CRUISING

[4.2] 

Put on your jockstrap and get out your yellow hankie: it’s CRUISING time.  Like SHOWGIRLS, one can’t simply describe CRUISING as good or bad.  And it’s not exactly Lynchian in its incoherence either.  We aren’t in a nightmare world, so much as a psychological state of mind.  While, sure, the movie is ostensibly about gays, or at least the more hardcore fetish elements of the scene, it’s not really about that. As director William Friedkin so ham-fistedly put it: it’s merely exotic window dressing. There are certainly details that only fit in with the subculture depicted in the movie, but looked at with a wider lens, the real focus of CRUISING is on the stability of identity, the layers of performativity, and the rituals and codes that close-knit communities prescribe to (which applies to a whole host of people).  And even in CRUISING, it’s not just gays. The flip-side and doppelgangers of these men are the police force (in one of the most hilarious and pointed depictions of this, Pacino’s cop character shows up undercover at the leather bar, but everyone there is dressed as a cop except him, so he gets thrown out.  The roles are reversed, and the fetishes of power/submission are re-encoded; the cops abuse and harass the gay community, but their uniforms and accoutrement and accompanying authoritarian personas are subversively adopted and utilized as centers of sexual play by the very people who should be most dismissive of them). This movie is probably still most famous for the loud resistance that the gay community at the time put up against it (boycotts, marches in the street, ad campaigns, and deliberate attempts to sabotage and disrupt the actual filming).  And yet, the movie utilizes many of the actual locations and clubs, as well as patrons, that existed in that very specific time in New York City. As well as being a historical artifact for this scantily-recorded moment in time, the very context of the film’s production offers a fascinating window into the discussions of who is allowed to tell which community’s stories. 

Seen from a late ‘70s perspectives, maybe it was inevitable that gays would feel enraged that a straight director wanted to ostensibly show how deranged and disposable gays were by making a big budget movie about a gay serial killer. And even when it was finally seen in theaters, weren’t people primed to view it with a lens toward seeing its homophobic elements? Did the director of the EXORCIST make another horror movie, but this one about the corrupting nature of homosexuality, where a straight cop goes undercover in the seedy belly of a degrading subculture and gets lured into that lifestyle? That would certainly have been a rather simplistic but obvious initial reading. But age has been very kind to CRUISING. Approaching the film with a little more credit paid to Friedkin and his intentions, and one can quickly see the fascinating layers of complexity that are weaved into this strange thriller. Watch it as if it were an art film (think LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD) or a giallo transposed onto American soil, and the superficial Hollywood veneer quickly peels away, and we begin to see the strange skeletal questions that Friedkin uses to graft his fleshy tale.  I remember my first time seeing this fifteen years ago and being utterly confused by the plot. We see numerous characters who are depicted as the killer, but they don’t appear to be the same person. Are there numerous killers? In the end, it is heavily implied that Pacino’s cop might be the killer. Or perhaps, become a future killer.  And what about this final shot, showing the Hudson river, the same place where the story began (with the discovery of severed body pieces)? Is the implication that we’ve come full circle? Or is it reminding us that the initial crime hasn’t really been solved?  There’s no right answer. If you are as fascinated with this movie as I am, you will love this lengthy article that looks at the production and post-production of the film extensively, to examine what changes were made to the initial script and concept, and how this shift radically changes the movie’s message and intent (http://www.rouge.com.au/3/friedkin.html).