Midnight Cowboy: The Genuine Counterculture Experience

After the post-war conservatism of the forties and fifties, the 1960s ushered in a period of change in America – changing attitudes, changing values, and changing perceptions. The evolution of culture and thought was reflected on the screen throughout the sixties in films that departed both thematically and formally from classical structure and content. By 1969, when John Schlesinger emigrated from Great Britain to make Midnight Cowboy, the counterculture had fully emerged as part of the seams of American culture as a whole, and is thus reflected in the film. Formally, Midnight Cowboy uses new modernist approaches to filmmaking, experimenting self-reflexively with its narrative structure, as well as its visual and sound design. However, more significantly than the formal methods used are the elements of the counterculture the film displays through its topically accommodating content. Using fictional protagonists of roughly the same age as the college-educated movie going audience of the era, Schlesinger addresses the very conflicts this generation deals with in reality: drugs, promiscuity, homosexuality, and the quest to find one’s own identity in a world that seems absurd and confusing.

One of the main tenets of modernism was a self-conscious questioning of moral and ethical values. To a generation who grew up in the aftermath of a global conflict, during governmental scandals like Watergate and amidst the quagmire of Vietnam, the world was not black and white. No longer was there a clear division between good and bad, right and wrong. An intense questioning of morals and ethics became necessary as the new generation tried to make sense of an increasingly confusing and disoriented world. In all modernist art, there was a move against tradition, and an overwhelming desire to explore new ideas. Poets and writers like Ginsberg and Kerouac took to the road literally, reminiscent of an older frontier mentality, with the hopes that the answers to their questions were somewhere waiting to be discovered. It is with this frontier mythology that Midnight Cowboy begins, and the image of the Cowboy – the lone man making sense of the wilderness – persists throughout.

Outfitted as a cowboy, Joe Buck sets out to become a male prostitute in New York City. Even here, evidence of the counterculture’s influence on Hollywood is obvious. Like Kerouac and the Beats, Joe wants to leave home, leave his family, set out on his own and forge his own destiny. Ironically, rather than the desolate unsettled west, the frontier he chooses to conquer is the urban jungle of New York City. To reinforce the frontier-like experience, he is dressed as a cowboy, complementing various other images that conjure up memories of the traditional Western like the opening sequence with the rocking horse and the movie theater marquee advertising an old John Wayne film.

Joe’s outward appearance, though, does more than merely invoke Western mythology. It also serves as a physical manifestation of Joe’s need to assert his masculinity. Not just an era of civil rights for racial minorities, the sixties ushered in a new generation of feminist and the women’s movement was revived. However, as women asserted their independence, men understandably felt threatened and underwent a transformation of their own. As femininity began to be redefined, so masculinity was necessarily redefined as well. This issue of masculinity and the new balance of power was difficult for many men to confront. As a result, Hollywood all but eliminated the issue from films of the decades. Consequently, in this decade, we see films which either villainize women or move them to the extreme periphery of male experience, and we witness a deliberate shift in focus to male-male rather than male-female relationships.

Midnight Cowboy takes both of these approaches. Women are of little insignificance in the film while it focuses instead on the blossoming friendship of Joe and Ratso and their respective relationships to the outside world. In the rare instances where women are portrayed, they appear in contrast to the accepted ideals and represent highly questionable moral values. Joe moves to New York to be a male prostitute, already establishing that women, far from the traditional ideal of the virgin, are paying for sex, and resulting in a total perversion of accepted societal values. This role reversal is not unique to Midnight Cowboy. Rather, it is a common theme in many of the landmark films of the era. Another huge counterculture film was The Graduate, also starring Dustin Hoffman. The film centers around this role reversal, where Mrs.Robinson is in complete control in the sexual relationship between her and a naïve young Benjamin.  Similarly, in the sexual encounters Joe has in Midnight Cowboy, he is subordinated to the woman. This subordination takes away, in a sense, his masculinity. This loss of masculinity is physically manifested when, after going home with a girl from a party who is willing to pay him for sex, he is unable to perform. The only way he is able to recapture this loss of control and masculinity is by getting angry at the suggestion that he is homosexual.

The portrayal of homosexuality in this film, too, suggests the strong influence of the counterculture in Hollywood. Caught in a changing society, Hollywood found itself trapped between its own desire to perpetuate traditional values and its audience’s preference for the new liberal ideals. It is because of this strong tension that Midnight Cowboy is so reluctant to openly approve or condemn homosexuality. Instead, it merely highlights it as an existing lifestyle, leaving further analysis to the viewers themselves so as not to ostracize either side of the morality debate. It remains ambiguous whether Ratso is gay, although at times he certainly speaks and acts as if he is, and Joe’s relationship with him may at times seem deeper than a mere friendship. Sometimes it seems that homosexuality is looked down upon, evidenced by the prevailing usage of slang terms like “faggot” and Joe’s anger at being accused of being gay after not performing in bed. Other times, though, it seems perfectly acceptable; in the same scene where Joe is angry at the accusation, the girl who is suggesting it seems perfectly fine with the idea. Thus, though Schlesinger limits the depth of discussion on such a controversial issue, he did include it in the film because of its prevalence in society.

More than anything, though, the counterculture had one objective – the discovery of one’s true self. The issues that the counterculture raises in society and the changes that were brought about due to their departures with traditional values are all connected by the pursuit of individuality and of freedom of thought and expression. Feeling claustrophobic within the confines of tradition, they sought any means possible of breaking new ground and exploring new territories. One of the ways they often did this was by taking drugs. Like in his approach towards homosexuality, Schlesinger neither condemns nor approves of drug usage, but does, true to the era, display its influence. In perhaps the most obvious show of the counterculture lifestyle’s pervasive impact on the city, and by extension, America, Joe finds himself invited to a pseudo-bohemian party. He and Ratso find themselves in a room of stereotypical counterculture figures and lost in a haze of marijuana smoke and various other substances. There are feminists, homosexuals, artists, and other such types philosophizing about life and lost in various drug-induced daydreams. However, it is merely another pattern woven into the texture of the city, neither good nor bad, neither moral nor immoral – just an experience.

That is, after all, what the counterculture stood for – experience. To use Kerouac as an example, his stream of consciousness style merely recorded his experience of traveling the country. Because the world was so absurd to this new generation, there could be no judgement placed. Each individual had the freedom of his or her own judgement, and each was to find his or her own way. Life was itself an adventure – an avenue to be explored. It is in this approach to life that Midnight Cowboy is most triumphant in its portrayal of the counterculture.

Midnight Cowboy takes the influence of counterculture in its every presence. As the new generation of Americans left home to experience the world, so Joe leaves Texas looking for new understanding in New York City – the epitome of American society. In his travels his experiences reflect the countercultures changing values and ideals, from the prevalence of drugs and sex to the forefronted issues of homosexuality and masculinity. More than anything though, Schlesinger’s film embraces the spirit of the counterculture by providing not a judgement or a point of view, but an experience. We experience, through Joe, the elements so intrinsic to the counterculture of the sixties and are left alone to ponder, question, and find our own answers to the questions of the day.