Midnight Cowboy

Midnight Cowboy was playing at our local artsy-theater. I knew John Schlesinger’s work from Billy Liar (what you could call a British version of this film…) and had obviously heard the film bounced around as a controversial masterpiece. And I have been on a Dustin Hoffman kick – saw an interview with him recently, and watched Straw Dogs.I think deciding to become an expat has also made me rather resminiscent of my culture. That quirky American culture, best portrayed in 60′s and 70′s films like this, where real people with extreme dialects smear their rude naiveté all over the screen. That is, not the façade obsessed with political correctness and being overlysensitive to everyone’s needs, but the one that I remember and communicated. It was just another thing that drew me out to the late-night showing of this film. Living in Europe… watching an American film surrounded by people not directly familiar with the culture… it all allows me to sit back and analyze something that has always seemed like a phantom to me – the American identity. I’m grateful for being let in on the little secret.

Midnight Cowboy had a way of showing both the whitewash culture and the genuine one.  It’s safe to say that Joe Buck himself embodies both qualities – a man wearing a Cowboy Hero mask, but who was walking with a flame under his foot and a second away from boiling over. Fed up with the reality of his dishwasher lifestyle he leaves for “the city” to pursue “the American dream.” How? By becoming a high-class male prostitute – a profession he figures will fall into his lap if he simply stalks women in his kitschy midwest get-up. However, nobody in New York is buying what he’s selling – neither in profession nor in character. He comes to the city as a hustler, but in the end, the city hustles him.

While Joe Buck becomes a walking stereotype in order to survive the city, his acquaintance Rizzo, though proud of his surname, refuses to follow the path of his anscestors and become a walking Italian stereotype. Rizzo fails to be any more of a success by shedding his stereotypes than Joe Buck does at milking his. It is also an interesting lesson in how the scum of the Earth can still have some goodness left to give.

I mentioned Billy Liar earlier, a black and white film about a misguided British youth. Though that film is in itself great, it’s easy to see that Schlesinger made so many visual advancements from 1962 to 1969. Midnight Cowboy has such a great grainy raw quality that is full of curious closeups and psychedelic interludes. Joe Buck’s face, sometimes so full of smug and other times so full of sadness, was another great quality of the film.

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