Camera And Action, page 18
Amongst a bus full of travelers, Joe listens to his transistor radio and picks up a New York City talk show where women describe their ideal man. Why, "Gary Cooper but he's dead," bemoans a caller. "Tall, definitely tall.... A Texas oil man.... Young," another imagines. Joe believes he is now at the doorway of opportunity. He is sure of its power to attract clientele and imagines his future prospects. At a sleazy New York City hotel, he unpacks his western gear, tapes a poster of Paul Newman to his room wall, and convinces himself of his new life and image.
Joe Buck unselfconsciously strolls about Manhattan in cowboy outfit. He finds his first New York City customer, an upscale call girl (Sylvia Miles), has sex in her swanky apartment, gets swindled out of his money, and is thrown onto the street. He faces repeated rejection when a new teacher appears, "a sickly, undersized Bronx-born grifter." "Terrific shirt," Ratso Rizzo comments. "Just admiring that colossal shirt. That is one hell of a shirt," he continues. "Bet you paid a pretty price for it," he concludes and Joe responds, "I ain't cheap," but little fortune is to be found for naive youth in Manhattan. As one film critic put it, "Joe Buck ... proved to be not so much notorious as naive, inept and lonely - touchingly, if just a bit too sentimentally, lonely."" Thus, Schlesinger carefully separates Joe from the savvy, alert, and committed hero of the Western.
The production notes describe Joe Buck as "a good-looking, uneducated Texas youth," the "synthetic cowboy" who fills his suitcase with red, green, purple, and blue cowboy shirts. Joe's notion of what makes a man is mediated, as his suitcase shows, until Ratso's cynicism meets his optimism head on. Eventually, they "join forces," the notes explain, "to bilk a hostile world which rebuffs them at every turn." The "unlikely pair of loners" commonly dream about how "to start a new life." For Joe, it is "the answer to the prayers of many lonely, lovestarved New York women," and for his friend it is "to be called by his rightful name, Enrico Salvatore Rizzo."12 In the meantime, Rizzo does his share of conning and sets Joe up with a bizarre and hideous Mr. O'Daniel (John McGiver), who fantasizes about the future with Joe when he sees his cowboy garb. "I ain't a for-real cowboy," he tells McGiver upon suspecting his corrupt intentions, "but I am one helluva stud." Joe is once again conned and learns yet another New York lesson.13
Traditionally, Westerns highlighted valor through the cowboys/Indians or sheriffs/outlaws dichotomy, but above all advanced masculine identity through the magnificent physiques and faces of men. Sergio Leone, for example, made a fetish out of Clint Eastwood's strong, linear jaw and penetrating eyes. Jon Voight, however, steps into this role as the antithesis of such pop culture heroes of the West and alters the iconic significance of the Newman/Eastwood looks. Voight's baby face, which defines his character, clearly contrasts to the Eastwood jaw. In addition, Schlesinger films Joe Buck inside the hotel room, imitating the poster-types. Joe flexes his bare torso in front of a mirror flanked by the Newman poster and a female nude fold-out and is happy with what he sees. Rather than riding through the expansive western landscape, Joe wanders the streets of New York.
Hollywood Westerns in Manhattan turn Joe into a contrived type, a statement, and a copy. Ratso complains about his friend's affectations as a Texan stud and tells him that in New York, "nobody buys that cowboy crap any more ... that's faggot stuff." Joe defends the identity. "John Wayne? You goin' to tell me he's a fag? I like the way I look. Makes me feel good," he argues back. Joe is a pathetic creature, entranced by Western potency and its meaning. His disappointing, unappealing persona is unlikely material for typical theater voyeurs. Compared to previous and current idols on screen, Voight makes a pronounced break. Likewise, Dustin Hoffman, fresh in the minds of viewers as the preppy Benjamin Braddock, now appears as a Times Square rat with tobacco-stained teeth, greasy hair, and thrift-store clothes that reeked through the screen. Rizzo is the voice of reason, claiming that Houston in Manhattan appears hideous. Hoffman and Voight muddy the glamour portrait that drew audiences to the likes of Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Clint Eastwood. Schlesinger subverts the typical screen images, "the human material," as critic Pauline Kael describes, "so much of what we respond to in fictional movies." It is not "the sensuality of the actors and actresses" that draws spectatorship into this film. Instead, it is the actors' performances that "involve us emotionally. "14
Rizzo's comments to Joe raise the stakes for a John Wayne ethos by calling cowboy paraphernalia "faggot stuff" on the streets of Manhattan. Voight's unsensual cowboy kitsch and Hoffman's ratty, grifter lifestyle complicate the Western's buddy image of masculinity. This film subverts the lure of the typical cowboy gaze by diverting attention from the silent stalwart on the desert to the talkative, conversational Ratso on the streets. These buddies talk while they walk Forty-Second Street. They tell stories, argue, apologize, and dream over the butane "campfire" in Ratso's dilapidated, rat-infested, abandoned building. Joe's array of cowboy costumes juxtaposed with the urban space of his chatty friend highlights Schlesinger's critique of the Western. Midnight Cowboy's American male has little use for the individualist, gallant hero fostered by Hollywood. Instead of Rooster Cogburn parenting the younger generation, Ratso Rizzo raises Joe's consciousness and points out his delusion.
At the heart of the story is the nature of Rizzo's offer to help. Rizzo takes Joe off the streets, and Joe makes money so he can take his friend to Florida, the place of Ratso's American dream. By "assum[ing] responsibility for another," and by "car[ing] about the welfare of someone else," the notes explain, each can be released from his dreary trap.15 Rather than the Western's model of regeneration through violence, the film shows that compassion - real and intense - connects men. Masculinity becomes more nuanced than the rugged individualism of the John Wayne type, because, in short, Midnight Cowboy is a love story that transcends convention and revises what has been constructed and produced in the popular arena through the Western genre.
In the Western's formula, the individualist proved his worth through valor, whether protecting the town or following the outlaw. He was subject, however, to the inevitability of domestication and settlement. Women figured in the narrative as both the threat and the stability in a region prone to modernization. Women were typically the basis for protection, but since the cowboy was usually the loner, women served in prominent roles as the prostitute with a heart of gold. Midnight Cowboy reverses the roles of the male loner and questions the place of women in that narrative. As if to mock both the "heart of gold" and the loner, Joe Buck neither protects nor fights for the safety of women and America's future. Instead, they are potential capital and the means to his wealth.
Joe's knowledge of women is rooted in his abnormal childhood. As a young boy, he was dropped off at his grandmother's house and abandoned by his mother. He was raised in the middle of a quasi-prostitution trade. Sex for money was not unfamiliar to Joe since his impression of women was established through this experience early on. At the same time, his self worth is at stake through his performance in bed as an adult male. In the film's most explicit scene between Joe and his wealthy client Shirley (Brenda Vacarro), Joe faces himself as a man. He has stripped himself of his cowboy hat, red shirt, and cowboy boots. In his nakedness with Shirley, he fails to perform sexually and must come to terms with who he is. "Joe could be anyone," Shirley teases him. "I like that: move over, Joe; come here, Joe; kiss me, Joe," she continues. Shirley excites Joe with her word games, and Joe's sexuality kicks in. Joe's accomplishment confirms that he is both stud and man. "I'm not exaggerating," Shirley tells her friend over the telephone. "You should try it. It might be terrific for you," Joe hears her say as she lines up another client for him on Thursday at 8:30.
Joe returns to Ratso as a provider and a success. "She went crazy," he tells Ratso. "Turned into a damn alley cat." He has used the money he earned from Shirley to buy Ratso socks, mentholatum, and soup. "We ain't gonna have to steal no more.... I got eight bucks in my damn pockets and twenty more comin' in Thursday," he eagerly reports to Rizzo. Yet, Joe's dream is dashed when Ratso explains he is scared because he can no longer walk.
The sex scene with Shirley continues the film's critique of celebrity sex in cinema. The camera shows close-ups of buttocks and breasts but does not allow viewers to enjoy typical sensuality in such images. What is revealed instead is that the celebrity culture and its clothing are neither sources of knowledge about manhood nor possibilities for change. Though the draw is powerful, the camera for Schlesinger functions now as a way to identify with Joe differently than with pin-up men such as Newman or Eastwood and father figures such as Wayne.
Donning the hat, boots, shirt, and buckskin coat should help Joe shake his anxiety, but Joe's attachment to the power in the image of the Western male works only if the icons retain their potential power. Joe must learn that what he knows has little to do with reality. If his pursuit for a better life depends on going east with the paraphernalia that empowers him, Joe's heroism -and therefore viewer empathy -will be found in the discovery of the emptiness in the image. As Dotson Radar put it, "The use and application of this heroic, sentimental, wholley false interpretation of actuality ... makes the hustler Romantic and American, and makes him touching." The empathy enables him "to deny the real cause of his estrangement from the straight world, and to dismiss it by laying hands on the John Wayne/Wild Bill/Jesse James America that exists out there west of the Hudson nowhere."" Thus, "laying hands" on the Wayne-Billy-James America fails ultimately when Joe faces the reality of Rizzo.
Coming to terms with the power of the Western that once taught young people morality meant separating the genre's story line from its link to masculinity and American exceptionalism. The Western broke down as a model for American identity in the wake of civil rights strife, antiwar demonstrations, and the counterculture's rejection of consumer society. The frontier thesis - that the West was a place to be conquered - and the popular notion - that it is also a place to test manhood - gave way to more sympathetic notions of American land and identity. The counterculture's "back-to-nature" movement popularized the landscape as sacred, not a place for conquest and development. The civil rights movement, followed by federal legislation, gave voice to minorities, which asked who the real savages were in the expansion of the West. Young men formed antiwar protests and refused to accept the Vietnam War as a proving ground for their manhood. Midnight Cowboy questioned America's cultural inheritance in this socially turbulent time by placing western signifiers on Joe Buck and taking him east to the heart of the American success story, New York City.
The film shows that what Americans have drawn on for symbolic meaning through countless references to the Western was contingent on place and experience. By transporting cowboy icons to Forty-Second Street, Joe has appropriated a westernness that correlates to no real experiences and is available only as a fantasy, not a promise. The use of westernness for personal search, ingenuity, and success is nothing new, but in this film the Western reference highlights Joe's discovery that the frontier image of manliness now has little meaning as a resource of power for a working-class young man and a homeless friend. In that context, the cowboy complex holds true to its cinematic renderings only as a distortion of male authority rather than a declaration of it.
If the Academy Award recognition of Wayne's art both validated his Western politics of moral clarity and influence on the one hand, Midnight Cowboy opened up the Waynesian narrative to a discussion of the Western's link between masculinity and moral superiority on the other.17 Joe and Ratso embody a new direction that suggests Waynesian ambition and iconic significance are inconsistent in rationale and outdated in their educational role. Midnight Cowboy does not just deconstruct John Wayne patriarchy as portrayed through his Westerns and therefore liberate all the Joes from under its influence. To the contrary, the film shows the point at which discourse fails experience and produces consequences. For the midnight cowboy, the effect has been both too real and too fantastic.
"Gotta get outa here," Rizzo tells Joe. "Miami Beach - that's where you could score," he points out. Ratso imagines himself in a place where rich, blonde women wave from balconies and call him Rico. "You got more ladies in Miami than in any resort area in the country," he explains. The Florida escape takes him out of dark, urban Italian New York and places him in the bright sunlight of Florida's expansive beaches, a place of comfort and no struggle. In much the same way as the West was imagined as a space for renewal, Florida for Ratso regenerates him and makes a new life possible. There, he will engender authority in the middle of the nouveau riche. A place of ultimate pleasure - of sunglasses, bikinis, swimming pools, palm trees, and luscious food - Miami clarifies Ratso's idea of what makes a man. He would be tan, running along the beach or at the pool, calling the bingo game for wealthy women. He would wear white and not be crippled by the paradigm of hard work, progress, and strife. Miami indulgence would free and empower him.
For Joe, Miami is a practical goal. He recognizes their desperation as failed hustlers in the city so seeks $50.00 for a bus ride south. When a conventioneer propositions him to go to his hotel room, Joe turns the moment into an opportunity. After a tirade of sorts, he asks the man for all of his money. When he is refused, Joe beats the patron unconscious with a telephone and steals the cash. Joe has now completed his task as Rizzo's helpmate, and the two of them share a ride to Florida. The telephone scene mimics Westerns and becomes a sinister rendition of the Cogburn code. As John Wayne explained about his characters, the only ones who got it deserved it. Said Wayne. "I've killed men on the screen, but it was always because they didn't follow the code."" On the Western's terrain, violence is manly and straightforward. One critic explained how "even murder is pure for being apolitical, done in the name of no cause, party, or abstraction." Action is immediate and autonomous. "Brawls," cheating, stealing, and murder require retribution and a straight shooter.'9 Wayne himself explained, "In Rooster's world, a kick in the face is clean fighting, particularly when it's a struggle for life."20
The West was a place of retribution where the ends oftentimes justified the means. It is easy to see why, then, frontier individualism as the core identity for American strength has historical construction in the Western and the height of its popularity in the 1940s and 1950s during and after World War II heroism. Traditional Westerns, like conventional war films, acted to instruct young men while affirming a masculine ethos, a code of conduct that included violence as the right and justified method of validating maleness. Like the young boy riding the plastic horse at the beginning of Schlesinger's film, Joe has to discover the place where he can discard the fantasy and cast the image away as a youthful artifact.
In Midnight Cowboy, violence runs helter skelter with no arguable justification and no code. Violence is predatory and tenacious. Survival for Joe means shoving the telephone down a patron's throat for nothing but money. A sort of Freudian response to the repressive nature of the Western's influence, the exploit turns into an act of rescue. Joe transfers violence from the Hollywood screen to the sleazy hotel room and renders pain visible. His pain is displaced rather than projected. With money in hand, he is now the subject and agent of his own story. He is saved from the ever-present Western that lived for over two hundred years on bookcases and in theaters of American culture. As a practical matter, he now has the means to save his friend.
Along the way to Miami, Joe throws his buckskin jacket, cowboy boots, hat, and shirt in the garbage. He buys new clothes and slips on a seersucker cotton shirt and summer khaki pants. Joe saves the bright palm-tree shirt for Rizzo and discards his New York black. "That was the last one they had," he tells his friend. Now, it is Joe's pragmatics that balance Rizzo's fantasy. His resourcefulness brings opportunity. "Hell, I ain't no hustler," he tells the once rugged and discontent friend. Joe explains that he will get "some sort of outdoor work" when they get there. Midnight Cowboy empties the West of its ideological reference with the icons in the garbage can and releases Joe from the silver screen of narratives and emblems. Miami, not the West, is the place of possibilities. Joe - not the "get-up" - is the source of strength.
Midnight Cowboy asks audiences to reconsider the muscular strapping of Westerns and their formula for maleness when Joe Buck at the end of the film throws the cowboy props in the trash. He exorcises both Forty-Second Street appropriation and failed narratives. Free from the costume, Joe has not simply banished the past. Rather, he has acknowledged his mistake. Joe Buck's image, like the suitcase full of cowboy shirts, was pure commodity. Otherwise, the theme of Hollywood's impact on identity would have been gratuitous in the context of the late sixties. Instead, the film advances a critique of the Western and its role as one of the discourses most available to the post-World War II generations.
The Academy's approval when Wayne accepted his Oscar in 1970 as Voight and Hoffman looked on made that moment a symbol of what had transpired in context of the sixties. The narrative was still potent by nature of its critical resonance, but the Schlesinger critique complicated the progressive notion of the rugged individualist advancing American society.21 Joe taking his friend south resolves the story's tension, even if it is too late for Rizzo, who dies on the bus before they arrive. Joe reaches over to close his dead friend's eyes, puts his arm around him, and protects him from the glaring stares of the other passengers. Masculinity now encompasses tenderness and vulnerability.
