Temporal Confusion in Midnight Cowboy

Film reviews invariably highlight three key features about John Schlesinger’s 1969 masterpiece, Midnight Cowboy:  first, it is the only X-rated film to win a Best Picture Academy Award; second, Joe Buck and Ratso’s relationship is widely interpreted as homosexual; and third, Buck has retained an Oedipus Complex.  I will attempt to rationalize the proliferation of these points in the media by reading Midnight Cowboy as a film that demands its viewers to broaden the scope of their norms.  Normativity and exchange are synonymous in this case.  Indeed, norms can be defined on the basis of exchange—if an item, word, or concept cannot be exchanged, it is extra-normative.  Therefore, consumers’ willingness to exchange ten dollars to see an X-rated movie represents a shift in the audience’s boundaries of normativity – even if viewers react angrily to the taboo content on the screen, they were at least receptive to it.  Midnight Cowboy’s subversive tendencies are not limited to diegetic content, however.  Midnight Cowboy requires an even broader expansion of norms by attacking narrative conventions in addition to content-expectations (such as the expectation that the male lead will develop a female love-interest).  In Midnight Cowboy this is subtly but powerfully achieved by attacking one of the most fundamental premises of a narrative—the expectation that a story will occur in chronological order.  Therefore, Midnight Cowboy forces its viewers to expand the scope of their norms by disordering meta-norms, such as the assumption that events will proceed chronologically, as well as diegetic norms, such as that of characters’ “healthy” psychosexual development.  Indeed, even the diegetic norms disrupted by Midnight Cowboy involve underlying temporal concerns.  The predominance of disrupted time across meta and diegetic norms suggests that Midnight Cowboy’s subversive power originates in an audience’s most beloved assumption of all—that events will proceed in an orderly manner.  Thus, time is the film’s master-key, a tool critics can and should use to interpret the seemingly heterogeneous content and style of this cinematic masterpiece.

One reason temporal confusion is such a useful heuristic for analysing and thematically unifying the events in Midnight Cowboy is that even events seemingly unrelated to time can be re-interpreted as temporal confusion.  One of the most frequently targeted concerns of Midnight Cowboy – Joe Buck’s Oedipus Complex – can also be read as diegetic temporal confusion, thus extending the trope of norm subversion through temporal displacement.  (By “temporal confusion” I mean that events are delayed, sped up, reversed, or disordered in some way.)  Temporal confusion affects nearly every source of conflict in Midnight Cowboy, including central issues like Joe’s Oedipus Complex.  Schlesinger indicates that Buck’s Oedipus Complex should be considered the movie’s fundamental psychological concern by rationalizing Buck’s cowboy outfit – the mystery of which penetrates as far as the film’s title – as an Oedipus Complex that has not been repressed with time, as occurs in healthy adults.  When Joe’s boss asks him, “What are you doing in that getup?” (A 4:39) Buck retreats into a series of flashbacks linked thematically by cowboy imagery.  First, the screen cuts to a shot of pre-adolescent Joe wearing a cowboy hat as his grandmother says, “You’ll make Grandma proud.  You’ll be the best lookin’ cowboy in the whole parade” (A 7:39).  This scene establishes a connection between Joe’s cowboy costume and pleasing his grandmother, although this pleasure is not yet explicitly sexual.  Schlesinger emphasizes the sexual nature of Joe’s outfit more and more strongly as the film progresses, however.  At A 12:47 Schlesinger depicts the young Joe Buck in bed between his grandmother and his grandmother’s lover.  The man is naked but for a cowboy hat; to his right, the young Buck receives a kiss from his grandmother.  This scene is shot head-on from a 270 degree angle.  The next shot depicts the boyfriend, now in full cowboy livery and riding a horse (A 12:52-12:55).  The camera is placed at a very low angle, creating the illusion that the beau towers above Joe Buck threateningly, thus rationalizing Joe’s Oedipal desire to kill his father-figure.  Joe’s presumed fear is accentuated by menacing laughter in the background.  Next, Schlesinger cuts to a shot of young Buck wearing a cowboy hat on a swing (A 12:58-13:01)—Buck has begun to emulate his “father.”  The Oedipus Complex is completed when Schlesinger returns to the shot of Grandmother, Buck and Beau in bed (A 13:05-13:06); however, this time the camera is oriented at 315 degrees such that the boyfriend, although physically present, is cropped out of the screen—cinematically representing Joe’s successful murder of his paternal rival.

Because Joe’s Oedipus Complex is established in connection with his original decision to sport a cowboy getup, I interpret Joe’s continued modeling of a cowboy costume as the persistence of his Oedipus Complex into maturity.  In other words, Joe’s Oedipus Complex has defied time, enduring long past its erosion in normal individuals.  As such, the Oedipal themes are an example of a broader concern in Midnight Cowboy:  the disruption of time.  The same can be said of Buck’s supposed attraction to men — a component of primary bisexuality which Freud suggests normally disappears with time.

Joe’s Oedipus complex and alleged homosexuality provide examples of diegetic time disturbance, wherein the characters themselves are responsible for temporal confusion.  More strikingly, Schlesinger emphasizes time’s significance by distorting time extra-diegetically as well, either through time contraction, reversal of cause and effect, or via time “anomalies,” wherein images from the future are illogically inserted into the present.  Schlesinger frequently “contracts”  (i.e. speeds up) time by mismatching audio and video.  For example, at the start of the film Joe Buck sings “Whoopidie little doggies” in continuous audio, despite the significantly faster passage of visually-measured time.  In the time it takes to sing a fraction of a song, Joe showers, applies deodorant, and dresses (A 01:26-01:47).  Likewise, as Buck walks down 42nd Street in what appears to be continuous stride, several days and nights pass, as indicated by the alternation between light and dark settings (A 40:00-40:04).

Schlesinger similarly distorts time by reversing cause and effect.  First Joe puts the fridge down (A 48:57), then Ratso suggests he “drop it anywhere” (A 48:58-49:00); first Buck lies on Ratso’s mattress (A 49:40-49:41), then Ratso asks Buck if he “wants to take a nap” (A 49:45).  Alone, these devices might be interpreted as existing solely for comedic effect, rather than as intentional instances of temporal confusion.  However, Schlesinger supplements these reversals with more subtle instances of effect preceding cause — instances likely to go unnoticed by the viewer and therefore indicative of the director’s attempts to portray temporal confusion as a theme in itself, rather than for comedic effect.  For example, following Joe’s male-escort catastrophe, Schlesinger inserts an image of an electric sun (B 12:26-12:30).  Because this sun – a pixilated, unrealistic image – is so blatantly ersatz, the electronic sun does not symbolize a sun, but rather predicts the conspicuous absence of sun.  It is not until one minute later (B 13:15-13:20) that the weather report acknowledges the lack of visible sun which, were cause and effect properly ordered, would have generated a void for the faux-sun to occupy.  In other words, occupant preceded vacancy.

Last, Schlesinger offers chronological anomalies as an example of time distortion.  For example, the now-canon scene (A 28:29) in which a taxi nearly collides with Ratso, barely missing his uninjured leg, foreshadows Ratso’s loss of mobility.  Ratso’s death is even more blatantly predicted by the shot of a gravestone bearing the name “Dominic Salvatore Rizzo” (A 19:34-19:37) – a name equivocally shared by both Ratso and his father.  Although such foreshadow most frequently pertains to Ratso’s demise, it can depict more trivial affairs:  when Joe and Shirley first meet in the dark-room, for example, Schlesinger, seemingly randomly, zooms in on a photograph of a short-haired, brunette woman’s head (B 31:24-31:25).  The photograph lies flat in a tray, as though it were lying on a pillow, and the woman’s eyes are rolling back in her head, her mouth ajar – a caricature of orgasm.  As such, the photograph predicts Shirley’s decision to hire Joe, even proleptically verifying that Buck will successfully copulate with Shirley, despite Joe’s original impotence.

I have gone into great detail cataloguing diegetic and extra-diegetic instances of temporal confusion in order to demonstrate, beyond doubt, that time is a persistent theme in Midnight Cowboy – an interpretation I’ve been unable to verify in the current literature, and as such, an interpretation even more in need of exhaustive proof.  Furthermore, I’ve included Joe’s Oedipus Complex as an example of diegetic temporal disruption in order to demonstrate that many of the themes critics have identified as central to Midnight Cowboy can be re-framed as malfunctions in the normal passage of time.  Why, then, is the passage of time foregrounded in Midnight Cowboy?  Although this is pure supposition, one likely explanation of time’s significance in Midnight Cowboy is that time represents the ultimate narrational norm, and therefore, to disrupt time is to symbolically confront American normativity.  The film’s title affirms this interpretation:  in addition to allusions to prostitution, the term “midnight cowboy” references Joe’s habit of tardiness at work, as Joe’s boss states:  “Four o’clock?  Four to midnight!  That’s when you’re due here” (A 04:35).  To title the film “Midnight Cowboy” – a life affirming depiction of the eponymous character – is to validate Joe’s tardy habits, or, more broadly, is to validate lateness (another example of temporal confusion) as a trait that should be considered appropriate.  Hence, Schlesinger disorders time, both diegetically and stylistically, as a subversion of cinematic norms.  By these means does Schlesinger expand American normativity as an exchange in mores between filmmaker and audience.