Review of Midnight Cowboy (1969) by Spangle — 06 Sep 2017

Dark, grimy, and disturbing, Midnight Cowboy is not exactly the film I thought it was going to be. I knew it was about a male prostitute, but I thought both Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman were going to be prostitutes, not just Voight. It was also my assumption that he was not some wannabe prostitute who does not really work, but rather an established one in New York City. Naturally, in line with this, my expectation was to see a lot more sex than I actually got. Now, none of these are bad things, in fact rather good. By not meeting these expectations, Midnight Cowboy manages to actually tell a far more interesting story of a young, hurt Texan boy coming to New York City to try to become a prostitute and meeting an ill loser with a limp who becomes his best friend. As a startling counter-point to the American dream at the height of the Vietnam War, Midnight Cowboy is a very good character study and a pure technical showcase for director John Schlesinger.

With this young Texan cowboy Joe Buck (Jon Voight), Midnight Cowboy creates the quintessential American male. Name dropping Gary Cooper or John Wayne as similar ideals of what a man is supposed to be, it is only natural that in the counter-culture 1960s, Schlesinger would take this example of masculinity and throw him into situations unfit for men. Sleeping with women as a prostitute or even partaking with some men when times are hard, as well as going to seedy underground parties with drugs, Joe Buck seems to be a man who could not be further from the old school definition of masculinity even if his look and style of dress say otherwise. Compounding this, he steals readily. Inspired by friend Enrico "Ratso" Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), Buck begins to rob people or steal small items to attempt to get any small number of funds for the two of them, Buck flies in the face of classic cowboy western stars Cooper and Wayne. Known for playing Sheriffs or simply passer-bys who fight against men who steal land/cattle from others, Cooper and Wayne are strictly on the "right" side of morality. Buck, however, by trading in sex and stealing stands as the complete foil to those classic men, to the degree that he would be an appropriate antagonist in one of their films. Schlesinger certainly hints at this dark villainy by the film's title of Midnight Cowboy. Dark and ominous, the addition of "Midnight" makes it read as being the darker version of a cowboy and, as it plays out, it is very appropriate.

In the process, Midnight Cowboy stands as a critique of the American dream. With a small town boy coming to the big city on a bus ride that takes him through quintessential American items - commercial billboards, oil, diners, etc. - the film presents Americana and then shows the polar opposite: the dark underbelly. Showing how this unassuming and innocent boy is quickly corrupted and spit out by the big city, the film shows Joe's journey from renting a small hotel room to being kicked out and having to stay in a condemned building with Ratso. Going from the penthouse in which he spends an afternoon with a rich cougar to the literal sewer with a man nicknamed rat, Joe goes from king of the hill to bottom of the heap in no time whatsoever. As easily as he walked in, New York City and its high barriers to entry spit him out into the gutter with drug-infested parties, dirty homes, and grime around every corner. On the surface, for men such as Joe or others who journey to the big city to achieve their dreams, it all seems so easy. Once they arrive, however, the city and its machinations put up barriers all around that make "making it" a challenge few can accomplish. Unfortunately for Joe, he is not one of those and, as a result, he must live in what can only be defined as "squalor" on a good day.

To capture the horrors seen by Joe - even if he does not believe them to be horrors - Schlesinger uses hectic and pretty nifty camera work throughout. Constantly cutting with jarring flashbacks revealing Joe's horrifying past in Texas with his unstable girlfriend, Midnight Cowboy can really only be described as a kaleidoscopic descent into the madness of this grimy and dark world of sin that he has found himself trapped within. Yet, perhaps most interesting is the party sequence. Using what is best described as a picture-in-picture approach at times, Schlesinger shows a shrunken version of the shot in the middle of the screen with the blown up, out-of-focus version of that shot playing in the background. It is deeply unsettling, off-putting, and greatly unique to watch. It really captures the mind-altering and vision-altering impact of drugs and makes what is already a deeply unsettling sequence to watch feel even grimier and more distorted.