Midnight Cowboy Essay

1380 Words3 Pages

In the film Midnight Cowboy, audiences are treated to the very different Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) and Joe Buck (John Voight) trying to survive in New York City with the hope of making it big. Despite their differing circumstances, both share tragic pasts and a hope for the future which is accessible to the audience throughout the film by various editing techniques, such as use of non-simultaneous and bridging dialogue, flashbacks, musical score, expository dialogue, and montage sequences. Joe and Rizzo have very different pasts which are revealed through these editing and sound techniques, yet despite their roles as foils for each other within the film, they both look to the same future and bright ideal of the American dream, symbolizing …show more content…

These flashbacks happen throughout the film, but the first happens in the beginning on the bus. Anne’s voice acts as a voiceover to a montage of shots which show her and Joe together, happy in a relationship, and the words “you’re the only one Joe,” are repeated. These few flashbacks, all within the first ten minutes of the movie, tell the viewer several things. Joe is very attached to his grandmother, she was inattentive, or at least less present, when she found a new lover, and he believes her when she says he is the best looking. This fuels Joe’s own self-image of a man attractive to older women, and is his reasoning behind chasing them in New York. Anne’s flashbacks are our real hints at the deep and scarring event which truly shaped Joe’s past and his obsession with sex. When Joe’s trauma is revealed, it’s already fifty minutes into the film. We’ve seen him struggle to get by and meet Rizzo, his future friend. The movie fades to black and takes us into an implied dream sequence. This sequence is intense and fast, and what starts as a good dream fades to black and white. The dream cuts between Joe’s grandmother and, what we finally learn, is Joe and his girlfriend Anne’s gang rape at the hands of a large group of men. This overlay of images is disturbing and emphasizes the twisted relationship Joe has with sex and

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