Midnight Cowboy (1969)

Not every movie can age well. Midnight Cowboy has not aged well.

What does this mean? You might think I am saying that there may have been some quality in Midnight Cowboy which was originally present, but which has not survived down to the present day.

What I actually mean is that Midnight Cowboy is a bad film. The only aesthetic criteria I can possibly have are my own, i.e. those articulated and determined by (or against) the contemporary background. A film which has "aged well" is an old film that is good. This can be the only possible meaning of these words. We would never say of an out-of-print, unreadable 18th-C epistolary novel that is has "not aged well, *but*...." There is simply no "but"--a film that has aged well is a film that appears good to our standards. What has changed, of course, is not the film itself, but these standards. What we mean to say, then, is not that the film has aged well or poorly, but that we do or do not regard a film as being good (against a background of our previous ratings of said film).

I for one cannot imagine a more interesting question than why and in what ways these criteria change. But that is for another blog. I should just say here that what you remember about Midnight Cowboy--the great acting, the handful of quotable scenes, Jon Voight's endearing stupidity, how gross and intimidating New York can be--that stuff is all there, and it's all enjoyable. What you don't recall--the plot--is simply absent. 

You may also have forgotten the cryptic and intrusive psychological flashbacks that attempt to give a "key" to understanding Voight's psyche, but without any payoff or weight. Or how the soundtrack plays the same song into the ground for the whole running time. Or how little significance (socio-historical, moral, plotwise) Rizzo's death has aside from conveniently getting Joe out of NYC. 

What we learn about 1969 from this film will likely be analogous to what future generations will learn about *us* when they re-watch Crash in thirty-five years. For a "boundary-pushing" sixties film with a famous soundtrack and starring Dustin Hoffman, you would do better to watch the also-overrated The Graduate.