion is the filmmakers’ clear belief that the mass public was not ready in 1969 (is it now?) to accept a male love story in the full sense.

Midnight Cowboy went further than any studio film had gone before in portraying a male friendship—but it didn’t go far enough. Sweetening the pill, the film made it easy for the general public to accept the legitimacy of the poor guys⁷feelings for each other. Both characters are presented as so forlorn and pitiable, so basically decent despite their hapless existences—and they’re so persuasively and appealingly played by Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight—that it’s easy to like them and even to accept them at the same time that the movie asks us to condescend to them. Bypassing any suggestion of deviation, the movie turns a male love story into an audience-pleasing sentimental weepie that’s good for as many tears as Love Story. Because it soothes a mass sensibility rather than challenging audience preconceptions, Midnight Cowboy is finally an agreeable movie, humane, compassionate, cathartic even—but not totally honest. It gives the audience what it can handle, and no more.

For all its comparative frankness, the movie is as protective and as posed in its depiction of 42nd Street and hippie culture as in its treatment of homosexuality. For all its groundbreaking hard-headedness, Schlesingers tour of the city’s low life has decidedly false notes. The cowboy hustlers lounging seductively against the movie posters are too neat, their stances too posed; reality is being rearranged for picturesque effect. The madwoman in the grim cafeteria is also too orchestrated an effect, as is the drunk sprawled in front of Tiffany’s. The women on the bus at the end, preoccupied with their hair and their eye make-up even in the presence of death, are also a too blatant touch. A foreigner, Schlesinger works overtime trying to capture American callousness.

The biggest stylistic blunder is the director’s handling of the hip psychedelic party. The freaks seem paraded, placed on display, to give the folks in Kansas a glimpse of big city dissipation. Oddly enough, the presence of Viva, who comes from Warhol’s stable and who is, presumably, the real thing, emphasizes the artifice of the movie’s strictly Hollywood style version of Warholian decadence. Viva is clearly uncomfortable; an alien presence, she remains detached, as if to say that this is all a masquerade, a put-on, for the folks back home.

Fast, impersonal sex, pot, psychedelic visions—the film tries to capture the freaky Warhol world by means of quick editing and garish color. The result is merely visual chic, already outdated by 1969. It’s an outsider’s view of the East Village sex and drug scene—it’s The New York Times rather than Rolling Stone that’s doing the story. Even so, the psychedelic light show that Schlesinger offers in place of a deeper and truer delineation of the late sixties freak scene was undoubtedly an introduction for the mass public.

Along with the country, Schlesinger matured. A scant three years after Midnight Cowboy, he dealt openly with the forbidden subject : Sunday, Bloody Sunday is the most humane and sensitive treatment yet of homosexuality in the movies. A mature man and a mature woman share a young bisexual male. The male love relationship is presented directly; the men kiss, they speak frankly about their feelings for each other. There are no secrets—the rivals know about each other’s existence. The doctor isn’t a stereotype; if anything, he’s the equivalent of the Sidney Poitier character in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?—a representative of a minority group who’s the best possible spokesman for his people. Like Poitier, Peter Finch is a man of great dignity and achievement. He’s so unfailingly sensitive and articulate, in fact, so completely free of stereotype, that audiences felt that he’s too good for his rather callow young lover, just as viewers felt Poitier was far superior to the innocuous white girl he wanted to marry.

The homosexual milieu in Sunday, Bloody Sunday exists side by side with straight society. Peter Finch’s heartaches are no different in kind or degree from those of Glenda Jackson. Being gay in this movie doesn’t mean being hysterical or suicidal (like the campy Boys in the Band) ; it doesn’t mean inevitable isolation, though perhaps, the film suggests, it requires greater compromise and flexibility.

A more sober view of the gay world than Midnight Cowboy, Sunday, Bloody Sunday is made in a mature style. Schlesinger avoids the hectic intercutting, the razzle-dazzle montage, that gives Midnight Cowboy a slick, disfiguring facade. Perhaps because he was uneasy with some of the undertones of Herlihy’s material, Schlesinger relied on visual flash that obscures the story line and character motivation, especially in the jumbled flashbacks. Taking homosexuality out of the slums, Sunday, Bloody Sunday shows greater confidence and control. The director doesn’t need to hide behind a gimmicky, elliptical style. He tells his story in an altogether unadorned manner, and the lean, taut technique is the perfect medium for Penelope Gilliatt’s no-nonsense screenplay. Here, Schlesinger has made the kind of movie that can change people’s minds; the film instructs and improves as it entertains.

Sunday, Bloody Sunday is the breakthrough, landmark movie that Midnight Cowboy threatens to be and never quite is. It’s true, though, that audiences responded more animatedly to the earlier movie, although, finally, it isn’t as probing or as humane as Gilliatt’s study. People with no particular interest in the subject were deeply drawn to Midnight Cowboy’s two protagonists, identifying with the characters’ loneliness, their touching, childlike devotion to each other, their sad, brave attempts to fight the city, their romantic dream of escape to the Florida sun and a life that would give the warmth and the dignity that the northern jungle so mercilessly denied. Dustin Hoffman, as the tubercular, dopey, failed con man, and Jon Voight, as the big, dumb, good-natured kid from the provinces, are matchless. The work of true actors submerging their own personalities into those of their characters, their performances are surely two of the most moving in the history of American films. Their humanity gives the movie its surprisingly universal appeal and helps to thwart possible audience phobia. Through the performances of Hoffman and Voight, the movie signals its audience that the story is about real people like you and me rather than an account of two unsavory homosexuals.

Midnight Cowboy cleans up and tones down its John Rechy–City of Night milieu. Instead of a hustler driven compulsively to impersonal sex, we’re offered a scared naive cowboy who craves affection and friendship. As a portrayal of a part of the gay subculture, Schlesingers is obviously an easier vision to take than Rechy’s, but the movie finally seems evasive on the always loaded and troublesome subject of American notions of masculinity.

A movie with terrific audience empathy, Midnight Cowboy deservedly won the Academy Award for Best Picture of the Year. But perhaps it would not have been so wildly loved if it had fully explored all the implications of its material.