The idea of the American Dream, reasonably, has been ingrained in this country since its genesis. The Declaration of Independence says it all by saying that all men are born with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The term “American Dream” didn’t exist until 1931 when James Truslow Adams used it in his book “The Epic of America” where he described it as each man and woman having the ability to make what they want of their own lives. Since then the idea of the dream has been reshaped by those who are doing the dreaming. As a result, authors like Truman Capote and F. Scot Fitzgerald and musicians like John Cougar Mellencamp and Les Claypool have put their own twist on the idea, many of which are dark and cynical. John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy is another morose interpretation of the American Dream as evidenced in the film’s cinematography.
To put it succinctly, the film is about Joe Buck, a naïve and attractive cowboy from Texas who is on his way to New York to become a male prostitute. However, his plan to please rich, lonely women gets derailed quickly by the harsh reality of the Big Apple. After spending all of his money, Joe takes shelter with the greasy swindler Ratso Rizzo and continues to try and live his own American Dream. The only hitch is that Joe doesn’t seem to be operating in the actual world but an artificial one.
The Greek philosopher Plato put it best in his allegory of the cave. In the cave were inhabitants chained to a wall so they could not move or turn their heads. And behind the prisoners was a great fire which cast shadows of themselves on the wall. The shadows were the only things they could see, so to them the shadows were real people. This situation perfectly sums up how Joe Buck was created.
The first shot of the film is a close-up of a drive-in theater screen with the non-diagetic soundtrack of a Western playing complete with galloping horses and gun fire. The shot of the screen is so close, in fact, that it’s difficult to decipher what it is until the camera steps back. And when it does, what is revealed is a child in a cowboy costume riding on a toy horse in the theater’s playground with an actual horse in a corral behind him. The young Joe Buck contently plays on his fake horse paying no attention to the creature within a few yards of him.
The setting of the bare theater screen serves as Joe’s cave wall, as does the television screen that acted as his parent when he was a child, which we see during numerous flashbacks. On these screens Joe watches images that represent reality without being real. However, being strapped in his own cave, Joe mistakes what he sees as being real and tries to replicate it. This means that Joe’s idea of a cowboy is a flashy Hollywood costume as opposed to actual ranch hands. And on top of that, his entire life view is something suitable for a raunchy soap opera.
Of course, his trip to the East Coast is not entirely based on misrepresented images. He also wants to run away from himself. Multiple flashbacks throughout the movie show that Joe once had a decent life with a beautiful woman until one night they were both raped by the local town boys. The event pushed Joe’s girl over the edge and she mistakenly blamed Joe for what happened. This type of tragedy would be enough for anybody to pick up and move across the country. As Claudia Rankine puts it in her essay Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, “…We should all change our names when we don’t like what we see in the mirror. It’s an easy way to distance the self from the self….” Sometimes changing your life is the best way to forget what it once was.
When the time comes for Joe to take the trip to New York, he still attempts to focus on his cave wall by listening to his transistor radio. He has no TV or movie screen with which to put his attention, but he cannot yet let himself get acclimated to reality. The radio works as a good replacement and during the course of the film it begins to represent both Joe’s last shred of optimism and the last shackle holding him in his cave.
During the last bus ride of the film where Joe is attempting to take a dying Ratso to Miami before he dies, Joe has a very different experience. Here he is without any kind of artifice to take him out of reality and is anchored down to the real world due to Ratso’s grim presence. It’s here that Joe redefines his American Dream to suit the real world. Instead of becoming a big-time, cowboy hustler in New York he comes to the decision of being a physical laborer in Miami. And he’s happy with that prospect.
In his essay on Blue Velvet, Richard Schickel said, “It could be argued that Lynch’s most basic business is to deny us the falsifying nostalgia that exposure to the cultural artifacts of the past so genially evoke, to deny us false comforts of falsified history, in the process denying us that ‘Golden Age’ we so often use to measure - and deplore - contemporary reality.” Essentially, Schlesinger aimed to do the same thing in Midnight Cowboy, except instead of denying us a perfect past he is shooting down an impossible future the American Dream seems to promise. The grittiness the camera took so often accompanied by its bleak subjects caused a powerful message. Film critic Roger Ebert, however, disagrees about the quality of the film’s photography. In his 1994 revisit of the 1969 film he said, “He took those two magnificent (Jon Voight’s Joe Buck and Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo) performances and dropped them into a trendy, gimmick-ridden exercise in fashionable cinema. The ghost of the Swinging Sixties haunts ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ and robs it of the timelessness it should possess.”
Of course, one man’s gimmick is another’s treasure as evidenced in Desson Howe’s review for the Washington Post of the same year, “But the fact is, in these unsentimental '90s, the movie's unrelenting grimness holds up very nicely. Beyond the toils and troubles of Joe Buck and Ratso (that's Enrico Salvatore Rizzo), the world itself is lost in hopeless isolation, wallowing in a poverty of money, morality and love.” Elsewhere in the article Howe compliments the film on the very same scenes for which Ebert attacked it. Specifically, what they refer to as the Warhol-esque party. Ebert felt as though the party had little narrative value, was already a trite scene at that point in time and was unrealistic in regards to Joe and Ratso even getting invited. Howe considers the surrealistic scene as cutely quaint.
While I tend to appreciate Ebert’s opinion more than Howe’s, if only for the reason it’s more fleshed out, I think both critics miss the mark. The setting of the party served as platform to give Joe the kind of attention that propelled him to New York in the first place. The documentary style footage present in the scene put Joe in the middle of his own shows. Instead of being a real person, he became yet another representation of reality, much like most of the other guests at the party. Joe enjoyed the taste of the artificial world and even got his first real gigolo job there. However, Ratso’s decreasing health brings Joe back to reality.
Ebert also said, “They exist apart from the movie, outside of it. Their lives have nothing to do with Andy Warhol parties, or escort services, or hard Park Avenue dames. And who can really believe they would ever find themselves on that bus to Florida?” What would Ebert have said if the story had taken an even more surreal approach, such as in 8 ½? Instead of one scene of a hallucinatory party, what if it had been as erratic as Fellini’s film? As Dwight MacDonald said in his essay on the film, “There are three kinds of reality in 8 ½, and the film proceeds with a constant shifting of gear between them. There is Guido’s real present….There are his memories of his boyhood and of his dead parents. And there are his Walter Mitty daydreams of a harmonious realm of luxe, calme, et volupte in which all his problems are magically solved: the artist’s world of creative fantasy.” Midnight Cowboy already reaches the first two in relation to Joe Buck. As for that last one, the closest we come to is Ratso’s fantasy about owning his own resort in Miami. Granted, there is a difference between supplying numerous fantasy scenes and creating ridiculous places of reality, but it isn’t a big one. In Fellini’s film, reality and fantasy were separated and the film transitioned from one to other and back again. In Schlesinger’s film, reality and fantasy were blended together, and considering Joe’s journey that seems like the perfect residence. He is a man that can’t distinguish the two, so the film can’t either. It works to complicate our understanding of reality along with the underlying theme of the American Dream.
But in the end we are left without the unreal world and are placed on a bus with Joe and Ratso heading to Florida. Here we see the evolution of both characters. In the beginning the difference between Joe and Ratso was big and small at the same time. They both had dreams and they both lived a harsh reality. The difference being that Joe was chained is his cave for most of the film whereas Ratso was embedded in reality. He fantasized about going to Miami, sure, but his day to day routine was focused on survival. The two are similar to the sisters in Donal Mosher’s essay Desiree, Daneal and the Devil. In it, both sisters have gone through a rough life, but deal with it differently. The older sister, Daneal, who was molested by her father, is embittered towards men and speaks openly about the harshness of reality. “Desiree however is not made of the same tough fiber. She bounds her world with cartoons, video games, and all the dense, sparkling décor of young girlhood.” But that last bus ride has Ratso attempting to live in the fake world for the remainder of his life and has Joe face reality. This means Joe has to give up his great dream and find something more realistic, which he does. He’s gone from a fragile Desiree to the toughened Daneal, finally punctuated by the death of Ratso on the bus.
The road to the American Dream is a dangerous one for many people. And for Joe Buck that path was even more hazardous due to him not living in the real world. However, he survived his journey and while he may not have reached his dream at the end of it, he did accomplish something better. He woke up to reality. Let’s just hope that Joe didn’t wake up from his dream to find himself in a nightmare.
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