Happy Super Bowl Sunday! I got no connections to share between football and Midnight Cowboy. Too bad Dallas isn’t playing tonight; that might have made for a better transition. As it is, I just finished a report on Sigmund Freud’s Oedipus Complex, and that happens to be much more applicable to this week’s film than the football game most of us will indulge in shortly.

Freud became convinced that every one of us feels sexual attraction to our mothers and jealousy and hatred for our fathers between the ages of three and six. Gross. I’m not a super big advocate of this theory, but Freud believed that a child’s normal progression through this phase of life determined how he or she functioned and related to others as an adult. If a child never emerged from his or her Oedipal stage, he or she would likely suffer from a wide array of neuroses later in life.

While the protagonist in Midnight Cowboy, Joe Buck, doesn’t demonstrate a passion for his mother and hatred for his father, he definitely exhibits issues that probably stem from experiences he endured in his unstable childhood. The film briefly shows a young Joe being dropped off at his grandma’s house by two women, one of which presumably is his mother. Some reviewers of the film have suggested that the women in Joe’s family are prostitutes, but that is not completely clear in the film. If that is the case, though, Joe’s childhood was perhaps even more tenuous. Whatever the occupational status of Joe’s absent mother and promiscuous grandmother, the film makes sure that its viewers realize that Joe’s grandmother has involved the young boy in inappropriate sexual activities in which both she and her various beaus have participated. Adult Joe never hints that he thought these activities were wrong, but he does share with his new friend Ratso that he is still angry at his grandma for dying without preparing him for her loss. Clearly, then, Joe holds some love for his grandmother, even though she was a major contributor to Joe’s unbalanced adulthood.

Ratso and Joe attempting to survive the harsh world they live in.

Teenaged Joe is super sexual—the only images we see from this time of his life involve him and his girlfriend Annie making out at a drive-in movie and then being pursued and assaulted by a gang of boys about Joe’s age. Joe’s inability to protect both Annie and himself leads him to feel inadequate even though in his memory Annie repeatedly reassures him that he is the best and the only one she loves. Joe seems to not have dealt with Annie’s being committed to an asylum after the gang attack; and after Annie’s exit from his life, Joe seems to have never had a sexual relationship with a woman that didn’t involve the transfer of money.

As an adult, Joe leaves Texas, the locale of his troubled childhood, and heads to New York City to start over. He is naively optimistic that he will find great success there as a hustler, sleeping with rich women who will pay him for his services. Joe seems to think he is a modern Casanova—the only thing he excels at is having sex. It’s not much to base a life on, and Joe and Ratso find themselves cold and nearly starving to death as they discover one tortured soul after the next on Joe’s mission to establish his hustling reputation. During one such encounter with a possible expert pimp, the man tells Joe that he must be lonely because everyone he meets in the hustling business is desperately lonely. Joe denies this, but deep down he knows it’s true.

Joe in the middle of some self-reflection.

Joe fills the emptiness in his life with his relationship with Ratso—a non-romantic, non-sexual relationship. This is perhaps the most fulfilling and real relationship Joe has ever had. Ratso doesn’t need Joe to be sexy or theatrical; the two young men just need each other to survive the brutal world in which they live. (Spoiler alert!) The preeminence of this fraternal relationship becomes evident when Joe finally has his break as a hustler and chooses to abandon his new “career” and take Ratso to Florida and fulfill his dying wish. But Joe resorts to violence to get the money for the trip, and Ratso’s death upon reaching the Sunshine State leaves Joe alone again—possessing a new opportunity to start over (NOT as a hustler), but struggling with a familiar loneliness. Freud would have had a heyday with this film.

For Me Then…

I think Midnight Cowboy makes a couple of interesting points. First, the world is harsh. The only comfort Joe finds in the whole movie is the camaraderie he creates with Ratso, another person who just barely exists on the margins of society. Other than that, the world is cold, unfriendly, and unsympathetic. Second, the film shows the dangers of unrestrained sexuality. It can be argued that the film promotes the free love of the 1960s, but its psychologically maimed protagonist and depressing resolution point out the emptiness of using sex as a way to find meaning and purpose in one’s life. Sex isn’t the same thing as love. While Joe might think he’s the best lover the world has ever seen, he isn’t very familiar at all with the concept of love. For me, that’s the most tragic aspect of this film. For all its emphasis on the glories of sex and the supposed freedom of engaging in intimacy with whomever one desires, all the film can offer its viewers in the end is loneliness.