#43 ‘Midnight Cowboy’
Cowboy Hats, Crushed Dreams, and the Homoerotic Lament of American Failure
Midnight Cowboy (1969) struts in wearing boots, chewing on masculine mythology, and promptly collapses on a bus full of broken dreams. It’s the only X-rated film to win Best Picture, which sounds rebellious until you realize it’s mostly an elegy for straight male fragility wrapped in a fur coat of exploitation, poverty porn, and quietly repressed desire. It’s a tragedy, yes—but mostly a tragedy for men who thought the American Dream would include a blowjob and a penthouse.
Jon Voight plays Joe Buck, a blonde himbo in a ten-gallon hat who thinks he can conquer New York City with nothing but a smile and a sexual business plan. He’s part cowboy, part child, all delusion. His idea of success is seducing rich women for money—a male prostitute with a Marlboro Man fantasy and the emotional depth of a wet cigarette. Spoiler: it does not go well.
Enter Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman, filthy and feral), a limping conman who sounds like he gargles gravel and lives in what can only be described as a biohazard. He befriends Joe, scams him, pities him, and ultimately becomes his only human connection in a city that chews through people like discarded fast food wrappers. Their bond? Tender, fraught, homoerotic in a way that makes 1969 deeply uncomfortable—and the film knows it. It hovers over their intimacy like a censor, never naming it, but always framing it as other.
Women, of course, are either predators or props. Joe's flashbacks to past trauma reduce one woman to a panting sex doll and another to the source of his psychic unraveling. The only women in the present are rich, lonely, or high—there to be judged, screwed, or hallucinated. The idea of mutual pleasure or emotional equality is not just absent—it’s unimaginable. The only tenderness allowed here is between two broken men, and even that ends in silence and death.
The film’s strength is its grime. Director John Schlesinger shoots New York like a sewer lit by neon. The dream is over, capitalism is a joke, and everyone’s body is for sale—but only the male body gets a close-up, a character arc, and a bus ride to Florida. Women’s bodies? Just part of the collateral damage of male disillusionment.
By the time Joe finally sheds his cowboy persona and tries to become “normal,” it’s too late. Ratso is dying next to him, and the film doesn’t offer redemption, just resignation. The message? America is not a land of opportunity. It’s a meat grinder of masculine fantasies, and all the women are just stains on the upholstery.
3 out of 5 dead dreams on the sidewalk
(One for the cinematography. One for Hoffman’s tragic charisma. One for the queer subtext it’s too scared to admit is text. The rest got left in the abandoned apartment with Ratso’s crutches and the myth of straight salvation.)
