Just saw Midnight Cowboy for the first time, and I was actually caught off guard by how moving I found it. It helps that I’m not bothered by movies which are dated, and that I adore character studies, buddy movies, and films with gay themes (if I’d known what the movie was about, I’d have seen it sooner). But anyway, back to my question.
For about 90% of the so called homosexual subtext between Rizzo and Joe, I’d say it’s there to illustrate the point that the friendship between the two of them transcends all the empty, humiliating, or brutal sexual experiences Joe has had (or the absent experiences of Rizzo). Even the scene where Rizzo presses longingly against Joe while Joe fixes his hair seems to be more about these two men’s desperate need for meaningful contact with another person. But one scene did have me questioning whether I was supposed to see more there, and that was the scene where Rizzo fantasizes about Florida.
It’s a weird scene all around, with the all the zany music and fast motion, but one thing about it did catch my attention. Fantasy Joe never wears a shirt. Rizzo imagines dozens of women, all seniors in wheelchairs for whom he calls Bingo games, and shirtless Joe is by his side. He frolics in the surf with shirtless Joe like they’re the inspiration for Rocky 3 (I get that Rizzo is fantasizing about being able to run, but still). So, was that scene saying that Rizzo was gay? Or am I reading too much into what is just a really bizarre and dated moment?
OK, no real proof and working from memory ---- I always wrote off Joe as being straight or maybe bisexual. Rizzo, between his health and lot in life, seemed to have no real orientation at all. Even in some of the dialogue that had a sexual leaning, he seemed to be more about having someone near him than having any sexual desire towards them. His attraction towards Joe was more finding someone who cared about him and what he thought more than anything physical.
It’s funny. I always thought, as a young person, that the film was about friendship. But the literature on it says that it is gay. The director was gay. It was rated X, one of the first, esp for a “real” film, and got best picture, the only one to do so, obviously.
I think it is about friendship, overwhelmingly so. That it deals with gay issues at all was unusual for the time, but I don’t think that the point was that Ratso and Joe were lovers or anything. I don’t think Joe was probably gay at all - any gay encounters he had were out of desperation, where as he was more than excited to prostitute himself to women. That one scene, though, just made me wonder if I was supposed to be interpreting a one-sided crush between them.
The X rating wasn’t really an X rating. As I understand it, the studio gave it an X, and when the MPAA finally reviewed it, they gave it an R.
I never really got the feeling of any kind of homosexual attraction. To me, it seemed like the characters were desperate for any kind of affection or attention. I always saw them like needy puppies just running to whoever would be kind enough to pat them on the head.
That said, I never read the book, which may be much different, as movies are prone to change so much.
I’ve actually never even seen Midnight Cowboy, but I’ve always understood it to be about a friendship between a sickly gay guy (Dustin Hoffman) and a handsome straight guy (Jon Voight) who wants to be a prostitute serving a female clientele but learns there’s not much demand for this.
Since I haven’t seen the movie I can’t provide a defense of this interpretation, but I gather that a lot of people who have seen it thought that the Hoffman character was gay.
In the desperate situation they were both in it never entered my mind that either one of them were gay. The movie certainly didn’t forward the idea, shirt be damned. In that setting they were supporting each other to stay alive.
I continued to be interested, so I went ahead and read the novel - it was a very easy, very quick read - and this seemed to be the case as far as the source material was concerned. Near the end, when Rizzo was very ill, Joe saw him naked and noted that his childhood illness left him underdeveloped. But then, both Joe and Rizzo were a lot more extreme in the novel - Joe was borderline mentally retarded, possibly from neglect (he reminded me a bit of Tom Cullen from the Stand), and Rizzo moved with a lopsided, rolling gait that had him struggling to keep up with Joe in the street, not just a limp. So I’m not sure if it’s relevant to what I saw in the film.
Entertaining book, though I thought the movie was a lot better.
I am pretty sure an “X Rating” in 1969 was far from what that rating would later represent. “A Clockwork Orange” also had an X Rating in 1971. After Deep Throat and similar films, "X Rated’ became synonymous with hardcore pornography.
Does the US have an X rating? I live in the UK so I’m familiar with the rating but I thought NC-17 was the US equivalent.
I’m having trouble wondering how “X Rated” could become synonymous with hardcore porn if Americans don’t use the rating. As for Brits Deep Throat and similar films weren’t rated X. They weren’t in fact rated at all, simply banned!
The NC-17 rating was created in 1990 to differentiate adult movies from porn. Back when people still got porn in theaters and video stores, they advertised their intent with big “XXX” labels (and no doubt started doing so because of the MPAA X rating). Since X’s became synonymous with wank material, not really fair to movies like Midnight Cowboy or Last Tango in Paris, the MPAA changed it. Or something.
I don’t think people rate porn anymore, but you’ll have to ask someone else. When I do indulge, it tends to be amateur stuff.
The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) never trademarked the X rating, so anyone was allowed to use it. Because of this it became so linked to pornography that they were forced to create the NC-17 rating for clearly adult material, since theaters refused to show X-rated films and newspapers rejected the advertising of X-rated movies.
That was my impression. I wasn’t quite clear on what the relationship was, toward the end it seemed like a father/son relationship, though not clear who was the parent and who was the child. Not really a well made movie, if there was a comprehensible story there it could have been done better.
Which doesn’t rule out him being gay or bi, though. Repression and self-loathing oven result in intensely negative reactions to expressions of what is being repressed/loathed.
Not saying he IS or isn’t, just that the above isn’t necessarily indicative of either.
I don’t think the movie gives us any good indication that he is, though. In the book, Joe is bisexual, or at the very least, gender apathetic (apasexual?). At the very least, he has a sexual relationship with a man for a few weeks after his girlfriend is taken away to an asylum. It’s only after he’s later sexually assaulted that he develops a repulsion. But in the movie, we never see him show any sexual interest in men. With Rizzo, though, you could make a case that he’s attracted to Joe, at least in the movie, at least in that one scene.
It’s not really important to the story. It’s just a little thing that struck me.
Also, I’m a bit surprised that the author was gay. The straight sex scenes are all written with a fair amount of detail, if a little…technically. But the gay scenes are all shrouded in metaphor. It comes off like the author was a straight guy trying to write a daring novel outside of his scope of sexual knowledge and got a little embarrassed.
It was the 60s, he would have been very unsure what he could get away with in a film. There was no secret about how to depict straight sex in film, but it was film, and he didn’t have a lot of examples of gay sexuality in film to work from.