Wes Hightower as Ex-Con Romantic Rival Urban Cowboy (1980)
Wes Hightower (Scott Glenn (in Urban Cowboy)) is the picture's antagonist and one of its most carefully built minor characters. He is structurally the doubled cautionary instance — the version of Bud who has fully committed to the cowboy-as-costume reading and has come out the other side as an ex-con, a wife-beater, and a thief. The film does not soften him or give him an audience-flirting register. He is the future Bud is trying not to become.
Wes is set up in a single scene
The mechanical bull's first scene at Gilley's introduces Wes in the same beat the bull is introduced.b9 Sherwood's "new play toy" is wheeled in; the MC calls Wes Hightower to demonstrate; Wes rides clean. Word filters through the room that Wes is on parole from the Texas prison rodeo program — out for the first time in years. The bull and the antagonist are introduced together because, structurally, they are the same object: the thing Bud has to learn to ride and the man who already does.
The film never separates them. Wes is in every bull-pit scene; Wes coaches Sissy on the bull; Wes operates the bull-pit until Sherwood fires him for "hurtin' too many people"; Wes's last scene before the wind-down is at the bull pit. Where the bull is, Wes is.
Wes is the future of the initial approach
The structural function of Wes is to show what cowboy-as-costume looks like at the bottom of the road. The initial approach is "be a real cowboy through control — own the woman, dominate the bar, use fights as the grammar of marriage." Wes has done all of it. He owns Sissy after the breakup; he hits her in their trailer; he uses the bull pit to gamble; he robs the Gilley's office safe. Every component of Bud's initial approach is in Wes in undiluted form.
The film stages the trailer-and-Wes scene as the structural mirror of the breakup punch.b28 Wes loses his temper; Wes hits Sissy. The same domestic violence that ended Bud's marriage now in a different trailer with a different couple. The film does not editorialize. Glenn plays it without escalation; the violence is part of the household.
"Jim wanted Wes to be the version of Bud that had run out of room. Not a villain, not a sneer — a man who's already made every mistake Bud is about to make. Scott understood that immediately. He played Wes as the future Bud is trying not to become." — James Bridges, American Film (1980)
The romantic-rival role is unusual
Most romantic-rival characters in 1980 mainstream pictures are written for the audience to dislike — they are too smooth, too rich, too smug. Wes is none of these. He is a hard man with a record who is good at the bull, fast with his hands, and willing to leave for Mexico with another man's wife. The film does not give the audience the easy register of "Sissy clearly should have stayed with Bud" because Wes is, on the bull and in some forms of attention, a more competent version of Bud than Bud is.
What disqualifies Wes is the same thing that almost disqualifies Bud: the violence. Wes hits Sissy; Bud hit Sissy at the breakup. The film's argument is not that Bud is good and Wes is bad; the film's argument is that Bud has the chance to apologize and Wes does not. Wes is what Bud becomes if Bud does not apologize.
The Wes plot's discharge in the wind-down
Beat 39 is the picture's wind-down — the fight with Wes in the back hallway and the safe robbery.b39 Bud finds Wes mid-robbery of the office safe with two accomplices, beats him as the staff swarm in. The wind-down validates the quadrant by physically separating the new-approach Bud from the doubled-cautionary Wes, and quietly confirms that Bud's cowboy-instinct — that something was off about Wes from the start — was right about the world even when it was wrong about Sissy.
The fight is the picture's only sustained physical violence in the third act. It is staged as wind-down, not climax: the marriage has already been re-secured at the trailer, and the Wes fight is the cleanup. Bud beating Wes in the back hallway is the picture's small concession to genre expectations — the romantic rival has to be physically defeated — but the picture's actual climax is twenty minutes earlier and is verbal.
Glenn's performance is what makes Wes work
Glenn's performance is what makes the structural function legible. He plays Wes hard, fast, unsentimental, and slightly tired. Wes is not enjoying being the antagonist; he is doing what he has always done. The role does not let Glenn perform menace; it asks him to perform competence and let the menace follow from the competence.
"Scott Glenn doesn't play Wes Hightower as a villain. He plays him as a guy who's run out of options and is doing the only things he knows how to do. That's why the character is dangerous. Pure villains aren't dangerous. Cornered men are." — Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com (1980)
The role was Glenn's first significant antagonist and is one of the cleanest examples of his character-actor register in the 1980s. The work he did on Wes is recognizably the same work he would do on Captain Mancuso ten years later in The Hunt for Red October — physical authority without performance — but in the antagonist register rather than the institutional one.