Midnight Cowboy · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The first thing Joe Buck does is dress. Fringe, Stetson, tooled boots, a transistor radio — the whole rhinestone idea of a man, assembled in a Texas rooming house and carried east on a Greyhound while Harry Nilsson sings about going where the sun keeps shining. Back home the costume meant something: virility, swagger, a stud worth paying for. In Manhattan it means rube. The city has seen this outfit before. That gap — between what a posture announces and what it actually discloses about a man's place in the world — is the whole film, and Deleuze has a name for it.

He calls it the gest: a bodily attitude that stops being mere behavior and becomes legible as a social relation, a posture that exposes the theater the body is caught inside. Joe's cowboy getup is pure gest. It doesn't act; it presents. Every time he leans in a doorway working the angle of his own glamour, the film shows us not a hustler hustling but a man wearing the idea of himself, and the wearing is the meaning. This is what Deleuze means by a cinema of the body: the camera reads duration and damage off how people stand, limp, slump, hold a cigarette — Voight's stretched-thin swagger, Hoffman's caved-in cough and dragging leg — rather than off what they accomplish.

And they accomplish almost nothing. This is the deeper Deleuzian event of Midnight Cowboy. In the classical American movie — what Deleuze calls the action-image — a character perceives a situation and acts to change it; the world presses, the hero pushes back, the situation transforms. Joe arrives with exactly that contract in his head. He has a plan: sell himself to rich Park Avenue women. The plan fails in its first hour and keeps failing. He pays for sex instead of being paid; a client weeps; he ends up rolling a man in a hotel. Deleuze calls this the crisis of the action-image — the moment, which he locates in precisely this late-sixties cinema, when characters can no longer respond adequately to what they see. The link between perceiving and acting snaps. Joe reads the city perfectly well. He just has no action that fits it.

What replaces action is the stroll. The picaresque setup — country boy conquers town — promises an arc, and Salt's screenplay refuses to deliver it. What we get instead is the trip that transforms nothing, what Deleuze calls the voyage-balade: movement without conquest, a drift through bus terminals and all-night cinemas and the cold of a condemned tenement. The spaces are arranged as a descent, and they are barely spaces at all in the old sense. The squat where Ratso lives — broken plumbing, improvised heat, no power — isn't a setting where a story happens. It's an any-space-whatever: a deserted, used-up place that has stopped serving as a stage for action and instead just radiates dereliction. Holender shoots Times Square with an almost ethnographic eye, letting the real crowd close around the actors, and the more documentary-true the city gets, the less it can be acted upon. You can only look at it. Joe becomes a watcher — Deleuze's seer, the figure who endures and registers rather than intervenes. The famous "I'm walkin' here!" survives precisely because the camera was working in live, uncontrolled space: the film keeps catching the city being itself, indifferent, while the men inside it run out of moves.

Out of that stillness the past leaks in. Robertson's editing — the film's real radical achievement, and an Oscar-nominated one — interrupts the present continually with splinters: Joe's grandmother, a girl, a violent sexual episode in Texas, advertising imagery, all flickering before they resolve into legible scenes. These aren't decorative flashbacks. They're recollection-images, the dated past breaking involuntarily into a present that can't move forward, so that we assemble Joe's trauma piecemeal exactly as he is unable to outrun it. Against them runs the other register: Florida, sunlit in advertising color, the staged dream-image of Ratso's escape. The film tells us by palette and texture which country of the mind we're in. When a man can no longer act on the present, time stops being the measure of his movement and begins to present itself directly — as memory he can't escape, as a future he'll never reach.

And everything slopes down. Ratso's cough deepens; the descent through the city's underside is also a descent toward death. Deleuze would hear, beneath the social surface, the line of slope — the entropic pull toward exhaustion that runs under naturalist worlds, the bus to Florida arriving with the dream already a corpse against the window.

The lineage is exact. The location ethos is Bicycle Thieves carried to 42nd Street — the city as documentary subject, the neorealist refusal of the soundstage. The memory-bursts are Hiroshima mon amour's involuntary image and Breathless's fracturing of continuous time, European modernism smuggled into a United Artists release. The Factory party, all jump cuts and blank durational stares, is Warhol's Chelsea Girls. The tenderness toward marginal lives is the kitchen-sink eye Schlesinger brought from A Kind of Loving. And the ironic pop song laid over the image — Nilsson against the grime — is the trick The Graduate had just taught Hollywood.

That a studio film built this way, carrying an X, won Best Picture is the historical fact. The Deleuzian fact is larger. Midnight Cowboy is one of the films where American cinema stopped resolving situations and started enduring them — where the hero became a seer, the plot became a stroll, and two failed men keeping each other warm in a condemned room became worth more than any action could have been. Watch the costume again. It was never going to work. The film knows it before Joe does, and loves him anyway.