SCARLET AND BLACK

Friday. November I4. [96?

Midnight Cowboy: “A liberal Film"

By Alan G. Nasser
instructor of Philosophy

British director John Schlesinger (Dar-
ling, Billy Liar, a Kind of Loving) has
serious reservations about the quality
of American life and culture. These re-
servations are depicted in Midnight Cow-
boy with a cinematic vlrtilosity that
dazzles the visual sensibilities. This film
must be seen by all who understand and
appreciate the cinema for what it is.
namely, the richest and most exciting
art form of our time. But this is not to
say that Midnight Cowboy is first rate
cinema. it isn’t. For olle must distin-
guish its philosophical basis from its
execution. 1 shall argue that although
the latter is often admirably skillful,
the former accounts for the film's ul-
timate failure, But first, a brief synopr
sis of the scenario.

Joe Buck (get it?), a naive young Tex-
an dishwasher, decides to break out of
the hopeless monotony of small-town
Texas life to seek the Holy Grail of ex-
citement and fulfillment in the dream
capital of the U. A., New York City.
He boards a bus and travels to the
east coast confident that the pleasures
of the Good Life can be secured with
the money he will earn as the finest
stud east of the Mississippi. After all,
he has a certain undisputable charm,
he is handsome, and what is most im-
portant, he is a terrific lay. Surely
those wealthy New York women would
gladly pay luxury wages for a piece of
Joe's action.

Accoutred in an outlandish cowboy
outfit, he walks the streets of the city
in search of his first customer. After an
unsuccessful attempt or two, Joe picks
up an aging hooker who, after they “do
it" (as one says here in Iowa), re-
sponds so pathetically to Joe’s request
for payment, that he gives her twenty
dollars. Things are not at all going as
Joe had planned. He is soon broke, and
forced to sell his services to a pimply
young homosexual in the balcony of a
Times Square movie theater. Then he
meets “Ratso” Rizzo, a limping, sick-
ly slumdweller who, though unemployed,
manages to eke out a living among a
circle of pimps, whores, queers, trans-
vestites, and doperpushers.

The initial experience with Ratso is
discouraging, Conman that he is, he sells
Joe an appointment with what he as
sures him is a promising ”customer”,
but who turns out to be a religious
zealot of lunatic dimenswns. Of course,
Ratso has in the meantime split.

While aimlessly wondering the streets,
Joe spies Ratso in a diner, and ap-
proaches him with anger and resent-
ment. But the two need one another, and
a deep friendship begins. Joe moves
in with Ratso and continues his doomed
search for the mythical crotch market.
Meanwhile, the two cannot muster the
means to eat, and Ratso's respiratory
condition is growing steadily worse. Joe
finally realizes, after a spectacular night
with a swinger he meets at a hippie
party, that he will never find whatever
he is looking for in New York City. There
remains only one genuinely meaningful
altemative for Joe: perhaps he can real—
ize for the now critically ailing Ratso
the latter’s principal fantasy, to absorb
the solar. sexual, and culinary hedons of
Miami Beach. Joe's own dream has
proved to be an illusion, but Ratso's
can yet be made real. But first Joe must
get the busfare.

in an exceedingly brutal scene, .ioe
acquires the money from a whining,
middle-aged, corporate homosexual. He
boards the bus with a coughing, fever-
ridden Ratso, and they begin their jour-
ney to the eschaton, as the film moves
inexorably toward its tragic conclusion.

There is much that is commendable in
this film, it is a polished production
whose professionalism ensures that is
is unflaggingly entertaining. In fact. it
would not be unfair to describe Mid-
night Cowboy as a slick film, perhaps
too slick in its opportunistic use oi, for
example, fast cutting to insure that the
film is paced with sufficient rapidity
to make boredom Virtually imposs. 12
The film is bound to succeed as ente
tainment, for it successfully adjusts
self to the best of tried and tested avant~
garde tcchniques. And yet, ior those oi
us who make a steady Visual diet of
first rate cinema, this filln is routine.
For it is one thing for a filmmaker to
competently employ sophisticated tech-
niques that have been put to far better
use by his predecessors, and it is quite
another thing for a director to make
innovative use oi techniques suggested
by others of comparable statute. Each
involves the competent employment or
interesting and aesthetically mature
techniques, but it is only the latter that
signifies the work of a truly creative
filmmaker. There is nothing innovative
about Schlesinger's film. It’s all been
done before, and better.

Nonetheless, Schlesinger‘s technical
sophistication is praiseworthy, especially
in the light of a comparison of Midnight
Cowboy with the thoroughly mediocre
Good-bye Columbus. Larry Peerce’s film
is superficially ilashy; its beauty is only
skin deep, a typical response to the cur
rent middle class cultural revolution.
The new educated middle class wants
class in its films, and Hollywood is ac-
commodatirlg. ”if dey want film dat got
class, films with an avante-garde, Eu-
ropean complexion, dat's what we'll
give ’em!" Hence, Good-bye Columbus,
Secret Ceremony, Whining, Reflections
in a Golden Eye, etc. Pudovkin em-
ployed linkage editing with enormous
effectiveness; Good-bye Columbus is re-
plete with linkages. Eisenstein induces

visual orgasms with a masterful use of
collision Cutting; Goodbye Columbus is
full of collision cuts. Hitchcock knows
prcc'sely when to get the most out of
an eccentric camera angle; Goodbye
Columbus is a collage of crazy camera
angles. Not to mention at least two
zooms in every scene and all sorts of
distortion producing lenses. But none of
it works, because these techniques were
never conceived with a sense of contex-
tual function. The techniques preceded
the conception of the film. It’s compara-
ble to how I used to complete homework
assignments in high school. Teacher said
to wr:te a poem with a metaphor in it.
So i dreamed up a metaphor out of the
blue, and hastily constructed a piece of
(loggerel around it. My poetry Stank, but
Father Aquinas loved it.

Now Midnight Cowboy is not like
Goodbye, Columbus. If. is not merely a
bag of tricks. Schlesinger's use of tested
techniques is always a natural and [liner
tioning outgrowth of his overall concep-
tion of the film coupled with a clear
sense of what he wants to do with a par-
ticular scene or shot Within the film. And
this is no meager achievement.

Moreover, Schlesinger has the age of
his aesthetics. Think of Wild In the
Streets, a putatively “hip” iilm about
the gcncration gap. But the generation
gap, as one critic so astutely put it, was
within the film, which was cinematically
primitive. Worse yet, remember The
Night They Raided Minskry’s? A Nelson
Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald musical with
mid 60’s production. Trash.

And there is a pleasing sense of land
scape to this film, reminiscent of nut]
and Easy Rider. Schlesinger wants to
give us a sense of America, its values,
its cultural complexion, and, in a sense
which I shall severely qualify present-
ly, lic succeeds rather nicely. One as-
pect of the country is seen through
Joe’s eyes during his bus trip. Dustin
Hoffman as Ratso uses his own voice

Dustin Hoffman (left) as Ratso Rizzo, and Jon Voight as Joe Buck, as they appear
in “Midnight Cowboy.“ The film was directed by John Schlesinger.

for a landscape of New York City. And
Joe's portable radio, his vade mecum,
addressing itself to the empty air of his
hotel room, performs the same funo
tionr

Dustin Hoffman and John Voight der
liver two of the most stunning performr
ances or recent years, They work brilr
liantly together, and the individual per-
formances are literally flawless, There
is also a feeling of improvisational free»
dom that is rare in a film of this kind.
Schlesinger worked hard to induce this

spontaneity in Hoffman and Voight. In-
stead of making the film from a com-
pleted script, he used the first draft of
the script as a springboard, encouraging
the actors to take off from the script as
a base, and when they were able to
improve upon its details, it was re-writr
ten as a result and the scenes in ques
tion were shot again, In this sense, the
making of the film contributed to the
making of the film. This is commonplace
in superior European iilms, but it is
largely unheard of among even the best
American directors. Alfred Hitchcock,
for example, would never dream of such
a thing.

in order to understand why, in spite
of all this, the film fails, it is necessary
to inquire as to the director‘s purpose
in making Midnight Cowboy. By Schle-
singer’s own admission, he wanted to
depict “how. in America, the odds are
so great against a man‘s fulfilling him-
self—greater than in any other country.
It is so easy to be deceived in this
country. You Americans are so busy
deceiving yourselves." i-ie is referring
primarily to being deceived concerning
values. Whenever he travels to the Unit-
ed States, Schlesinger claims, he is in-
creasingly stricken by the way in which
Americans are bombarded from all di-
rections—signs, posters, all sorts of ad
ver‘tisements, radio and TV commercials,
films~with messages and propaganda
that cultivate in even the best of us a
whole network of false values, hopes,
aspirations and needs. The least harmful
are those lies such as "Eat here for the
biggest hamburger in the world,” or
“The world’s best coffee.” But the more
serious of these, that would have us
form images of ourselves extracted from
the decadent culture of a sexual lump-
enproletariat (Does not Playboy seek to
cultivate just such an image in the
minds of its readers?), produces charac-
ters like Joe Buck. Joe's conception of
himself, his sense of what a place like
New York has to offer (Read the sub-
way posters and the magazine ads:
“New York is Fun City!”7which it
most certainly is not), and his conception
of what he can make of his life in New
York City. are all learned. They are
learned from his environment. And
Schlesinger insists that everything in
Joe’s environment both suggests and en-
courages the ultimately destructive set
of hopes and aspirations that make
Joe Buck tick.

No one would deny that all this is true
as far as it goes. But it does not go
very far. In fact, in the absence of any-
thing more substantial in the way of so-
Clo-cultural insight, it is a superficial,
commonplace, and uninformative des~
Cription of the ills of America. What is
most important to see about Midnight
Cowboy is that there is a reason for
its social and moral fatuousness, And
in this reason lies the fatal flaw of the
film. You see, its viewpoint is entirely
inadequate, given Schlesinger’s aims and
objectives, which are to express, by
means of the visual aesthetics of the
cinema, the effects of certain aspects of
American culture upon its victims, and
the responses of the latter to their exist-
cntial predicament. The inadequacy oi