The Decoy Climax Urban Cowboy (1980)
The most striking structural fact about Urban Cowboy is that the film stages the bull-riding contest at beat 36 as if it is the climax — three weeks of training, the $5,000 jackpot, the ceremony, the Charlie Daniels Band — and then deliberately empties it in thirty seconds.b35 b36 Bud is announced as the winner; the band kicks in; Pam asks if he thinks Sissy left; Bud knows she did. "Shit! I wanted her to see this. That would have been perfect. Perfect." The trap snaps. The contest is won and instantly empty.
Every external marker of climax is on the contest
The film loads every conventional marker of a climax onto the rodeo contest. The institutional form: Sherwood announces it three weeks before the event, with a $5,000 jackpot, a 1-25 scoring system from each judge, top five to a short go-round, and the rules running "just like any rodeo right across this country."b23 b33 The training-arc form: Bud spends thirty minutes of screen time working with Sherwood's coach on style and form.b25 The ceremony form: an MC, a backstage area, contestants, an audience. The pageant form: the Charlie Daniels Band sits at the side of the stage and kicks in when Bud is announced. The fairness form: at the funeral Sissy revealed Sherwood has fired Wes from the bull-pit operator job for "hurtin' too many people," removing the corruption variable so the test is honest by the time of Wes's qualifying ride.b31 b34
If you walked into the picture at minute 110, you would say: this is the climax.
The film empties the contest in thirty seconds
The real climax is at beat 38: the apology at Sissy's trailer.b38 No music. No crowd. No jackpot. Sissy is packed for Mexico, Wes is back at Gilley's robbing the safe, and Bud has chased her down the parking lot and across town to say one thing: "I'm hard-headed, and I'm prideful. And I wanna apologize clear back to when I hit you the first time. I love you, Sissy." Sissy returns it. The post-midpoint approach is tested at the highest stakes the film offers and it holds (see The Trailer Apology).
The structural decision to load the contest with climactic markers and then refuse to let it be the climax is the film's central argument. The cowboy-as-costume reading would treat the contest as the destination — the trophy is what completes the cowboy. The cowboy-as-character reading treats the apology as the destination — the marriage repaired is what completes the cowboy. The film is willing to spend thirty minutes setting up the costume reading in order to make the audience feel the difference when it doesn't pay off.
"The moment the Charlie Daniels Band kicks in and Bud says 'I wanted her to see this' — that's where you realize the picture has been working you. The contest was a sleight of hand. The picture was always somewhere else." — Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com (1980)
The Pam scene is the contest's structural cancellation
Beat 37 is the bridge.b37 Pam — the wealthy mirror of the initial approach, the woman Bud has been trying to substitute for Sissy — admits she tore up Sissy's note and effectively releases Bud back to Sissy: "I'm a shit. But I'm not that big a shit. I have to tell you something. … you don't love me, Bud. And I don't really love you. Not like that. So you shouldn't let her get away." Pam performs the new approach for him. The structural contest — between the wealthy substitute and the actual marriage — is decided at the moment the wealthy substitute herself walks off the field.
The Pam scene is the contest's cancellation. Once Pam tells Bud the contest didn't matter to her, the contest doesn't matter to the film. The picture has already moved.
Other films do not stage a deliberate trap
The trap-candidate-climax structure is rare. Most films either land the climax where the marketing says they will (the bull-riding contest in the picture's poster art) or stage a single dramatic event that is unambiguously the climax. The deliberate empty-the-spectacle move requires a director who is willing to disappoint the audience's training in order to argue with it.
"Bridges is doing what Mike Nichols did at the end of The Graduate — using the wedding as a decoy and the bus ride home as the actual ending. Urban Cowboy uses the rodeo as a decoy and the trailer apology as the actual ending. The audience has to feel the deflation for the picture to land." — David Thomson, The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood (2004) (book, not available online)
The decision is what makes the picture more than a country-pop romance. Without the empty contest, the film would be exactly the cowboy-as-costume picture its surface looks like. With the empty contest, it is a film about the difference between two readings of the cowboy and the cost of confusing them.