There should be a permanent moratorium on documentaries like Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy. Instead of burrowing deep into John Schlesinger’s Best Picture winner, the only X-rated film to do so, director Nancy Buirski uses it as a springboard to discuss the cultural and social upheaval that defined the late 1960s.
Is there any period from American history – maybe even world history – that has been rehashed this often? We do not need another talking head telling us about the Vietnam War’s impact on American culture, just like we do not need to hear “American Pie” juxtaposed with Jimi Hendrix’s interpretation of the national anthem – both of which happen here in the same scene. None of the film is illuminating, except for a handful of anecdotes, and so we are left with a constant, gnawing feeling rewatching Midnight Cowboy would be a far more rewarding experience. The only reason this film exists is to bring Schlesinger’s subtext to the surface, as if we are too thick to recognize what he was doing in the first place.
Buirski opens with an interview with Jon Voight, who starred as Joe Buck in the film, and his story about the film’s production is a great one (Hoffman does not provide any interviews, God bless him). Schlesinger was an English director with a background in documentary, and in a moment of self-doubt, he questioned the whole enterprise of following a gay hustler around New York City. Voight assures Schlesinger the film would be remembered as a masterpiece, something he could not really know at the time, but something Buirski accepts as a given. Her purpose is similar to Voight’s, implying we are like Schlesinger and Midnight Cowboy’s status has not already been secured. Did you know that the film was innovative for presenting a gritty, desanitized version of New York City? Well, in case you did not know or have forgotten, Buirski juxtaposes footage of Schlesinger’s film with b-roll of New York from the same era. She repeats the same technique with its portrayal of homosexuality, its unsavory characters, and so on. If this film were a college-level essay, the professor would say it relies too much on secondary research.
At one point, Buirski must have realized that her material was kind of thin. Her expansion of the film’s scope, a rehash of 1960s social change, pads out the material with zero fresh insight. There are some obvious images, like the ubiquitous shot of bombing Cambodia or Richard Nixon saying, “Sock it to me.” Many of the interviews, including Midnight Cowboy co-stars Bob Balaban and Jennifer Salt, use “we” to talk about that era’s protest movements, taking more credit than they deserve, a classic Baby Boomer affectation that somehow must still be tolerated. Now there is no reason this material cannot be handled in an insightful way: Mark Harris’ terrific book Pictures at a Revolution, for example, ably weaves Hollywood history from the late ‘60s onto the greater canvas of American culture from the same period. Buirski, on the other hand, approaches her film with the arrogance that can only come from the wrongheaded belief that she is first, or best. Not even Forrest Gump, the apotheosis of Boomer nostalgia-bait, could be less subtle.
Absent any insight and with ham-fisted direction, Desperate Souls, Dark City might have merely been a disposable film, the kind of fare that is diverting to casual film history fans. But what makes it borderline reprehensible is its lazy, vacuous attempt at provocation. Throughout the film, Buirski relies on ironic editing that was perhaps innovative in 1960s cinema, but implies an insult today. At the beginning and end of the film, she cuts between key scenes from Midnight Cowboy and wounded American soldiers in Vietnam, all while using the maudlin pop music soundtrack, a technique that Schlesinger already lifted from Mike Nichols and The Graduate. Not only is this imagery already deeply entrenched in the popular imagination, but once again, Buirski underlines and underlines and underlines a point that Midnight Cowboy already made, with significantly more artistry and significantly less contempt for the viewer.
At least this film offers the modest, unintentional assurance that soon we’ll have fewer Boomers on-hand to remind us how important they were. And if we can keep Ian Mackaye from appearing in yet another documentary about punk rock, maybe the pop culture documentary can advance in form, instead of retreading into the tediously familiar.
Photo courtesy of Zeitgeist Films/Kino Lorber
The post Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy appeared first on Spectrum Culture.