And yet both the X rating and the best picture win tell us something about Midnight Cowboy as a watershed moment in the culture, marking a transitional period where Hollywood was responding to radical social change, but not quite keeping up the pace. It would be tempting, for example, to draw a connection between the film’s release and the Stonewall riots a month later, but it would be revisionist history to think about Midnight Cowboy as the gay rights movement gone mainstream. To the extent that Joe Buck, the film’s faux-cowboy hustler, opens himself up to trade with other men, it’s tied to desperation and shame, not the pursuit of latent desire. If he had wanted to have sex with men, the film might have kept its X.
At the same time, Midnight Cowboy is an extraordinary document of its era, as if it were the bridge to New Hollywood – accessible and sentimental in many respects, but constantly pushing the audience to accept new techniques and look to the margins of American life. Director John Schlesinger, a gay British film-maker, would push further still two years later with Sunday Bloody Sunday, a thornier and more explicit drama about sexual fluidity, but he had a keen sense of how adventurous viewers were willing to get and how far he could extend their sympathies. He made a film that could both win an Oscar and see the future that was coming around the corner. [...]
Midnight Cowboy is a fine character study of a lonely man who can’t escape the echoes of his past and even finer buddy drama about two strangers who huddle together in their unlighted corner of the world. But what really stands out in 2019 is the film’s sympathy for the marginalized, those invisible people who have no presence in the Hollywood of today, much less any political representation. Poverty is usually something to be delivered from, not something that deepens and consumes as it does here. The sad joke of Midnight Cowboy is that Joe loses money at his intended profession, lending cab money to his first trick, dropping $20 to Ratso’s scam, and getting stiffed on a movie theater blowjob before benefiting from the small mercy of a socialite opening up her wallet.
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