It has come to my attention lately that Cruising — a movie I’d made a conscious effort to avoid for a good portion of my movie-watching life because (a) it was purported to be nothing more than unfettered, hysterical fag-baiting, and (b) because William Friedkin was a director that I’d found increasingly less interesting as I inversely found a lot more to like about, say, Alan J. Pakula — has actually developed something of a revised critical take. So I watched it last night and, to my surprise, it hit me in much the same way The Exorcist did, at least initially. It is a complicated, disturbing, complex and, yes, occasionally offensive work of cinematic provocation. Neither film is tidy, and as far as I’m concerned that’s easily their best quality.
Al Pacino plays an undercover cop investigating a string of murders in the underworld gay S&M leather scene (which were obviously committed from the within, as victims are discovered post-coitus), which requires him to learn their code of behavior and attitude where one false step could potentially destroy his attempts at subterfuge. (Apparently, both the film and the novel it’s based on were created in response to similar sets of NYC crimes that received less-than-full attention from the police department, for reasons that seem apparent.) So he plunges headlong into the world of amyl nitrate, abrasive punk-disco beats, bandanas-in-pocket and endless, sidelong pas de deux glances. The major difficulty, though, isn’t that Pacino has to delve into an ethnographic case study without a safety rope, but that he has to try and delineate the very narrow difference between a culture of sex role-playing that puts its focus on violence and body-controlling machismo (i.e. fisting) and a criminal murderer who uses the S&M society’s longing, pleading need to fulfill wishful fantasies as a trap.
So, I’d argue that if there is anything in the film that can be safely designated as homophobic, it’s the notion that there’s very little difference between gay rough trade and homicidal frenzy. (Apparently, though, that’s not what bothered gay audiences in 1980 so much as the suggestion that practically every fucking fairy in NY walked around at night in either drag, leather chaps or jock straps. That, too, is tricky territory, but I think it’s justified by the film’s overall concern with immersing its main character into a vast sub-society.)
Another ethically dubious notion is the way Al Pacino’s character appears to lose his sense of heterosexual identity as he burrows deeper into his alternate persona. He frequently rushes back from his stakeout apartment on Christopher Street to have sex with his girlfriend (Karen Allen). As the film goes on, he appears to engage in increasingly rougher sex, and the film suggests he needs to hear that faggy disco beat in his head to get in the mood with her. Is Friedkin trying to suggest that homosexuality is indeed learned? I’m not sure, but there is something to be said for the bald, “listen in folks” way Pacino reads the line “There’s a lot you don’t know about me” in his first scene in bed with Allen. It’s left to speculation whether Pacino is already of questionable sexual identity (especially in light of his interactions with the gay couple that live next door and the severely open-ended result of that story thread), and not simply just because he starts spazz-dancing at the club instead of wallflowering. Cruising’s decidedly odd take on homosexuality is that it’s a façade, an alter-ego, a uniform to be worn at night and then stored away in the bedroom closet. Which is not at all unlike the way Friedkin portrays the methodology of police-work, no?
One of the most surreal moments in the film is when a naked Nubian bodybuilder is brought by the cops into one suspect’s interrogation to beat a confession (and ejaculate) out of him (despite the fact that all they’d need to do to free him from suspicion is take his fingerprints), a weird little detail that’s never fully explained in a way that makes standard police-thriller sense. But with it, Friedkin is clearly making an attempt to tie the two worlds of testosterone-fueled codes of conduct together by their respective balls. In this respect, I think it’s tough to dismiss the film as homophobic nonsense. Masculinity in general is what’s being dissected here. I was going to write “post-feminist masculinity,” but there’s only one female character in the whole damned movie, and she’s more or less a tool with which Friedkin pries open Pacino’s sexual Pandora’s Box. (Hell, the last shot of her in the film features her wearing Pacino’s undercover leather gear, complete with what appear to be the killer’s sunglasses.)
I recognize that the implications that Pacino’s seduced by the gay lifestyle and the further notion that, in succumbing, he would naturally turn violent as a matter of course are alarming propositions. (Personally, I pretty obviously couldn’t care less about genuflecting before cinematic good taste, as my favorite filmmaker Brian De Palma routinely delves into the whole “bloody orgasms” equation…) But at the same time, I’d argue that the film’s homophobic conceits are the means, not the ends. Crusing is not a film about the society of homosexuals reflecting a “culture of death” (to swipe a phrase from my ideological opposition’s handbook). It is a film about mankind’s inability to bridge the psychological gap that exists within, the gap between what brutal fantasies our imaginations are capable of and what we bury deep inside our tightening, twisted psyches in order to present ourselves in a manner befitting the mores of the social enclaves we most desire to populate.