Camera And Action, page 17
The spirit of rebellion in Easy Rider provided the marketing world a timeless image of America. In the business magazine Forbes, a Diner's Club advertisement promotes travel with the classic photo of Fonda and Hopper riding side by side on their Harleys. The tagline tells consumers to "travel in good company."58 In a Pepsi-Cola commercial on television in 2006, a white-collared professional (an organization man) takes a break from work. Middle-aged white collar men can be wild in their suits and ties with a little help from the Fonda-style Harley and the sound of "Born to Be Wild." On a break from the office, the businessman imagines he is one of the men on a Harley speeding along in the open space of the outdoors instead of confined to the inside of a car. Pepsi, Steppenwolf, and a balding office worker escape, if for just as long as it takes a stop light to turn green.
The biker image was changed forever as it melded with the rising status of the customized Harley Davidson. An experimental project from beginning to end launched both of the filmmakers' careers as celebrities, cost less than $400,000 to make, and has amassed some $58 million. Somehow this outcome gives Wyatt's words at the end of the film new meaning. The video re-release and the advertising market's appropriation of Easy Rider icons speak as much for the value of the film.
The film has entered the world of websites and chat rooms. There, fans share stories about heading out on the highway with their adventure groups. Like tourists, they seek to relive the landscape's promise and participate in momentary fantasies of their own. One adventurer wrote, "We didn't own Harley's but we had the coolest Suzukis to be found in Idaho, Wyoming and parts of Utah." The explorer and his side-kick "had the forks extended, changed the handlebars, attached highway pegs and added the much needed `sissy bars"' and "roamed the highways ... looking for ... adventure."59 Rumblings about a sequel keep surfacing. In the 1980s Hopper had planned a "Biker Heaven," a fantasy about a "post-apocalypse America in 2068. More recently Miracle Entertainment fabricated "Easy Rider AD." The story has Wyatt in jail for the murder of George and brings George's son on the scene to prove Wyatt's innocence.60
Hollywood had spent nearly a century constructing and refining the American male riding, shooting, and cleaning up the frontier. In the last quarter of that century, Easy Rider took the Western back to the future, recycling, reinventing, and redefining the genre. The film's long cultural prominence suggests it was more than a dressed up Western or lyrical biking ballet since moving through open spaces on chrome and metallic technology naturalized the Harley as an ideal of independence. Taking two hippies into hostile territory to show what's wrong with America in 1969 and romanticizing the land with a Harley Davidson, a contemporary form of independence, turned a two-wheeler into an American icon and bike-riding into a favored sport, like skiing. At the same time, the bike defined the divisions between old and young, open and closed, pure and impure America. Untrammeled space was celebrated as freedom and ultimately as the salvation of masculinity, if not society in general.'
With the help of the bikes, the film showed again what the West has won. The two men's counterculture authenticity and empowerment depended on the vibrant West as the sign of real America. In 1969, as in earlier decades, the truth about America was romanticized once again - this time with a view from a motorbike instead of a sleek, black stallion. The mere longing for western rather than southern landscapes places these regions on both sides of the same coin, engraved and fixed. Like Hopper, who located freedom on New Mexican territory where "the herds mingle," the riders customized Harleys to prove where freedom can exist. The bikes, in turn, brought back an America lost and managed to promise a younger generation its own form of reconstruction.
Giving meaning to America through Wyatt and Billy as 1960s representatives, however, also meant bringing hippie identity in line with conventional masculinity. Hippies and cowboys side by side retained masculinity's dependence on open space at a historical moment when familiar signifiers of convention were breaking down. The film exchanged images of Gary Copper, John Wayne, and Fonda's father Henry for long hair, popular drugs, and mechanical bikes. It also defined itself against the grimier image Clint Eastwood promoted in the Spaghetti Westerns and his tiparillo fixation, yet not at the expense of the mythic Western man. This 1960s treatise on the ideal of freedom melded rugged individualism with the counterculture outlaw and provided new ways to consume and imagine old ideals of freedom.
Underneath its updated look, the dichotomy of rebellion in America can be seen. Easy Rider found America in the narratives of old as much as it did in the activism of the new counterculture debates. Fonda's bet about the "modern Western" reinvented men for a 1969 audience in the midst of generational debates and hippie discourse and a younger generation that would carry "the Sixties" with it into the next decade. Not surprisingly, the story continues its life today in the consumer marketplace.
At the same time the counterculturalists were going back to the commune, a Texan meets a Forty-Second Street New York hustler and together they ask audiences hard questions about men in buckskin jackets. Cowboys of a different type made their debut the same year as Easy Rider in John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy. Schlesinger paid attention to issues arising out of people's experiences with American pop culture and ignored the stirring issues of hippieness and generational rebellion. Midnight Cowboy validates other experiences as the filmmaker asks new questions about a difficult subject to resolve - the gender debates.
Everybody's talkin' at me.
-Midnight Cowboy
On April 7, 1970, seventeen actors and actresses presided over the forty-second Oscars. With no master of ceremonies, "Friends of the Oscars" ranging from Bob Hope to Elliott Gould read their cue cards and paraded before an ABC-TV audience of millions. Except for the talk about the 1.5 million-dollar Elizabeth Taylor diamond, the night belonged to the men of the Western. Of the many films nominated in 1969, the top Awards went to Midnight Cowboy, True Grit, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Robert Redford and Paul Newman slid easily into new categories of Western individualism with their historical buddy roles as Butch and Sundance. Their hair a little longer than the cowboys of Westerns past, they still fit the mythic mold. The contrast of the night was clearly in True Grit and Midnight Cowboy. Would it be John Wayne as U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn, Jon Voight as Joe Buck, or Dustin Hoffman as Ratso Rizzo representing the West, America, and American men?
Wayne's larger than life image did not go gently into the night. He won Best Actor for his role in True Grit, a film hardly remembered and rarely referenced today. In the spirit of Shane, True Grit did what old Westerns guaranteed audiences they would do - show that a man, like his country, uses all resources to fight injustice and to make the frontier safe for American progress and expansion. Perhaps the quintessential symbol of the "West-ethos," Wayne accepted his Oscar for Best Actor, beating Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, but the night belonged to Midnight Cowboy. Winning Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay "based on another medium," the film was clearly acclaimed as the best of the best.
Less than a year earlier on July 11, 1968, as if to foreshadow the Oscar night, Life Magazine featured Wayne and Hoffman on the cover of the issue. The title read, "Dusty and the Duke: A Choice of Heroes." In a bright and artsy collage of purple, red, green, blue, and yellow, Wayne the cowboy covered two-thirds of the page. Much like the close-up in his debut film Stagecoach, his cowboy image clearly dominated the space. On top of Wayne's cowboy hat stood a black and white profile of Dustin Hoffman, bent in the shape of a question mark. "The two heroes may well face off when the time comes to give out the Academy Awards," the writer predicted.'
On both of these stages - Oscar's and Life's - popular culture registered changes in American society. The Duke's certain, decisive persona on the one hand and Dusty's alienated, uncertain, and agitated new man on the other represented the contrast between two cinematic worlds, two generations, and two political sensibilities. Explained Life photographer John Dominis, they "are the best examples I know of the way America seems to be polariz- ing."2 The representative New Yorker, the thirty-something liberal Dustin Hoffman argued on the streets of Manhattan for consciousness raising and changing social relations. The other, a sixty-two-year-old cowboy of the dusty trails of the West, stood his ground on the deserts of Durango, filming yet another Western.
Larger than his surroundings in the popular imagination, Wayne mirrored his conservative politics and common-sense approach in True Grit. The Marshall "feels the same way about life that I do," noted Wayne. "He doesn't believe in pampering wrongdoers, which certainly fits into the category of my thinking," he continued.' Having won no previous awards for what he considered his best performances in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and The Searchers (1956), he presented and accepted awards on Oscar night. There, he stood clearly showing the Western as an American icon if not institution. Even if the Western's heyday had faded, he made the identity very much alive. The Oscar moment brought the male ethos, so completely represented by the Western during the 1940s and 1950s, to a point of departure. It was a standoff between two strong, parallel identities played out in one national narrative defining both older and younger generations.
Cinema had indeed played a central part in establishing American cultural roots. What it produced and circulated had even become a source of knowledge about masculinity. Considering the depth of the Western's cultural resonance, it was time, however, to question its effects. It is thus both ironic and fitting that a critical challenge to this deeply embedded American representation came from overseas, from British filmmaker John Schlesinger. In his interpretation of James Leo Herlihy's novel, Midnight Cowboy, Schlesinger posed the possibility that there existed a perverse consequence to the rugged individualist formula propagated in the cinematic and popular West. American masculinity may have been coded into the consciousnesses of viewers through the Western, but an irresistible politics of gender arising in the late sixties simultaneously challenged that transparent construction. Schlesinger questioned what the tenacious hold of this myth meant, even in its waning moments.
Midnight Cowboy asked viewers to consider Hollywood's impact on the production of identity, especially in the Western's representation of individualism, masculinity, and Americanness. Schlesinger's picture helped forge new narratives about men's experiences in the wake of antiestablishment sentiment, which asked for more authentic individualism than convention would allow. Contemporary filmmakers addressed changing taste in men's images by updating the old Western in the manner of Sergio Leone's trilogy, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Clint Eastwood's later films.' Schlesinger, on the other hand, offered a space in which to liberate stories about men from the subjugation of masculinity circulated through the genre of the old frontier, its popular rendition of the cowboy, and cinematic updates.
The Western had long offered viewers a grammar and vocabulary for male identity in men's place in American history. Eastern journalists, artists, novelists, and others had portrayed two centuries of Western myth in writings, paintings, travelogues, and novels. The frontier West was an attractive myth for commodification in popular culture, politics, land, music, tourism, rodeo sport, and fashion because it brought action and strength together in a national identity. The image of the cowboy resonated with young and old who saw the story line performed live in the days of Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, and other touring cowboys riding decked-out horses in Fourth of July parades, at county fairs, and other local venues. On Saturday morning television, boomers learned how to dress like Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, and Autry, with guns, holsters, and chaps, and to perform their own reality shows as summer cowboys and cowgirls. Real cowboy boots were a luxury and a keepsake for many children.'
John Wayne with Oscar in hand for the role of Rooster Cogburn in True Grit (1969), bringing the Western's heyday to an end, with his wife Pilar (Photofest).
By the 1970s, urbanites such as Ralph Lauren conceived a world-wide consumer market based on the image of the West as territory of the masculine individualist.' Western regions saw the fabrication of the "old West" towns such as Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Sundance, Utah. Likewise, just a few pages away from the Wayne/Hoffman article in the July Life, a Marlboro advertisement with a virile man in a cowboy hat, equated cowboyness with smoking. Holding a cigarette in one hand and leather reins in another, he stood in his tack room preparing to ride. Westerns, Marlboro men, and cowboys like John Wayne pieced together alluring ideas about what it meant to be masculine and American. By appropriating frontier history, popular culture, and celebrity personae, marketers and developers appealed once again to the already familiar American interest in expansion and the need for nostalgia.
As a place and idea, the West confirmed the potency of change and action. Advancing the opinion that the West was "won," the Western helped prove the value of pursuit. By consuming the products of the West, whether wearing, smoking, or viewing them, one could identify with the manliness of western lore and imagine possibilities for action. Handsome celebrities compelled imitation. Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, Jack Palance, Ronald Reagan, and of course John Wayne, to name a few, helped fuse the look of a western persona with a particular power of desire. These men had become their own story line, winning wars, shootouts, and fistfights and teaching film buffs what it meant to be an American and a man.
With The Great Bank Robbery in 1913, the Western's long screen life began its relatively unquestioned reflection of masculinity. Certainly the genre managed relative updates, but its key feature - the ability to link masculinity, open spaces, and Americanness - held strong. The genre forged an American superego and men stood as the dominant historical force in the middle of that space. Like a parent, the genre drilled viewers on the rules and conditions of social interactions. Considering the long life of the narrative, its representation of gender is revealing. As historian Joan Scott explains, it is not just experience alone that produces identity. Rather, "signifying systems" influence the production of "gender." The Western is part of the "processes of signification" that give experience meaning. Not only does the genre itself produce meaningful stories but the genre's long life functions as a part of the construction of Americanness.7
What Schlesinger contests in Midnight Cowboy begins with John Wayne's ubiquity as the star of Western discourse of individualism and masculine authority. True Grit, for example, was a reiteration of those fundamental stories of men with integrity, principle, and moral unambiguity who sacrificed themselves for the greater good. The marshal, as Wayne described him, is "such as the screen has never before seen."8 As the production notes illustrate, he is "a hard-bitten, whiskey-gulping, mean-tempered rapscallion ... [a] one-eyed U. S. Marshal" who brings the outlaw to justice. Like typical narratives, True Grit stresses justice, responsibility, and accountability. The characters "go through plenty together and, each in his own way, exhibits true grit," Wayne explained. Cogburn helps Mattie Ross (Kim Darby), the "perky young girl from a family of good substance," learn the lesson of grit. An Annie Oakley of the South, who has "the best little head on her shoulders of anyone in the state of Arkansas in 1880," she learns how to track down her father's murderer, survive a rattlesnake den, and ride with men.' The world is immoral and unjust but in educating Mattie, Wayne shows that moral action conquers pain and suffering. Thus, True Grit enables viewers to identify with the men teaching young women about clear moral choices. Masculinity, action, endurance, and strength connect, as if universal and transparent.10
Joe Buck (Jon Voight) transports the buckskin and fringe image to New York in Midnight Cowboy (1969), only to find his new buddy Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) ridiculing it as "cowboy crap" (Photofest).
The Western of Wayne's era failed to maintain its prominence in movie theaters during the Vietnam era and Midnight Cowboy registered that change. Schlesinger's film asks what happens if the genre has consequences beyond moral education. Certainly the test of the Western's endurance was its strength as a pedagogical center, a place where both identity and morality could be passed on to its audiences as one and the same. For Schlesinger to critique that potency was a risk at best since Americans may have lost interest in Westerns at movie theaters but were still mesmerized with Gunsmoke on CBS and Bonanza on NBC, the second and fourth most popular television shows at the time. Schlesinger gambled on the possibility of reevaluation during this time. Though the image of the cowboy was a persistent one, Schlesinger's success as measured by box office revenues and Academy recognition suggests that American viewers willingly widened the scope for the representation of masculinity.
Schlesinger's first American-produced film opens to the sound of horse hooves, shooting, yelling, and a large white screen. It is an outdoor theater where families once sat in cars to catch the latest release. The camera pulls back and shows the drive-in as a thing of the past. Against the massive, white screen in the middle of the weeds and rusted speakers, a young boy rides a plastic horse, and the story begins. A young Texan, Joe Buck, who had been raised in a fatherless household, is about to seek his fortune as a hustler in New York City. In voiceover, he sings, "Get along little doggie." The camera cuts from the Big Tex Drive-In and focuses on him. Joe prepares to leave Texas and his job as a dishwasher at a local cafe in search of a dream. He carefully unfolds a fringed buckskin jacket in a motel room and puts on a Kellygreen cowboy shirt as he imagines telling his employer, "You know what you can do with them dishes." Joe lights a cigarette, walks out of the motel, down the local street and past a '50s-style, dilapidated movie theater. On the marquee the letters JN WAYNE THE A AMO dangle as if falling. At his work, he announces to his fellow employees that he is starting a new career. "What the hell you doin' in that get up?" his employer mocks him. "Grab an apron and clean up the crap," but Joe happily boards a bus and heads east for his new urban life as a cowboy, albeit one out of place and time. This first sequence establishes the meaning in the "get-up" and sets up the narrative's critique of Joe's misappropriation of the image.
