GAY
FILM REVIEWS BY MICHAEL D. KLEMM
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GAY
FILM REVIEWS BY MICHAEL D. KLEMM
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Cruising Warner Brothers Home Video, 1980
Director/ Screenplay: Starring: Rated R, 102 minutes
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The
Return Of Cruising
It's baaaack! Newly restored for its debut on DVD, it's time to revisit William Friedkin's Cruising (1980) - a movie with lots of baggage that still manages to polarize the gay community to this day. Is it really as bad as its reputation makes it out to be? Do a Google search and you will find opinions from all over the spectrum. The old guard has mellowed somewhat but, for the most part, still views it as an abomination, and younger writers are calling us a bunch of old farts as they wonder what all the fuss was about. I am going to assume that most of my readers have seen the film and, if not, are at least familiar with it. For those who haven't, there are spoilers ahead. THE
CONTROVERSY |
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It is well known that there was intense protesting during the filming. Vito Russo was one of the demonstrators and gives a full report in The Celluloid Closet. Queers were angry about this movie. It might have been different if positive portrayals of gay men and lesbians existed on the Hollywood screen or on television at this time but this was 1979. |
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All we wanted was some balance. One protester wrote, perhaps melodramatically, that "People will die because of this film." Another famously wrote that "Cruising wasn't a film about how we live, it was a film about how we should be killed." Demonstrators did everything they could to sabotage the filming. There was an unsuccessful attempt to get Friedkin's location permits in the Village revoked. When that didn't work, people honked horns and blasted stereos out of windows to interfere with the sound recording. Others sat on rooftops with large reflectors to disrupt the lighting. Regulars of the meat packing district's leather bars participated in the filming but several of the bars backed out when they saw the script. |
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The naysayers weren't wrong. Gay bashings did go up after Cruising hit the movie theaters in 1980. Screenwriter Ron Nyswaner, (Philadelphia, Soldier's Girl), reports in the HBO film of The Celluloid Closet that he and his boyfriend narrowly escaped being beaten by a group of college jocks who had just seen Cruising and told them that this was what they deserved. My partner, Andy, counseled gays at the college where he taught, and he got panicky calls from many young men asking if that is going to be what their lives would be - wondering if they would be killed or wind up as someone's bitch. Remember too that the S&M world is a lot more accepted and recognized now than it was then by gays and straights alike. FANNING
THE FLAMES FURTHER: |
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Speaking of The Exorcist, there is a rather creepy connection between it and Cruising that is revealed in the extras (and was reported in The Celluloid Closet as well). A hospital technician who appeared in one of the lab scenes of The Exorcist committed a series of gay murders a few years later. Friedkin's interview with the man in prison inspired him to make Cruising.
Friedkin must have "got" the protests to some extent because he inserted the line of dialogue about the S&M scene not being "the mainstream of gay life" and that it was "a world onto itself." For this, he is to be commended. He also inserted a disclaimer at the beginning of the film that stated that this was not meant to represent all gay life (this disclaimer, however, is curiously missing on the new DVD. Hmm....). Vito Russo called the disclaimer an "admission of guilt." That might be going too far but Friedkin certainly included it in the original release for a reason. He (or the studio's lawyers) must have realized that he had struck a nerve and had to take some responsibility for how his film would be misinterpreted by impressionable and homophobic moviegoers. |
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THE
FILM |
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 To
be quite frank, the film is a mess. Because we don't know the victims, there
is no suspense in any of the killings. When the film concentrates on the
cat and mouse game between Pacino and the killer in the third act, it loses
steam and often grinds to a halt. It is deliberately vague on many points
- a plus in foreign art films like L'Avventura or Blow-Up
but totally wrong for a police thriller. Friedkin suggests that there is
more than one killer, again fueling the flames that the gay lifestyle is
inheritantly violent. One of the most damning arguments to support this
is a series of subliminal shots - each lasting only a frame or two - of
gay pornography (close-ups of anal penetration to be exact) that flash on
the screen during the first murder scene - linking gay sex with the stabbing
of the knife. Cruising oozes
with queer self loathing. The killer tells each of his victims that "you
made me do that." The suspect that Pacino eventually pursues is a college
student who is writing a thesis on musical theatre and has an overbearing
father - all of the usual cliches. Pacino, too, has a dysfunctional relationship
with his father. Give Oedipus a rest. |
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 And
then we get to the implied premise that our lifestyle is not only violent
but contagious! Pacino is transformed by his exposure to the leather
world. We see this in his relationship with his girl friend, played by Karen
Allen. They are first seen together in bed making love gently while soft
chamber music plays on the stereo. The next time we see them together, he
is ramming her like a machine while he hears loud club music in his head.
Pacino grows more violent as the film goes on. Which brings us to the moment
that still angers many of us to this day: Spoiler alert! Skip the
next two paragraphs if you don't want to know how the film ends. |
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 Call
me an old queer who is stuck in the past, but the premise that Pacino could
become a leather killer himself from his exposure to the scene is
homophobic to the core. Is he a killer? Who knows, but why even suggest
it? In Friedkin's defense, he only implies this. The book that Cruising
was based on did, in fact, end with the cop turning into a killer himself.
Friedkin may have toned this ugly theme down, but he also added the leather
bars which did not appear in the book. I'm sorry, but even if his
intentions were good, they were certainly misguided and it doesn't
get him off the hook. (Is it a coincidence that Friedkin also directed The
Boys in the Band ten years earlier - that paean to queer self loathing
that many today regard as a gay minstrel show?) |
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And now? |
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But, after the hormones wear off, even this documentary look is suspect. It has been enhanced. By the sheer nature of this being a performance many of the patrons may have acted out more for the cameras (I can't remember ever seeing a man fellate a billyclub on Leather Night at the old Buddies) and there is also, of course, the punk rock music in the background that was not the music of those clubs back then - giving the scenes a much more sinister feel than if Donna Summer was playing. But as hot as these scenes are, one gets uncomfortable in the realization of how shocking these images would have been to the general public in 1980. Hell, during one of the long camera pans we see a man in a sling about to be fisted! Okay, it was a gutsy scene for 1980, but do you honestly think that these images engendered warm and fuzzy feelings about gays from the audiences who first saw Cruising? To them, this was a freak show just like the orgy scenes were in Bob Guccione's dreadful Caligula the year before. To top it off, Ronald Reagan had just been elected President. The country was shifting to the Right. And in another year we would start hearing about AIDS. |
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A note on the restored DVD: There are a few subtle differences between the film on the DVD and the one that played in movie theaters in 1980. There was no opening title in the original release; it began with a disclaimer that read: "This film is not intended as an indictment of the homosexual world. It is set in one small segment of that world which is not meant to be representative of the whole." This disclaimer is curiously missing now and a horizontal crawl of the film's title now slides by to reveal the opening shot. The scene where Al Pacino snorts poppers and dances is enhanced by a glow effect that lights up the entire bar as he inhales the drug. A review on DVDtalk.com claims that there is a short scene added near the end between the police and the killer's roommate but my memories can neither confirm or deny this.
More on William Friedkin:
Al Pacino also appears
in:
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It
begins with a severed arm found floating in the Hudson river, a harbinger
of the horror to come. Al Pacino plays a young cop named Steve Burns who
agrees to go undercover as bait to attract a serial killer who is targeting
the gay leather community. He is the same physical type as the victims.
As he descends into the Dante's Inferno of the NYC leather bars
- populated by hot, sweaty rough trade - he begins to realize that his
assignment is "changing" him. The part that still bothers 70s gay activists
to this day is the implication that Burns transforms into a queer killer
himself just from having been exposed to this "alien" lifestyle. 
Let's
revisit the 70s. Diane Keaton was stabbed to death in 1977's Looking
For Mr. Goodbar by a closeted man who she called a queer when he couldn't
get it up. In 1974, a killer in a dress was repeatedly shot over and over
by James Caan in Freebie and the Bean. 1976's Ode To Billy Joe
gave us the REAL reason why Billy Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahachee
bridge - he was queer. Hollywood had a "great" track record when it came
to portraying us onscreen. Cruising
was the last straw for my generation. They had good reason to protest
the movie and today's generation, who grew up with Will and Grace
and Ellen on television, seems to have a problem understanding
this.
The
DVD's extras are very informative, but one of the problems that I am having
is the way that everyone involved with the film is trying to present Cruising
as a misunderstood classic that was years ahead of its time. Hardly. I
am willing to concede that director Friedkin did not set out to deliberately
make a homophobic film. He repeatedly states, in the disc's documentaries
and commentary, that he just thought the gay leather scene would make
"an interesting backdrop" for a crime thriller. He shares anecdotes about
hanging out in the leather clubs, right down to arriving in the proper
attire for "Underwear Night," so that we will believe that he was just
one of the guys and wasn't out to be exploitative. But methinks
the director doth protest too much; he had to know that those scenes
would be shocking to the audiences of the time. This is the man who directed
The Exorcist for crying out loud! 
Friedkin
claims to understand why the protests happened but he never makes it clear
if he is finally figuring that out now or if he knew what he was
doing in 1979. It is also telling that not a single gay person was interviewed
for the DVD. Maybe the filmmakers think they have answered the controversy
by acknowledging the protests but their attempts at being politically
correct seem suspect when the gay viewpoint is conspicuously absent from
the disc. And what should we make of the fact that Al Pacino is nowhere
to be found in the extras either? 
This
analogy might be unfair because Griffith did, in fact, intentionally
portray the Ku Klux Klan as being the good guys in Birth of a Nation.
(It is one of the great tragedies of our filmic history that the milestone
silent film that invented most of our cinematic language is also remembered
for being one of the most racist films ever made.) Friedkin's film does
not, at any point, openly condemn the gay community or take the
side of the killer. It does a nice job, in fact, when portraying the police
as being homophobic. Two misogynist cops harass a pair of tranny leather
hookers in one of the opening scenes and it is pretty ugly. But this doesn't
mean the audience got the point. This attitude was par for the course
in cop films of the 70s (Joseph Wambaugh and The Choir Boys anyone?)
and audiences at the time would have probably laughed. And what is one
to make of that interrogation scene where the big muscular black cop,
wearing only a jock strap and a cowboy hat, comes in and bitch-slaps a
suspect? 
Okay,
there is some balance. We have the disclaimers. And we also have
this nice "normal" gay man named Ted who lives down the hall from Pacino
and admits that he is afraid to cruise. Pacino uses him to learn information
but also becomes his friend. When the wrong man is arrested, Pacino tells
his superior, played by Paul Sorvino, that he didn't sign on for this
so that they can arrest someone just because he is gay. There are
positive things in this film. It's just that there is so much emphasis
on the "sordid" details that these bits get lost in the shuffle.
Pacino
catches the killer. Or does he? Then Ted, the nice gay guy whom Pacino
befriended is found brutally murdered. We then see Pacino shaving and
his ambiguous stare into the mirror implies that he is the one
who killed Ted. Meanwhile, his girl friend tries on all of his leather
gear, emphasizing again the leather scene's seductive lure. Pacino stares
blankly at the mirror and the image dissolves to the Hudson River where
the severed arm was found in the opening. What are we supposed to think?
Movies
supposedly are entertainment and it is thus unfair to hold them responsible
for cultural mores. But it is a fact that much of what people believe
is derived from the movies and television. Bigots in 1980 who thought
that queers were degenerates watched Cruising
and had their worst fears confirmed. Young gay men who were just stepping
out of the closet, and were unsure of themselves, were terrified by what
they saw in Cruising. I didn't
see the film on its first release for that very reason. In order to deepen
my knowledge and understanding of our cinematic past, I first viewed it
on VHS in 1996 and thought it was a sloppy film. It was also painfully
obvious to me why this film would have been considered dangerous in 1980.
My reaction
to watching Cruising today
is very complicated. Again, I think it is a mess but I can enjoy parts
of it as a guilty pleasure - especially for the sequences filmed in the
leather clubs. Watching Michael Corleone in leather (and sniffing poppers)
is not without its humorous aspects. The scenes where Pacino misconstrues
hanky codes, or shows up wearing leather on "Precinct Night" (and is immediately
presumed to be a real cop) are both hilarious. And who can forget
that classic moment when Pacino asks the killer "Hips or lips?" Cruising,
for all its faults, is a great time capsule of the actual pre-AIDS leather
scene in all its rough and tumble glory. The men couldn't be hotter to
this queer writer who came of age in the 70s - hairy chests and moustaches
and muscles and leather vests, oh my! The image clarity compared to the
murky VHS tape I saw over ten years ago brings out every detail. Even
Pacino looks good as rough trade - despite that horrible 70s perm. These
scenes are great to watch because the men were not extras, they were the
actual patrons of the bars, giving it a nice documentary sheen when seen
today. 
Which
is why homosexuality being seen as a disease that can be caught is such
an offensive idea and this remains Cruising's
greatest transgression. I don't hate this film, but I don't think it is
a "misunderstood classic ahead of its time" either. It should be seen
by every student of queer cinema.