The Mechanical Bull Urban Cowboy (1980)
The mechanical bucking machine at Gilley's is the structural object the entire picture bends around. It is delivered to the bar at beat 9 — Sherwood Cryer's "new play toy" — and from that scene forward, the marriage and the bull are tied together. Bud commits to the project of riding it; Sissy commits to the project of riding it too; the marriage breaks on the question of who can ride it; the rodeo contest is its institutional form; and the climactic apology is the moment the bull is finally let go ("Shit, you can ride that bull anytime" / "I don't wanna ride it!").b9 b10 b18 b38
The bull existed before the picture and went viral after it
The bucking machine itself was real and pre-existed the film. Sherwood Cryer's mechanical bulls — built by an El Paso machine shop that had been making rodeo training gear since the early 1970s — had been at Gilley's for several years before the Esquire article. They were used by actual rodeo riders to train between events. Aaron Latham described them in his 1978 piece as the centerpiece of a particular Houston-area subculture; Bridges and Latham then made them the centerpiece of the picture.
"The mechanical bull was at Gilley's because real cowboys trained on it. The picture didn't invent the bull. The picture told the world the bull existed." — Aaron Latham, Texas Monthly (2018)
After June 6, 1980, every honky-tonk in America wanted a mechanical bull. The El Paso shop went on order-backlog for two years. Suburban bars in Cincinnati and Long Island installed bulls. The fad peaked in late 1981 and tapered off by 1983, but the bull as an artifact of American kitsch persisted for decades.
The bull is the marriage in miniature
The film's structural argument is that the bull functions, on screen, as the marriage in miniature. Bud rides the bull and Sissy meets him after with "I love you so much, Bud. You looked so great up on that bull."b10 Sissy declares she wants to ride too. Bud teases and deflects.b11 Sissy practices in secret with Jessie.b16 When she rides it publicly Bud explodes — "I'm the next best thing — your husband. You ain't never riding it, ever!" — and hits her.b17 b18 The fight, in full, is about the bull. It is also, in full, about the marriage. The picture's two-paths reasoning makes this explicit: every confrontation about the bull is a confrontation about whether the marriage is owned or shared.
The signature directorial decision is to keep that doubling visible without ever speaking it. Bud never says "the bull is our marriage." The film never says it. The audience is asked to feel it. The breakup punch lands where it does because the audience has watched twenty minutes of bull rides build into a single fight.
"The mechanical bull in Urban Cowboy is one of the great American film metaphors of the 1980s. It is sex, it is competition, it is masculinity, it is the marriage. The film is willing to let it be all four at once and not adjudicate." — Vincent Canby, The New York Times (1980)
Sissy's transgression is what makes the picture move
The structural function of Sissy riding the bull is that it is a transgression in the world of the picture. Gilley's culture, in 1979, did not put women on the bull. The bull-pit operators — Wes is one — were men, the riders were men, the audience was nominally mixed but the cheering was male. Sissy's first ride is greeted by the MC with "Girl on the bull!" — the line announces what is structurally true: this is irregular.
Sissy is good at it. The film's most dangerous fact is that she is better than Bud — "I think you're jealous cos I ride it better." This is the line that triggers the breakup punch.b18 The bull, in the film's argument, is the place where Bud's mastery is supposed to live and where Sissy keeps proving him wrong. The marriage cannot survive that mastery being hers.
Debra Winger (in Urban Cowboy) rode the bull herself in most of her shots. The decision was load-bearing: if Sissy's rides had been a stunt double, the breakup punch would not work, because the audience would not believe the threat to Bud's reading of himself.
Travolta's training was a year long
John Travolta (in Urban Cowboy) set up a borrowed mechanical bull at his Santa Barbara ranch and trained on it for months before the shoot. Most of Bud's bull-pit shots are him. The training was the same training the rodeo riders did between events; Travolta has spoken about it in subsequent interviews as among the most physically demanding work of his career.
"I had the bull for five or six months at my place. I rode it every day. I knew what every bolt did. By the time we shot, I could ride it as well as the rodeo guys." — John Travolta, Texas Monthly (2018)
The contest is a trap candidate built around the bull
The third act stages the bull-riding contest as the climax candidate (see The Decoy Climax). The film loads three weeks of training, a $5,000 jackpot, the Charlie Daniels Band, the ceremony, and the announcement onto the contest, and then empties it in thirty seconds — Bud wins, Sissy is gone, the win is hollow. The bull's structural function reverses in the third act: the object the marriage broke on becomes the object Bud has to put down before the marriage can be repaired. By the trailer apology Bud is still trying to give Sissy the bull ("Shit, you can ride that bull anytime"); Sissy has to refuse it ("I don't wanna ride it!") for the film to end.