Looking Back at “Cruising”

“Cruising scares me.”

To accept that Cruising is a simple murder mystery is to ignore a huge piece of the puzzle and to excuse a host of problematic decisions on the part of the filmmakers. The film’s ultimate lack of resolution – there are several killers who all look alike and frequent the same establishment – makes a clear statement (however unintended the filmmakers may maintain it is) about a community as a whole.

Take the filming of the murders themselves, for which the actors portraying previous victims were actually used to stand in as the killer in subsequent scenes (a point laid out in one of the DVD’s featurettes). Clever trickery designed to throw off the scent for a sleuthing audience? Not exactly, when the film ultimately has no solution and the clues aren’t real. (These men couldn’t have come back from the dead to murder, although the film stops just short of suggesting such things.)

The majority of the film’s characters are presented as soulless clones of the same dark-haired, leather-clad man, who is both murderously aggressive and doomed to a violent death himself.

Equally troubling is Friedkin’s use of frames of hardcore gay pornography during the film’s violent stabbings (he refers to them as “subliminal”, but the images are pretty “liminal” from what I saw). Equating sexual penetration with stabbing is nothing new in thrillers with an erotic bent, but cutting actual frames of gay porn into scenes of men being graphically stabbed is taking the metaphor to a whole new level.

The parallel being made between gay sex and destructive physical violence is clear (you would have to actually stab someone with a penis to be more literal), and the result is more akin to a Nazi brainwashing film than a piece of entertainment.

The film also rests much of its narrative on what is at this point quite dated Freudian psychology. The men responsible for at least several of the murders share one weakness: daddy issues. Both men received no love from their fathers, which made them seek out the love of other men, and the resulting horror at their own actions drove them to murder the men with whom they had sex.

Friedkin admits that this line of thinking is one of the film’s biggest faults: “That’s cheap Freudian crap – that’s one of the weaknesses of the film. The guy who has problems with his father… I was new to Freud in those days, and Krafft-Ebing.”

Now that Freudian thrillers are a bit cliché, audiences will likely find Cruising’s psychobabble more quaint than offensive. And considering that no one who would believe that unresolved father issues lead to male gayness would make it through more than five minutes of the film anyway, the residue of misinformation is likely harmless.

So the question remains: If the point with Cruising wasn’t to horrify people with images of gay sexuality, and it wasn’t about how this subculture is populated by soulless, sex-craved drones who threaten to pollute the straight world … then what was it about?

Friedkin puts it this way: “It represents violence and it represents the attitudes of the police and the politicians toward violence and crimes in the world of any minority. They sort of just don’t really care – they figure well, let ‘em kill each other. That basically was the attitude then, with rare exception, and that’s what I made the film about – the violence against gay people then. The unwarranted attacks on gay people. The mysterious deaths, which later turned out to be AIDS. And the unsolved killings that were going on at that time were only written about and dealt with in gay publications.”

The film does, to some degree, support this. The police, while not overtly homophobic in the film, are certainly hands-off when it comes to doing anything to help the community. And when Burns is asked by his superior to take down a suspect, Burns responds by saying that he’s not comfortable taking someone down just because he’s gay. (At this point we’re still led to believe that Burns is one of the good guys, so his sensitivity is meant to be viewed as a positive.)

But the implication that the film was meant to speak up in defense of the very people that it infuriated and offended is going a bit far.

The gay men in the film are uniformly unpleasant, frequently violent, and most think only about sex. The film’s one legitimately decent gay character, Ted (Scardino), doesn’t belong to the dark subset of the gay community that Friedkin insists the film is meant to be confined to, noting at one point, “cruising scares me.”