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, something violent. They arrive before they make sense and only later resolve into readable scenes.
Payoff: You assemble Joe's past in pieces, at the speed he fails to outrun it. No one ever explains it to you. 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.
Once you have seen it
Count how many of Joe's plans actually work. (structure)
He arrives with one scheme and it collapses in the first hour. He pays instead of getting paid. Salt's script keeps refusing the arc the setup promises, and the drift takes over.
Payoff: This is a picaresque with the conquest removed. The movement is real and it changes nothing about his position.
Look at how the condemned room gets furnished. (setting)
Broken plumbing, no power, heat improvised. The two men keep adding to it anyway. The most derelict space in the film slowly becomes the only home either of them has.
Payoff: The squat is where the transactions stop. Everything else in this city is bought, and that room is not.
Compare the Florida daydreams with everything shot in New York. (light)
Florida arrives in advertising color: sun, sea, saturated warmth. The city stays gray, vertical, blown out in daylight and cold blue in the squat. The palette tells you which country you are in.
Payoff: The escape looks like a brochure because that is what it is. Nobody ever photographs it as a real place.
Watch the party sequence break into jump cuts. (cutting)
Robertson assembles the Warhol Factory scene from disorienting cuts and superimpositions. Joe drifts through it without a footing. The form of the sequence does what the drugs and the room are doing.
Payoff: The city's hip center is as unusable to him as its street corners. He cannot get purchase anywhere.
Carry this in: Watch Joe's costume and Ratso's limp. This film reads both men off their bodies, not off their words.