The Travolta/Cage Project #13 Urban Cowboy (1980)
One of the weirdest, most strangely satisfying elements of the Travolta/Cage Project so far has been the borderline uncanny ways the Nicolas Cage and John Travolta movies we’ve covered overlap. The unexpected synchronicity continues with the movies we’ll be discussing for the latest episode of the Travolta/Cage podcast: 1986 Canadian historical racing drama/early Cage vehicle The Boy in Blue and Travolta’s zeitgeist-capturing 1980 hit Urban Cowboy.
Both films find their stars at the height of their youthful beauty and overpowering sexual magnetism playing rugged young men who make their names with their bodies and sweaty physicality rather than their minds. AND both movies focus on sports so obscure that my brain stubbornly refuses to acknowledge that they’re real sports; sculling in the case of The Boy in Blue and competitive mechanical bull-riding with Urban Cowboy.
Urban Cowboy is very deliberately cut from the same cloth as 1978’s Saturday Night Fever, with the simultaneously exciting and depressing world of country music and a massive country and western complex called Gilley’s taking the place of discos and Texas filling in for New York.
Like Saturday Night Fever, Urban Cowboy was both an unexpected box office hit and a fascinating sociological exploration of a very specific American subculture, in this case the Honky Tonks of Texas and the cowboys and cowgirls that flock to them each night to drink, try to get laid, listen to music, start fights and kill some of the inexorable pain of a working man’s hardscrabble existence.
Just as audiences looked at the parade of misery, sexual assault, drug abuse and free-floating suicidal despair that defines the lives of the no-hopers in Saturday Night Fever and desperately wanted to be part of that world, moviegoers fell in love with Honky Tonks and country music and the cowboy mindset despite writer-director James Bridges (The China Syndrome) portraying Honky Tonks as sad places for alcoholics, wife-beaters, ex-convicts and other assorted lowlifes to get fucked up, start fights and maybe break a leg on the mechanical bull.
Also like Saturday Night Fever, Urban Cowboy was inspired by a magazine article, in this case about the tumultuous love affair between two spirited patrons of Gilley’s; unlike Saturday Night Fever, the story that led to Urban Cowboy is rooted in reality rather than its writer’s fevered, frenzied imagination.
Travolta’s challenging role in Urban Cowboy fits snugly into his early sweet spot playing sexy assholes who are also sexy morons, studs who are so nice to look and move with such ease and grace that it’s easy to ignore how terrible they are in seemingly every other way. Travolta stars as Bud, a small town bumpkin who comes to the big city looking to make enough money working in an oil refinery to be able to buy a nice piece of land back home.
At a hillbilly heaven called Gilley’s, Bud falls into a deep, instant state of lust with Sissy (Debra Winger) possibly because she is the only human being in a hundred mile radius as attractive as he is. The sexual chemistry between the characters as well as the actors is explosive, volcanic, iconic.
I’ve never seen An Officer and a Gentleman or Terms of Endearment. Why would I? They’re culturally important films of quality and prestige that got great reviews and won awards. Why would I ever choose to waste my time on such nonsense when Neil Breen has made MANY films I have not seen yet?
So Urban Cowboy was my glorious introduction to the wonder that is Debra Winger in her radiant prime. “Sexy” doesn’t do justice to the heat and sensuality Winger brings to the role. In her skin-tight blue jeans and midriff-baring shirt, Winger is the most scorchingly sexy screen siren this side of Maggie Cheung in In the Mood for Love but there’s tremendous depth and sadness as well as overpowering carnality to her star-making performance here.
Winger plays Sissy as a feisty, spirited modern woman who knows what she wants and goes after it, whether that means having a go at the mechanical bull at Gilley’s after Bud forbids her from doing so or satiating her sexual hunger for Wes Hightower (Scott Glenn), a broodingly sexy sociopath she can’t resist.
Yet Sissy is also unmistakably a product of her time and place. She’s a Southerner conditioned by society and the awful, brutish men in her life to see her role as fundamentally submissive. Sissy may be smarter, and more capable than Bud. Hell, she’s probably even a better mechanical bull rider than her handsome, piece of shit husband but the deeply insecure Bud, a tragic exemplar of toxic masculinity at its most fragile, can’t stand the idea of any woman, let alone his woman, upstaging him so he tries to keep her in a tiny little box where he thinks he can control her.
In Bud’s mind Sissy’s existential duty is to bring him a beer first thing in the morning and when he comes back from work, to have the trailer where they live spotless when he gets home with dinner on the table and, of course, to be ready for sex whenever he wants it.
In our world Bud is a knuckle-dragging neanderthal whose conception of gender roles is stuck somewhere in the early 1950s but in the film’s gritty, grubby yet weirdly seductive universe Bud is what’s known as a cowboy, a brash man-child who drinks too much, is perpetually up for a fistfight, works with his hands, listens to country music and, with horrifying frequency, engages in domestic abuse when drunk or angry or jealous.
A force of nature like Sissy should have all the opportunities in the world. In 1980 Texas, however, her options are bad (Bud) and much, much worse (Wes). There’s a horrifying moment late in the film when Wes hits Sissy and then forces her to make him dinner. It’s not enough for him to be physically abusive. No, he has to prove to her and to himself that he can control her in other ways as well.
Like Saturday Night Fever, Urban Cowboy is an incredibly grim look at men abusing the women in their lives in a desperate, failed attempt to feel less powerless and vulnerable in a society that sees them as disposable, easily replaceable drones with an understandable, if wildly incorrect reputation as a fun, sexy movie about a music-based subculture audiences fell in love with.
Re-watching Urban Cowboy four decades after its release it feels like it’s simultaneously a very 1970s character study rooted in a nuanced, sophisticated understanding of a segment of American life that had been all but invisible on film up until that point and a commercial 1980s movie about two explosively sexy movie stars and the exciting world of competitive mechanical bull riding.
I half-remembered Urban Cowboy being about contemporary cowboys, country music and looking for love in all the wrong places. It’s about all of those things, of course, as well as the desperate need to blot out the otherwise unbearable pain of existence through any means necessary but it’s also about mechanical bull riding to a surprising and self-defeating degree.
Saturday Night Fever had the good sense to know that its climactic dance contest was important only for what it revealed about its protagonist and the world that he inhabited. It mattered exclusively because it gave Tony a moment of clarity where he realized, much to his horror, that the narrow little nighttime world he rules as the king of a shitty disco is even more racist than even he, an avowed racist and user of epithets, can handle.
Urban Cowboy, on the other hand, devotes way too much of its way too generous 132 minute runtime to mechanical bull riding and that dumb final contest where Bud will finally prove himself as a man or some other macho bullshit.
If Urban Cowboy was devoted a two-step contest or country line dancing it would have invited withering compassions to Saturday Night Fever, of course, but it’s such an all-consuming joy to watch a young John Travolta move that I would not have minded a bit.
Urban Cowboy is a raucous and soulful country musical with a pedal-steel soul that deludes itself into thinking that it’s a sports movie. It turns out I am not the only person who wanted more music and less of everything involving that mechanical bull because in 2003 someone had the bright idea of turning this realistic exploration of the bottomless rage and habitual violence of repressed heterosexual men into a fabulously unsuccessful Broadway musical featuring new and classic country tunes that ran a mere 60 performances.
Undiscouraged, in 2015 Hustle & Flow and Dolemite Is My Name director Craig Brewer directed the pilot for an Urban Cowboy television show that was not picked up despite Brewer’s sweaty, sensual style being a perfect fit for the material.
Country music is so much bigger now than it was forty years ago, due in part to the new audiences Urban Cowboy helped bring in but the multiple unsuccessful attempts to recreate the magic first in the form of a flashy Broadway show and then with a TV spin-off illustrates that it is perhaps a fatal mistake to separate Urban Cowboy from the very specific cultural moment that created it.
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