John Voight as Joe Buck from Midnight Cowboy (1969)
The list of words I use to summarize my vantage has not changed much over the years. Writer, dreamer, gamer, roleplayer — I have been each of these things for long enough to dissolve the need for revision; these are the inroads to a connection with me (if a connection with me is what you’re after), and they provide the context to understand almost everything I say, so when I have to biographize myself (in a profile, for instance), these are the words I use.
I was wearing my writer-roleplayer hat as I watched Midnight Cowboy’s opening salvo: a young fella in a cowboy hat, getting ready (for something – for what? that’s the hook). He polishes not just his image but his entire appearance – mannerisms, voice; the mirror makes him a spectator, and the camera situates us similarly: to watch/judge him watching/judging himself. It’s a visual representation of the feeling I get when I’m slipping into character, running through dialogue options in my head, picturing this character as an entity in space. I am not objectively the character I write or play, and yet they would not exist without me, so I am not entirely not-them either.
The initial curiosity sparked by this image, a question which will persist until the end of the film and will, in fact, outlast it: is this authenticity or performance? Has he crafted this image in an expression of self or is it a costume, symbolic of the validation he hopes to extract from others? It’s a question that haunts me, too — the writer, the roleplayer, the person navigating a world where identity and survival seem inextricably linked to the act of being seen.
I was raised in Texas, so the red thread of Joe’s fate linked us across the space of possibility that manifests between fiction and audience. He moves through a place that is familiar to him and feels familiar to me, announcing his intention to commodify himself in New York as a cowboy, an archetype organic to his environment, and earn his living as a prostitute.
I spent a portion of my childhood in a town like that, where everyone knew everyone else, and where any impulse to perform would be quickly eroded by the absurdity of such an action; when you stay in the same place all your life, among the same people, they know when you’re putting on a show. But the skepticism these people express doesn’t sway him — shortly after the film starts, he is on a bus heading north.
As Joe transitions from a familiar, local setting to the hostile and indifferent world of New York, the question of authenticity or performance muddies.
A native New Yorker once asked me if Texans really wore cowboy hats, and the answer is yes, sometimes — but always, if they’re performing Texan. The cowboy hat is to the template of Texan the way independence is to the template of Texas. In Texas, the persona Joe adopts might have reflected a degree of authenticity, but to a New York audience, it functions purely as a signal, a means to be seen. The city refuses to validate him; it’s too sharp-edged, too knowing. He flails and fumbles in his initial attempts to impress people with this caricature. The people who see through his act reject him outright; those who believe it’s authentic are put off once they realize it’s a performance. This is where Joe’s existential crisis begins: the cowboy doesn’t work in New York, but he clings to it anyway; costume becomes disguise.
Contrast this with Rico: a New Yorker who, ostensibly, performs – he lies, cheats, hustles to survive. But despite this obvious performative angle, there is no artifice here; he has not built a character for the purpose of external validation (he has not successfully built a character at all). Rico is both congruent and incongruous; he – like Joe – is an organic byproduct of a specific environment, and while he too expresses a far-fetched desire to leave, the fantasy he has constructed around it — to move from bleak, filthy New York to bright, sunny Florida — feels less like an escape from himself and more like a rejection of what New York symbolizes.
Rico never wants to be someone other than himself, he just wants to be himself somewhere else.
Before the homogenous world of the internet (by which I, like most people who talk about the internet, mostly mean social media), where almost every place you visit is crafted using the same stylistic standards, and the difference in one page’s appearance over another boils down to their choice of template, there was a place called Geocities. But Geocities wasn’t a place in itself; despite its name, it was not much like a city, not a location on the internet’s map, but something like an interstate — a path by which one might arrive at several other, actual places, each with their own zip code.
I had a Geocities page. It was a fansite to a game called Soul Reaver, where a jawless vampire betrayed by his kin awakens from a purgatorial sleep into a broken world and must traverse that hellish landscape on a quest for vengeance. The game was released in 1999. I became obsessed with it for two reasons (beyond the overarching single reason, which was that it was a compelling piece of fiction to my adolescent sensibilities, a dark and vaguely Lovecraftian horror-fantasy with interesting dialogue and an aesthetic more literary than Mario Brothers): 1) because it was forbidden – a borrowed thing that would have been unapproved-of in my house, a game I played in the middle of the night, looking over my shoulder, with the volume down low trying not to wake my mother; and 2) because my computer crashed and I never got to finish playing it.
The Geocities page was indicative of a neutral-to-bad habit I have never been able to break: the burning desire to immortalize, to pay homage to fictions that took root in me, that excavated my psyche and built strange houses there. When I love a story, I can never seem to leave it alone. As a child, this meant filling notebooks – bestiaries of fictional monsters from Dragon Quest and Super Mario Brothers; drawings of the tornadoes that tore through my dreams; a Dragonball Z story with violet dragon balls and an ouroboroic she-dragon that encircled a dying planet in search of its saviour. As an adolescent, it meant spending hours learning HTML and CSS so I could customize a little corner of the web – sites that were a lot like the notebooks I filled, but that were (at least in theory) visible to the world.
To a modern user of the internet, Geocities would look like a shantytown – unpolished and bright, garish and loud, ugly and absurd. We asked and answered all the same questions that the modern internet demands answers to – who are you, what is your quest? – but our answers were more abstract.
Rico might be Geocities – a simpler, scrappier version of connection-with-others; a character whose way of life works in the margins but can’t hold up under the demands of a modern world; authentic in a way that is simultaneously endearing and pathetic – threadbare and outdated, absurd in the way real life always is. In a commercialized world, Joe fails initially but not entirely; Rico fails entirely. Rico’s version of authenticity is a great idea until it hits the marketing department, where it dies the same quick death as everything else that just won’t sell.
I’d been considering my exit from social media for several years before I actually did it. Before the tech cleanse was a sanctioned thing, I languished over the same list of questions everyone inevitably does when they hover their cursor over the hard-to-locate delete function on any given platform – how will I keep track of the 5/500 people I actually care about? will I ever talk to [person] again? – and had deactivated for extended periods, but never pursued deletion.
What sealed it for me was when a person I rarely spoke to sent me a caustic DM demanding to know why I didn’t post about an outrageous thing that everyone was posting about. We were not friends; if we were, she would have known how I came and went from that space, often avoiding it for weeks or months at a time. I did not even realize that she read my posts often enough to care, but she cared enough to spot an inadequate performance, and that was enough.
I once worked at a job where we were all supposed to wear the same color to the office on any given day, but instead of formalizing this, the manager would just mention it to one person, assume it made the rounds, and then berate everyone who didn’t get the nonexistent memo. This felt a lot like that.
But it also took me further back: to the early days of Myspace, where — like most adolescents online in those years — my friends and I would engage in a sort of performance art with our Top 8 friends, rearranging the digital hierarchy in ways that amplified petty feuds, dramatized love triangles, destabilized friendships. Two decades later, I still remember laying awake in bed one night, anxious and hurt, after a recent crush moved me from the first slot to the second. But to disengage from this process at the time was nigh impossible; the thesis purported by these social spaces was one we had collectively chosen to accept wholesale: that validation is necessary, and it requires performance.
It’s painful to watch Joe confront this idea again and again, in various shapes and contexts: that external validation is both vital and inherently performative, but that the tension between performance and authenticity is jagged, difficult to hold without injury. To perform is a trap; to refuse to perform is also a trap. In almost every sense, the social contract of the modern internet reflects this same awful dichotomy — be yourself, but not too much; don’t be fake, but don’t tell the truth; use the right terms even if you don’t mean them; pick a side and fly its flag so everyone knows how best to insult you.
I should clarify, though: despite my disdain for social media, I am not handwaving the notion of performance-as-survival; if writers are salaried liars (and roleplayers do it for free), then I threw my lot in with the theater kids a long time ago. It was not really possible (to my knowledge) to make a living on the internet in the days of Geocities; most of our aspirations were so much smaller, the stakes so much lower. People need money to survive, and branding – the alchemy that transmutes authenticity to performance – is a valid way to make a living; the people who make their living this way defend it, the commodification of the self, because even if it is always more artificial than organic, we are all still just trying to survive.
In this metaphor, I suppose there are two ways to view the relationship between Joe and Rico.
One way — the way many people seem to view it — is that their partnership is a beautiful, if troubled, thing that emerges from a hopeless, hostile place. New York, a place steeped in commerce and artifice, nevertheless nurtures something real between these two men; Rico becomes the unlikely key to a locked door that empowers Joe to reject his own shallow brand and seek something richer and more real.
Alternatively: that Joe and Rico’s relationship was damned from the start; that Rico’s survival was illusory, a negative contrast that slants tragic to remind us that whatever passes for progress will swallow every authentic thing in the end, bones and all.
There is a void that opens up when you remove yourself from social media — like turning off a white noise machine and being plunged into silence, peaceful or terrifying or something in between.
The ambiguous question the film’s ending refuses to answer: is Joe discarding the cowboy persona because he’s found something real beneath it? Or is he — as alone in the end as he was in the beginning — just a man on a bus taking a one-way trip towards another person’s fantasy?
On one hand, they say we’re social creatures. That we’re supposed to want to perform, to be validated, to be accepted by others. But Rico didn’t seem to think so; he was a hustler because he had to be, but he was as real and as garish as a Legacy of Kain fanpage on Geocities in the year 2002.
It’s hard not to feel like a tragic character when the world around you becomes unrecognizable. People will caution you against nostalgia, call you old-fashioned, outdated; it will gnaw at you, this insecurity.
In what initially felt like an act of survival, I rejoined Twitter at the beginning of the year. But I’ve been gone too long, and that particular costume no longer fits.