Cruising (dir. William Friedkin, 1980) is a controversial film. It earns this label more through audience and critical reactions than through its content. Content-wise, it’s a bit muddled, which of course facilitates reactionary interpretations. Its depictions of gay-bashing and homophobia are as pulpily violent as its wordless scenes of semi-nude male bodies writhing in underground bars are pulpily seductive, and the picture it paints of gay life in early 1980’s New York is grim and seedy and dangerous. Released at a time when representations of homosexuality in the mainstream media were sparse and often negative, it inevitably generated backlash from gay rights groups who viewed the film as yet another exploitative depiction of a “lifestyle” in which sex is inextricably tied to violence and homoerotic urges are a mark of shame and depravity.
Given its polemical history, I was surprised to see Cruising in the Criterion Channel’s collection of “taboo-breaking” queer cinema for Pride Month. I guess it fits the description: a lot is shown that is considered “taboo” by contemporary cultural standards, although whether the taboos are broken or enforced by the film is a slippery question the answer to which changes based on the viewing context. Friedkin himself remarked that the movie was “never” an “anti-gay screed,” but rather a glimpse into the specific S&M subculture of the gay experience based on a real-life serial murder case from the era. And from a modern-day viewpoint, seeing the film within the context of all the other cinematic depictions of queer life that came after, the culture it depicts seems less monolithic.
The question of interpretation is complicated by the role of the police. Although the film is far from “copaganda” - the police fail to apprehend the killer, the killer is a police officer (in a last-minute reveal that sacrifices clear character motivation for shock value) - it positions the authorities as our window into the “regular” world. The opening scene, in which a beat cop delivers a Travis Bickle-style speech to his partner about cleaning up the filth from the streets, could go either way depending on whether or not you viewed Taxi Driver as a satire.
Al Pacino’s George Burns, an undercover officer looking to make detective, bridges the divide between the film’s two worlds; the “everyman,” in an acceptable heterosexual pairing, ostensibly more interested in doing his job than in “working over” potential suspects. The audience is made to identify with Burns, and the casting of a likeable star who served a similar narrative purpose in one of the era’s biggest successes, The Godfather, facilitates this kinship between viewer and protagonist.
However, Cruising’s subject matter is even more “taboo” than the Italian mafia, and the content dictates an inevitable lack of subtlety that can be ascribed more to a dearth of gay media representation than to the representation in this specific film. Club scenes, post-coital scenes, and murder scenes are often unaccompanied by score, and Friedkin allows action to unfold in long, silent takes that feel more voyeuristic than judgemental. The classical theme that plays when Burns is in bed with his girlfriend connotes propriety as well as stodginess.
The killer’s act of corrective penetration - stabbing to death the man he has just sexually dominated - is his indictment of his own behavior as well as his victim’s, a manifestation of self-hatred. Or it could be, anyway. Unlike in Psycho or Dressed to Kill, there is no psychologist to sweep in at the end and explain the murderer’s perverse motivations. As oversimplified and unsatisfying as the psychological explanation often is, the lack of such a convenient wrap-up leaves us with no prescribed point of view with which to agree or contend. But is it fair to expect a clear moral answer from a film simply because it deals with “controversial” subject matter? Does the filmmaker have a “responsibility” to lead the audience down the “right” path in their thinking? At a time when gay life was not in the public eye as it is today, media depictions such as Cruising were many people’s first and only foray into that world, and although it focuses on a small subculture, Burns ultimately does not restrict his violence to members of that subculture when he murders his neighbor, a gay man who does not participate in the “scene.” The film’s final twist is sticky because it traces this violence back to the authorities while acknowledging that elements of that same violence (the police costumes, the power dynamics) are also present in the subculture the authorities aim to attack. The film falls short of breaking the taboos it exposes, instead grimly reinforcing them.
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