Midnight Cowboy, Mental Illness and Homelessness
Kris Kristofferson, too.
I’m in Boulder, Colorado these days, and was here for the Boulder International Film Festival, which the organizers have nicknamed “BIFF,” but I don’t think that moniker will be adopted by the arts community in the way that, for example, MoMA has.
I mention this only as a segue for what I really want to discuss today, which is the link between certain alternative lifestyles and mental health. The film festival organizers hit a home run, in my estimation, with their decision to include a documentary about the now largely forgotten 1969 classic film, “Midnight Cowboy,” which starred Dustin Hoffman as a two-bit hustler named Ratso and, in a brilliant portrayal, Jon Voigt as the would-be male prostitute Joe Buck.
Most of you reading this were not alive in 1969, and many of you are so-o-o tired hearing about “the Sixties.” I can understand that. But here’s part of what the film festival promoters had to say about the documentary and, by implication, the original movie: “It is about the 1960s, a troubled era of cultural ferment, about cultural and social change, and about broken dreams and strivers, then and now [emphasis added].”
Most movies about historical epochs are junk, even worse than snooty but ultimately middle-brow TIME Magazine essays. There are almost no good movies to have come out the “the Sixties” or the early 1970s, but “Midnight Cowboy” is a mirror of the times. This was the era when “Make Love, Not War,” and “If it feels good, do it,” were the rallying cries of millions of Baby Boomers when they were in their twenties, but “Midnight Cowboy” took the zeitgeist of the times to its logical conclusion – anomie, being adrift, on your own, no direction home, to borrow a phrase from Bob Dylan, who profited handsomely from coming of age in the Sixties. Many people, such as Ratso and Joe Buck, just ended up as distressed human beings, their lives passing them by without them even knowing it, the detritus of a cultural and social revolution that was just a game for most people, but which they erroneously believed was truth.
I think of Ratso and Joe Buck every time I see a homeless encampment today. Here in Boulder, several dozen tents were set up in a bandshell before this very Progressive city essentially doused it. Still, there are homeless people along a once vibrant pedestrian mall here, and at many highway exit ramps, just like in big cities. But you’ve all seen pictures of what’s happening in San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, and Los Angeles – there are many people in their twenties (just as Ratso and Joe Buck were) whom I believe bought into the promise of a lifestyle that really doesn’t exist in any positive way, and maybe I should give some credit to Kris Kristofferson who wrote the words “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” No – this kind of freedom means you’ve lost everything.
It’s common now to speak of “unhoused persons” instead of the homeless, a nod to the fact that some people who’ve lost their jobs ultimately lost their homes or apartments, as well. Many observers and pundits point to drug addiction and mental illness as part of the massive homeless problem today, too. They are not all wrong – these factors would describe why many of the people we see on the streets are … on the streets, or “sleeping rough,” as they say in the United Kingdom. I’d add the assault on family and marriage as further contributing factors to homelessness, whether the source comes from a cruel job market that forces adult children to move from hometowns and their birth families to elsewhere after high school or college, and to the movie stars and intellectuals who think marriage is passe anyway.
But we cannot ignore what is so clearly at the core of why so many younger people are homeless, young people who haven’t even tried to live what once was viewed as a normal and healthy life, but which came to be denigrated as “bourgeois” and hence unworthy by intellectuals and writers who, in fact, usually were leading their own successful, bourgeois lives. The homeless I’m describing are people who went on the road searching for freedom, or meaning, some kind of Godhead, and they’ve been hit hard by reality. There is no Promised Land beyond their own lives, and no one cares if they find what they’re looking for or not.
Some people do follow a dream and start new tech companies and come to create great art, and perhaps a few do become contented mystics and meditators, but most people who hit the road and follow false scenarios will crash. They have crashed – just look at any homeless person under 30 or so today, most of whom are men, but not always.
There were only a couple or three good movies that captured “the Sixties.” I recommend finding “Midnight Cowboy,” obviously, but also “Two-Lane Blacktop” from 1971, a brilliantly understated road movie about two hustling drag racers who traverse the country challenging the locals to a race for money, plus “the girl” that they pick up hitchhiking outside some small town, and a middle-aged businessman who drops out of society and buys a fast car to nowhere himself. (Curiously, singer James Taylor had the lead role in the movie.) No one really knows where they’re headed in this movie, and the script brilliantly gives none of the characters in the movie a name – they are just “the driver” or “the mechanic” or “the girl,” Everyman in this particular subculture, all lost, all unhappy, all doomed.
So, a few moviemakers from this era saw what was happening to marginal people who fell for the Kris Kristofferson line, who knew that Ratso and Joe Buck were no antiheroes but just two souls who had been duped out of their humanity. Next time you see a highly disturbed homeless young person you can search for answers and solutions, but you cannot ignore just how damaging “the Sixties” were to so many people, including unto this day, or “then and now,” as noted above.
Before you go, be sure to check out my latest collection of short stories, “Don’t Go,” from the Stephen F. Austin State University Press (978-1-62288-929-7 Paperback), available from the publisher at https://www.tamupress.com/book/9781622889297/dont-go/ or from any online bookseller, or order through your local bookstore (they’ll appreciate the business).