Looking Back at “Cruising”

Friedkin has always stressed that the film is not meant to represent the gay community as a whole, but only the S&M and leather community, a statement flimsily supported by a single line of throwaway dialogue early in the film. But no matter – Ted is brutally butchered in his own home, regardless.

Another victim, an affluent dressmaker who stops off at a peepshow on the way out of town and is butchered in a booth, also seems to not be tied to the leather scene. The implication clearly seems to be that the darkness in which the film basks is present in all gay men, or will somehow find them.

But Friedkin dismisses these concerns, and his conviction suggests the attitudes of a person who has never been a part of an underserved, misrepresented and persecuted group. “Violence and killings – I never thought nor do I suggest that that was an offshoot of being gay. A lot of the protests against the film in ‘80 said that it seemed to indicate that the gay lifestyle brought about murder, death, violence… and strangely, you know I find that so off-base. I never got the same criticism from the French government when I made The French Connection and the dope smuggler is a French guy and the guy working for him as his hit man is another French guy. And I never heard from French people that I was accusing all French people of smuggling heroin into America, but that was one of the tacks taken by the protests in 1980. And I think they were reaching – I think there was an enormous reach to find a foundation for the criticism.”

Which is more audacious: that Friedkin is comparing a foreign character in an American action movie to an entire film dedicated to exploiting a much-maligned subculture, or the fact that he’s suggesting that someone is more easily offended than the French?

Forgiving Friedkin?

After 27 years of equal rights advances and the mainstreaming of gay images and characters in entertainment, the question on many people’s minds is whether the film will strike a different chord with a new generation of gay viewers, and even with the same generation that held it in such disdain.

Friedkin notes that the gay rights movement has made the world ready to accept the film for the thriller it was always meant to be, noting, “Those gains have been made … There’s less of an attitude of ‘this is going to hurt us’ or ‘this is about what we’re doing’… it’s now being viewed as a film.”

Well, that’s entirely possible. What the rerelease has going for it is that a younger, less activist generation who have seen a wide array of gay images in entertainment and are possibly more forgiving of a retro chestnut like Cruising may embrace the film for all its camp excess.

And with the current trends in fashion and music toward emulating this time period (not to mention fascinations with vintage gay publications and pre-AIDS porn), there’s lots to enjoy in Cruising in terms of atmosphere, which is one of the few things the film has in spades. These streets and backrooms are humid with danger and lusty thrills, and call back to a time that holds a certain romance for a modern audience, be it real or imagined.

Gay or straight, Cruising’s most prominent themes are those of aggression and masculinity, and the film uses the nearly all-male setting to play these themes out to testosterone-peaked extremes. Domination, muscles, leather, body hair, images of authority and violent aggression saturate the film. In fact, one of the film’s backhanded compliments might be that gays are not simply the desexualized sissies that have held court in cinema for decades, and are as masculine – and as dangerous – as heterosexual men.

But the film misses a key point about the leather and S&M communities: they’re not about real aggression. They’re about play-acting, posturing, and fantasy, not actual violent intent and desire to do harm. Looking at the club scenes and sexual couplings in the film, you’d think that leather daddies are a violent, dangerous bunch; and while this is doubtless true in some cases, it’s certainly not the rule.

The film looks at this subculture from the outside and apparently falls hook, line, and sinker for the set dressing, or at the very least doesn’t care to look beyond it at the average guys under the leather. Even the simple fact that Friedkin replaced disco (the preferred music of the leather clubs at the time) with more aggressive punk rock and grunge (to the surprise of the crowds filming the scenes) demonstrates a desire to bear false witness to the actual scene for purely sensationalistic purposes.