Midnight Cowboy

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I thought I knew this film about as well as could be done. It’s one of my favourite product of the Sixties, next to The Beatles, blooming headgear and flares. But I may not be as wise to its deeper meaning as I had thought.

I’ve long held Midnight Cowboy to be a ‘simple’ tale of trampled naivety and male bonding – a heartbreakingly affecting and effective one, but a fairly simple story nonetheless. Joe Buck the Texan cowboy turned would-be hustler forms an unlikely bond with crippled scoundrel Ratso. The pathetic pair struggle to survive in the harsh Big Apple and in the extraordinary final scene Ratso dies on the way to a better life. Fade out. Bring on the Best Picture Oscar.

But not so fast. In discussion of the film with Brian and my fellow students, more possible layers have come to light. I can’t yet say I agree with all of them but they are, at the very least, interesting.

Apparently the flashes of back-story that illuminate Joe’s past in Hicksville, which are far more pronounced in the screenplay than in the finished film, show not only that Joe participated in the gang rape of a girl he fancied, and who was later carted off to a mental hospital, but that he became the victim of his fellow rapists as well. In another interpretation he is framed for the rape, which through the justice system and other byways is how he ends up doing a stint in Vietnam. The movie makes this angle clearer – at least by comparison. It’s all filtered through a heavy dose of Sixties surrealism, so it’s hard to gauge what the truth is.

Personally the fact that something traumatic happened to Joe was all I needed to know. To me his abandonment by his mother and the overly mothering role played by the grandmother who raised him had a far greater impact on his personality and sensibilities than something as drastic as rape. The film is based on a book in which, as tends to be the case with books, this whole tale is explored in far more detail, and apparently according to the author the rape is true.

Also true in the novel format is Joe being a murderer. In the final moments of the film he robs a man in order to get the money to take Ratso to Miami. In the process he forces a phone into the man’s mouth. I’d always assumed this was a symbol of Joe’s homophobic revulsion, already seen earlier in milder form when confronting a nervy college student. But as Brian tells it, this act actually kills the man, making both Midnight Cowboy and the character of Joe Buck a whole lot darker than I have always held them to be. If Joe has done all this for Ratso, it gives the latter’s death an extra edge. But it would also take away some of the lustre from the film’s otherwise beautifully simple tragic arc. In the film as it stands now, you have to go wilfully looking for the darker interpretation to be able to see it at all. And even then you might have to squint.

Is it possible I loved this movie while only ‘reading’ half of it? No, in the end – even with the novel as a guide, it is not necessary to see in the film anything more than what is clearly there. The rest is interpretation.

In all honesty, when I think of Midnight Cowboy, I think of the score.

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Filed under Dustin Hoffman, Everybody's Talkin', Interpretation, Jon Voight, Midnight Cowboy, Musings, Opinion