Midnight Cowboy
Raucous and Sordid Things
If many theoretical arguments in cinema before the 1960s rested on whether to emphasise film as a realist medium or a formalist one, many films of the 1960s in Europe, and the 70s in the US, resolved the question by combining aspects of both. Film could record reality, while painters could only reproduce it, and theatre directors restage it. Why would filmmakers want to ignore this component unless they felt that somehow recording an event would be inartistic, and leave cinema doomed to its status as no more than a recording device? What initially mattered more was generating a vivid if often artificial mise en scene (German Expressionism), an emphasis on editing (Soviet Montage), and the components of storytelling (classic Hollywood). Reality may have been drawn upon, but it wasn’t paramount. Neo-realism, more than most, seemed to change this, with the Italian film movement of the 1940s and early 50s offering longer takes, using the streets of Rome, Milan and other cities, and minimising the story. We can look back and see that the takes weren’t that long, the streets scenes weren’t quite random, and the stories still quite pronounced: none more so than Bicycle Thieves, with the viewer hoping for much of the film that the central character will find his missing bicycle, as in a Hollywood film we might hope our leading man gets the girl.
Nevertheless, the importance of location became a central feature of modern filmmaking, and increasingly, directors in the 60s and 70s realised they could have their cake and eat it too. They could offer locational specificity along with formal deliberation, and a good example of any in the late 60s American context is John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy. Is this film about a naive Texan, Joe Buck (Jon Voight), who takes off to New York to become a gigolo, and befriends, and increasingly takes care of, a street-wise cripple, a realist or formalist work? That depends on what one wants to focus upon and will lead us to a secondary question: one that concerns whether a film is dated or a time capsule. Yet this inquiry is a product of the first: if a film is made up of pro-filmic explorations of its time, as it looks at the specifics of environment, it can no less be a product of its time through the techniques it adopts.
But first, the film’s realist elements, and how Midnight Cowboy has absorbed both neo-realism and the documentary tradition of the 1960s known as Direct Cinema. Streets and people began to matter, whether it was filming the post-war city in a state of repair and disrepair (the bombed out Berlin of Germany Year Zero; the new housing estates going up in Rome in Bicycle Thieves), or exploring the lives of documentary subjects in American films as Frederick Wiseman did in High School, and the Maysles Brothers with Salesman – both films released the same year as Midnight Cowboy. These had a tangential relationship with a branch of the avant-garde during the sixties, with the non-interventionist approach nevertheless intervening in the editing, as it avoided the absurd directness of Andy Warhol films like Eat and Sleep, which showed nothing more than eating and sleeping. The very fears many had in the early moments of cinema, where film might be seen as no more than a recording, weren’t going to lose Warhol any sleep or upset his digestion – as he filmed Robert Indiana scoffing a sandwich in the former film, and watched John Giorno sleep in the latter. This was recorded film at its most bare, and yet also reflected a mood in the 1960s that indicated everyone and everything had the right to find its way in front of the lens. Direct Cinema shaped its stories far more than Warhol’s films did, but Wiseman, the Maysles and others were interested in the quotidian, too, and there is this side to Schlesinger’s film also. Several Warhol figures appear in the film (Viva, Paul Morrisey, Ultra Violet, and Taylor Mead), and Warhol reputedly had a hand in the lengthy party scene, even as he was also recovering in hospital after a recent assassination attempt.
The party sequence is one of the great soiree scenes during a decadent decade that was full of them; those in La Dolce Vita, one in La Notte, another in Blow Up, and one too in Schlesinger’s own earlier Darling. It is, centrally, what makes Midnight Cowboy a time capsule, and if someone were instead to propose that the scene ‘dates’ the film, this would be to misunderstand the difference between the temporally specific and the technically fashionable. When a film captures its moment as the party scene here, this is quite different from using the techniques of that moment. While it is possible a film might become diegetically dated as it shows, for example, certain hairstyles that say more about the era in which it was filmed rather than the Roman or Napoleonic period in which it is set, it seems unreasonable to attack a film taking advantage of its recording device status to capture the reality of its time. Just because Schlesinger, Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni show us scenes that were reflecting the fashionable, this shouldn’t make the film any more dated than showing the rubble and post-war rebuilding of neo-realist cinema, the high school evident in Wiseman’s documentary, or the various salesmen in the Maysles Brothers’ film.
This might even be true of Midnight Cowboy’s general content, with attacks on the film’s homophobic aspect surely reflecting the times rather than imposing homophobia upon it. Ryan Gilbey has it about right when he says, ‘‘’It is the penultimate scene, when Joe robs, beats and perhaps even kills a gay client, that throws the movie into disarray. The scene itself provides a snapshot of Joe’s own shame and self-doubt, and a film should be allowed to depict the consequences of homophobia without being accused of perpetuating it.’’ Gilbey notes, though, ‘‘it is the way the attack on that man is swept blithely aside in the next scene that casts doubts on the motives of the film, and on the integrity of its gay British director, John Schlesinger. ‘’ (Guardian) The film’s purpose is to illustrate how Joe Buck would react when he desperately needs money for his dying friend, his anger at finding clients who are gay while struggling to find women who can augment both his finances and his sense of self, and also, perhaps, a homosexual impulse in himself that he constantly represses. If Gilbey, as a gay man, has a problem, he sees it in the form and the film’s indifference to the consequences of such a scene. Nothing is made of it, and the film quickly moves on as we are somehow expected to forget that Joe has brutally beaten someone up, as he returns to being a sympathetic character. To explore more specifically how a film will reveal homophobia in its form, while apparently only detailing it in its content, would be for another piece; all we wish to extract from the notion is that showing homophobia on screen is itself not going to date a film. It will be aspects of the narrative form that reveal this antideluvianism.
In this sense, does formalism date as realism does not, if we assume that realism is predicated on capturing as accurately as possible what is in front of the lens, and formalism the various devices used to capture it? The more the techniques of the sixties are deployed, the greater the risk of it appearing fashionable. It is one thing to show the New York scene in the late sixties; another to insist on doing so using slippery long lenses, image blurring, juxtapositional time leaps, and shifts between black and white and colour. From this angle, the film is fashionably formalist, yet temporally realist, as it uses the form of its time but also captures its era. Our purpose isn’t simply to damn Midnight Cowboy for these techniques, but it is to acknowledge we can comprehend the film as a late sixties work as much by the style adopted as the subject matter under discussion. It would be unfair to claim a film is dated when its purpose is to explore its given milieu, where hairstyles, clothing, cars and furniture will all reveal the moment when it was made. Yet it might seem fair to see that in capturing these in a particular way, the film reveals its own relationship with the sixties beyond the pro-filmic images it focuses upon.
When it uses the long lens to hone in or out, the slipperiness rests on making the viewer aware of the lens’s length: Schlesinger and cinematographer Adam Holender offer, for example, a close-up of a piece of jewellery in an upmarket shop, and Holender zooms back and does it again a couple of seconds later with another item. Shortly after this, he shows a blur of red, and soon after a blur of yellow as cars pass so close to the lens. We become aware of the form as the lens shows how easy it is to move in and out of objects, and to generate blurring effects, and this approach became what was called a ‘zoom boom’. Its overuse, Nick Hall noted, ‘‘was a persistent theme in cinematographers’ complaints. Interviewed about the production of the comedy musical Hello, Dolly!, Harry Stradling remarked, ‘People zoom in and out for no logical reason, and I think this is very distracting.’’’ (The Zoom: Drama at the Touch of a Lever)
Equally, Alain (Hiroshima mon amour, La guerre est finie) Resnais’s work led other fimmakers to play more openly with time than most films prior. Flashbacks before Resnais were usually motivated by a character’s conscious recollections, whether it be Double Indemnity or Citizen Kane, but Resnais and others would often introduce a detail that indicated a different time frame, but this wasn’t instigated by a character proposing it, but in the film recognising it. When, in Hiroshima mon amour, Resnais shows us details of a past event, it isn’t until later in the film that we come to realise this is one from the central character’s life at the end of WWII, as she explains to her Japanese lover her problematic past. Films by John Boorman, Nic Roeg and Joseph Losey all took advantage of Resnais’ innovations to play with filmic time. Here, Joe Buck never offers to others what happened to him back in Texas, but Schlesinger splices into the present tense of the story, past events that propose Joe Buck had a relationship with a disturbed young woman and was gang raped himself by what had previously seemed to be his friends. All this is offered at various moments, while never quite adding up to a coherent picture of what that past constituted. The director doesn’t even offer it with visually assured coding. These scenes are mainly in black and white, but not exclusively so. When Joe goes to see a preacher, thinking he is going to meet a female client, the film moves into what seems like a colour flashback to Joe’s past, and then into a black and white fantasy involving the petty thief who has set him up, the person he will then befriend, Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman).
But this chromatic indeterminacy had become, if not common, then apparent. By the mid-sixties, films weren’t only using colour, they were also well aware of the moment they were in when colour and black and white were both still viable options. To film in monochrome or colour, that was the question. A few filmmakers in the late sixties took this quandary and played without it by moving between the two, without clearly delineating the reason why. This was evident in films by Nagisa Oshima and by Lindsay Anderson in If….. Schlesinger takes an aspect of this possibility and allows his film to make the form present by refusing to offer flashbacks in black and white and colour footage in the present, and fantasy sequences in colour, and real past events in monochrome. While Joe Buck’s fantasy-rage against Rizzo is in black and white, a later sequence with Ratso fantasising about life in Florida is in colour. Some might see in such choices the arbitrary, others the trendy, and still others an awareness of how free filmmakers were at the time.
We might see in the various techniques it uses, the film’s flirtation with datedness, but we could also see a relationship with form that shows cinema was no longer beholden to telling a story or revealing the milieu for that story. These weren’t obligations in the avant-garde, but they certainly were in Hollywood productions, and yet there Schlesinger is, a British filmmaker making his first film in Hollywood (after A Kind of Loving, Billy Liar, Darling and Far From the Madding Crowd), absorbing a combination of neo-realism, Direct Cinema, European New Wave practices, and the avant-garde. Some might believe that while it is unfair to attack a film for being dated, as it merely shows on screen a present moment, it is justifiable to claim the film is so when it uses a panoply of formal devices presently in vogue.
However, surely better to see the film absorbing aspects of film’s formal possibilities within what could have been a straightforward buddy movie. The perfectly competent The Odd Couple, made the previous year, shows a work that has taken almost nothing from the various film movements that allowed cinema to become modern. Apart from a widescreen format and some deep-focus camerawork, that might seem a nod to Andre Bazin’s respect for the importance of mise en scene, the film could have been made in the early fifties. If it doesn’t look as readily of its time as Midnight Cowboy, it isn’t only because the story it tells has nothing of Schlesinger’s determination to film New York’s underbelly and alternative social scenes, but it also, of course, rests on the determination to act as though various shifts in film’s formal history hadn’t taken place.
Our point is that while attacking a film as dated because of what it shows on screen is a non-argument, to question a film that that does use many of the available techniques of its moment is to risk getting into one. David Thomson may have liked Midnight Cowboy but found it ‘‘odd stylistically’’, even if he admitted that ‘‘it was a breakthrough film in that so many raucous and sordid things were handled so casually.’’ (Have You Seen…?) He takes its pro-filmic aspect as given, and admires its willingness to explore the milieu, but the film is memorable partly because it offers a twofold comprehension of its era, as if the multiple formal devices at work, reveal somehow the craziness of an America that Thomson (like Schlesinger, a Brit who went to live in the States) saw as inevitably bizarre. Few cities were more outlandish than New York, and perhaps no time as outré as the cusp between the 1960s and the 1970s. It might be a provocation too far to say that the realism of Midnight Cowboy’s milieu is matched by an unusual realism of the form: as though it wanted to say that the style doesn’t counter its verisimilitude, it extends it. It suggests that New York and the United States was, generally, at this time so fragmented a place that it needed fragmentation to register it. The film has a zapping quality, as though concentration spans have been fried and nobody can quite face the complexity of the world in which they find themselves. As the wonderful Nilsson song proposes: ‘Everybody’s Talkin at Me. I don’t hear a word they’re sayin. Only the echoes of my mind.’’ In an early scene, Joe goes back to a woman’s penthouse apartment under the impression he has found his first client, and while having sex, Joe and Cass’s butts keep changing the channels on the TV as the film cuts to a smorgasbord of sounds and images. If this is the reality of many Americans, then why not reflect it in the form? Schlesinger may have been taking advantage of the various film movements that had created numerous innovations in cinema, but he uses them all the better to say something about everyday America.
This might also help explain the film’s success. It took third place at the box office in 1969, and won the best picture Oscar, even if it is important to note that in the late sixties and early 70s, small films could make big money: Easy Rider, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and Goodbye, Columbus were all in the top ten. Yet none of them were as formally busy as Midnight Cowboy (no matter the psychedelic sequences in Easy Rider), so perhaps many didn’t view the technical jiggerypokery with dismay; instead, seeing in the style the very capturing of it.
Yet no doubt people warmed to the story of a gigolo with high ambitions and a kind heart, and with the latter almost always getting in the way of his attempts to make cash. He ends up getting tapped for money by Cass, and a male student he has a brief encounter with, claims he can’t pay him. Joe roughs him up a bit, and, of course, much later, roughs up a whole lot more the character Gilbey invokes in his remarks. It may have been a sign of the times that Joe Buck can paste a couple of homosexuals and viewers might still see Joe as a decent sort, yet others might insist on defending a film that not only has a gay director but also a gay subtext. Is this really a love affair between two men who can’t acknowledge their feelings towards each other? When Joe asks Rizzo when he last got laid, Rizzo crosses his legs and says it is only a subject he will address during confession. It is a joke, but we might wonder if his dismissal of ‘fags’ contains a disavowal. Joe might see himself as hyper heterosexual, but he has also been brutally raped if we take the fever-dream sequences as back story. If the film is a simple tale of a couple of guys down on their luck in downtown New York, it contains complexity aplenty in what might now be called a co-dependent relationship. When, at the end, Rizzo dies on the bus before getting to Miami, Joe hasn’t rid himself of a nuisance; he has lost perhaps the closest to a friend he has had in his life. The flashbacks suggest his mother left, he was brought up by his grandmother, was betrayed by his girlfriend and also his friends. However scuzzy a figure Rizzo happens to be, a bond has developed. When Joe puts his arm around the dead man, as the bus continues on its way to Miami, there might be fewer dry eyes than in a cinema showing a weepie. Whether the form has added to this feeling or countered it, for many it is undeniably there and, as one of the three buddy movies in the top five that year (the others were Easy Rider and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), it gave birth to many more throughout the 70s: Scarecrow, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, California Split and The Last Detail amongst the best. Though some of these might be equally good, none of them was surely quite so moving.
© Tony McKibbin