Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Midnight Cowboy
1969 · John Schlesinger · Midnight Cowboy on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how people in New York look at Joe's outfit. (setting)
Fringe, Stetson, tooled boots, transistor radio. In Texas the costume reads as swagger. On a Manhattan sidewalk it reads as a rube, and the city has seen it before.
Payoff: The outfit is the argument. Joe is wearing an idea of a man that stopped working before he got here. In the reading: the-gest. The reading calls the costume a gest: a posture that shows a man's place in the world without a word of explanation.
Notice the flashes of Texas cutting into the present. (cutting)
Hugh Robertson interrupts scenes with splinters: a grandmother, a girl, advertising images. They arrive before they make sense.
Payoff: You assemble Joe's past in pieces, at the speed he fails to outrun it. In the reading: mnemosign / recollection-image. The reading calls these recollection-images: the past forcing its way into a present the man cannot move forward in.
Look at the real crowd pressing around the actors. (camera)
Adam Holender shot in live Times Square with the traffic and pedestrians running. Daylight blows out on Joe's white hat. Hoffman's shout at a taxi stayed in because the street was genuinely uncontrolled.
Payoff: The city keeps being itself while the men lose ground in front of it. Nothing they do touches it.
Listen for the harmonica that comes back through the film. (sound)
Toots Thielemans plays John Barry's melody, thin and unaccompanied. Harry Nilsson's Everybody's Talkin' rides the opening bus. Around both, the track is plain street sound: traffic, crowds, radios.
Payoff: One lonely instrument against a city of noise. The music holds the longing the dialogue never states.
Watch how Voight stands and how Hoffman walks. (performance)
Voight leans, poses, keeps the swagger stretched thin over need. Hoffman builds Ratso from the limp, the cough, the greasy hair and the wheedling Bronx voice. Both men are read off their bodies.
Payoff: You learn these two from posture before either says anything true. The acting is physical work, not speeches. In the reading: cinema of the body / attitudes & postures. The reading calls this a cinema of the body: the camera takes a man's history off how he stands and moves.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch Joe's costume and Ratso's limp. This film reads both men off their bodies, not off their words.