Looking Back at “Cruising”

[img_assist|nid=8932|title=|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=135|height=200]For many gay men not of filmgoing age in 1980 (and some who were), William Friedkin’s Cruising may as well be the boogeyman when it comes to disparaging depictions of gays and gay life in mainstream film. Roundly vilified by critics, activists and both gay and straight audiences alike upon its release, the film has long stood as a high watermark of the misrepresentation of gay men as empty, sex-crazed monsters.

And yet, on the eve of the film’s long-gestating (and long-awaited, for the curious and completist) release on DVD, the attitude of many viewers, critics, and of Friedkin himself is that the initial negative reaction to the film was due to the fact that the world — and more specifically, the gay community who protested it so fiercely — simply wasn’t ready for it.

After viewing the remastered film in all its gritty glory and speaking with Friedkin about the film, we take this opportunity to discuss what Cruising meant in 1980 versus today, and whether it deserves a second chance … or should be dumped in the East River like its many gay victims.

Looking at the film with fresh eyes, the first question that comes to mind is, “Was Cruising ahead of its time, or is it a prisoner of it?”

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Cracking open the time capsule

Cruising somehow manages to be almost charmingly locked in the time in which it was made, while at the same time being completely at odds with the spirit of its age. In a day when gay rights were finally gaining traction a mere 10 years after the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village, a movie that relentlessly and viciously exploited a gay community was not going to go unprotested, especially when it was coming from a major director with intentions on filming on location. (The fact that the film was almost entirely dubbed post-production was due to off-camera protesters ruining nearly all live sound during shooting.)

Director William Friedkin (The Exorcist [1973], The French Connection [1971]) seems to be keenly aware that the movie is an anomaly. In a recent interview to promote the DVD release, he told us, “If I tried to make Cruising today, I couldn’t get it made today, and I’m not sure very few other filmmakers could … Cruising was an experiment to the major Hollywood studios, and they saw that they were getting killed for making it … There’s not a lot of people lining up to do more such films.”

If you’re not familiar with what “more such films” refers to, here’s a quick synopsis: loosely based on the novel by Gerald Walker and a series of actual unsolved murders, Cruising tells the story of Steve Burns (played by Al Pacino), a cop who is asked by the NYPD to go undercover to investigate a series of brutal murders taking place in the city’s gay fetish community (mostly S&M, leather and uniforms).

As the violent stabbings pile up, Burns takes an apartment in gay ground zero (the West Village of Manhattan), befriends his amiable gay neighbor (Don Scardino) and hits the leather bars to find himself a killer. Along the way Burns picks up the codes of the gay underworld (from hankie colors to pickup slang) and learns a little more about himself than he bargained for.

In the end, a killer is found but it’s clear that he wasn’t the only murderer prowling the clubs and Central Park Rambles for gay men to butcher … and it’s even suggested that Burns himself either was one of the killers all along or has, by his association with this seedy-seeming underworld of public sex and pantomimed aggressions, become one.

Plagued by protests both before and after its release by gays fed up with seeing their lives distorted on the screen (and particularly disturbed by a film that potentially served as a user’s manual for seducing and murdering gay men), the film was roundly criticized upon its release.