Closing the (heterosexual) frontier: Midnight Cowboy as national allegory

John Schlesinger's 1969 Hollywood film Midnight Cowboy allegorically regist ers and articulates three of the film's broad historical contexts. In deter ritorializing the figure of the cowboy, the film narrative allegorizes, sim ultaneously, the crisis of U. S. imperial nationalism produced by the war i n Vietnam; an emerging gay liberation movement's challenge to traditional f orms of heterosexual - and national - masculinity; and the moment of global capitalist crisis and restructuring which severely threatened U. S. contro l of the world economy. Ultimately,the film dialectically, allegorically "m aps" the complex relation between these distinct, contemporaneous historica l developments in a way that poses fundamental questions about the heterono rmativity of traditional Marxian models of totality.