Looking Back at “Cruising”

Friedkin remembers, “The reviews vilified the picture. To me as a filmmaker I felt like a war criminal. It was completely unexpected, the extent or the depth or how it carried on for almost a generation, until the film was re-released early in 1990. Then I began to see reviews in the same publications that had vilified the picture before now praising it – but these were different reviewers from a different generation with different attitudes about lifestyles.”

Cruising was criticized both for its content and its narrative, which puzzled some and frustrated others with its seemingly ambiguous ending. Friedkin maintains, “I think there’s no ambiguity. There’s no solution – that’s different. The killings were unsolved, there’s no one killer. (There are) many killers ... I grant you that that’s not easy for audiences, who are used to a killing, for example, on television, taking place at 9 o’clock and the murderer going off to prison at ten o’clock. But the cruising murders are still unsolved, and there was no one killer.”

Given the setting, the crimes and the nature of the killers (sadists who are remarkably similar and share the common goal of punishing gay men for being sexual), the film is naturally packed wall-to-wall with gay references, images and characters of all sorts.

In fact, perhaps the best thing that can possibly be said for Cruising is that it at least has the guts to go all the way.

The “Male Gays”

The sexual content in Cruising is still shocking today, when mainstream films that dare to show male nudity and men in any sort of sexual situations with one another are still a cause for intense controversy. Sure, many elements of gay sexuality such as public orgies and other practices are presented clearly in the interest of horrifying a straight audience, but you can’t accuse the film of not getting its hands dirty in the process.

It’s worth noting that the version of Cruising that finally made it to screens in 1980 (the same version being released on DVD, albeit with a remastered picture and stereo soundtrack) is a full 40 minutes shorter than the film Friedkin shot, and that nearly all 40 minutes that were cut were of sex acts in the clubs.

Says the director, “Warner Brothers would have put everything back into Cruising if we could have found it – we could not find a frame. We didn’t add anything and I didn’t subtract anything. It was just, for the most part, more footage of the clubs. For example, I shot every one of the sexual activities that occurred in the clubs, which you now see pieces of in the film, like the fist-f**king and the golden shower – those were all shot for real.”

Unsurprisingly, the original cut was not a hit with the ratings board. Friedkin remembers, “I sent that film back time and time again, chipped away and chipped away at it, finally 40 minutes came out. But it adds nothing to the storyline or the theme or anything else. And if I had found it, I don’t think I would have really used it … I knew they were never gonna go with that stuff. That’s why I showed it to them. What’s left up there is bad enough!”

Considering how many leisurely pans across grinding bodies and Crisco-slick limbs the film already has, it’s hard to imagine another 40 minutes of non-plot-related leering possibly fitting in Cruising. The film’s unwavering gaze already crosses the line of mere fascination into … anthropological interest? A sadistic desire to unsettle the audience at any cost?

Whatever the reason, Cruising is a full-immersion dunk into a world of unbridled man-on-man lust, however unrealistic that world may ultimately be. It’s kind of like Queer as Folk: The Leather Years.

The film also boasts a few gonzo moments that are legitimately (and, one can hope, intentionally) hilarious. While it’s horrifying to see a gay man beaten up in a room full of policemen during questioning for a crime he may have committed, it’s downright bizarre when the man doing the beating is an enormous black man wearing nothing but a jockstrap and a hat. (The nameless character shows up, administers a solid smack, and vanishes with no explanation.)

But even peppered with moments of dark humor, it’s hard to argue that the film’s leering, peepshow vibe isn’t deliberately exploitative. Friedkin has maintained that the film’s sexually graphic club scenes were populated by actual gay clubgoers acting naturally in their element, but he knows as well as anyone that simply pointing a camera at someone very often causes them to change their behavior and exaggerate their actions.

So if the point here wasn’t to use gay male sexuality to horrify, then what was the point? The men behind the production maintain that the gay S&M underworld is merely a backdrop for a murder mystery, but that rings hollow given the fact that, in the end, the film isn’t a murder mystery at all.