CRUISING RECONSIDERED

That he fails to resolve it satisfactorily – Friedkin throws the audience off with the discovery of yet another murder that may implicate Pacino’s deep undercover cop, Steve Burns – further exposes the film’s lack of thematic focus. Combine this with the half-assed police procedural – via Gerald Walker’s novel, but reconfigured by the on-duty peregrinations of NYC Detective Randy Jurgensen – that provided Friedkin an excuse to examine a socially aberrant subculture that clearly fascinated him, and Cruising should be as easy to dismiss today as it was in 1980. But there’s a roiling, unsettling texture to the film that cannot be denied; it may be fatally flawed (Friedkin admitted to me that the dual father-son conflict which besets both Burns and the serial killer, Stuart Richards, is a Freudian non-starter), and it may play up the kinds of homosexual stereotypes that plagued the community for years (e.g. the running "Blue Oyster" gag in the Police Academy movies wouldn’t exist without Cruising), but there’s something genuinely compelling about this movie. One doesn’t need to like Cruising to take it seriously as an absorbing piece of cinema. Accounting for why it’s absorbing, however, ain’t exactly easy.

Friedkin was three years removed from the most exhausting filmmaking experience of his life, Sorcerer (a superb remake of Wages of Fear that’s also on tap for a DVD reissue), when he took on Cruising. After the agreeably entertaining caper flick, The Brink’s Job, Friedkin the provocateur was ready to plunge mainstream audiences into a heretofore unseen world of leather, whips, chains and amyl nitrate-fueled hook-ups. To best achieve this immersion, he received permission to shoot in many of New York City’s most notorious S&M bars, which bore ominous monikers like The Mine Shaft or Ramrod. And when it came to capturing what went on in these sweaty, dimly lit establishments, he didn’t flinch; indeed, Friedkin and cinematographer James Contner depict happenings like "Precinct Night" in all their nightstick fellating glory.

The problem with Cruising is that there’s only one seemingly sane gay character fluttering around the outskirts of this world, and he’s not only insubstantial but completely abandoned once Burns begins to make headway into his hunt for the killer. Though it does at first feel like the character of struggling playwright Ted (Don Scardino) has wandered in from a more honest dramatization of post-Stonewall gay Manhattan, he’s also the audience’s best chance to perhaps understand the allure of the leather clubs and, most crucially, get to know Burns, who remains closed off to his girlfriend (Karen Allen) and superior officer/mentor (Paul Sorvino).

Once Ted disappears, Cruising turns into a Big Gay Tour through hell, and this is precisely why the film is still largely reviled by that community. The deliberate suspense built by Friedkin in each of the film’s intensely disturbing murder sequences hinges on two things: the inevitability of violence and the possibility of seeing two men fucking. To Friedkin’s credit, the former element is excruciatingly effective because, at the time, he’d already proven that he didn’t give a shit about taking care of his audience. And it pays off brilliantly in the first murder, where Friedkin shoots the killer drawing his knife along the back of the actor and plunging it in all in one take; the startled reaction of the actor enhances the viewer’s sense that they’ve just watched an actual stabbing. But it’s impossible to not resent Friedkin for playing up the horror/titilation factor of gay sex – which, at the time, was as big a taboo as reelecting Jimmy Carter – as a means of throwing the audience off balance.

This doesn’t mean Friedkin personally found the concept of gay sex off-putting; it’s his opportunism, which did nothing but reinforce cultural hostility toward homosexuality, that’s objectionable. This is why it’s tricky to suggest that Cruising is somewhat more palatable today than it was in 1980; even though many Americans now understand that not all gay men scurry off under the cover of night to cramped underground bars named after euphemisms for buttholes, the film is still savagely insensitive. But the surface of it is so haunting (particularly Jack Nitzsche’s desolate electronic score) that one can’t help but watch. It may not be defensible (at least, not in my estimation), but it is to be experienced. And while Friedkin’s now invoking everything from the looming AIDS epidemic (he’s talked of "mysterious deaths" that weren’t reported until 1981) to the ambiguous finale (even though he chided me for claiming that the film had an ambiguous narrative), what he should really do is clam up and let a new audience comprised of people who’re unfazed by homosexuality have their say. There’s no undoing the past, but there may be a future for Cruising that doesn’t entail its being a pop cultural punch line. Considering the film’s previous critical reputation, that’s progress.