Cruising
At a glance...
- Directed by William Friedkin
- Released in 1980
- Runtime 102 minutes
- Watched at home
- Final feelings: homoeroticism from the closet
It's both delightfully horny and deeply ambiguous. If the closet is self-loathing, Cruising paints that emotion with every unflinching stare into the abyss that Al Pacino makes as he tries, and fails mostly, to integrate with these leather-strapped kinksters. Just like the gay communities know that the cops don't really care about our deaths, a closeted fag cop gets to learn the hard way the price of selling out for his advancement. Amazing that at the end of this film you are not informed of anything, you don't know for certain who killed whom and while to me it felt clear that the implication was that Steve killed his neighbor and closest gay connection, Ted, it's presented to us simply as the continuation of violence that has always been there and that will continue to be conveniently ignored.
It's interesting considering the differences between the modern and contemporary audiences of this film. I can totally understand a desire for thematic restraint that some, or maybe many gay people felt about this movie at the time. How much of the backlash was from fags who wanted to keep their culture on the down-low? How much was from respectable queers who didn't want to have the hypersexual superstition further applied to them in their everyday lives? One idea that seems unquestionably backwards to me is that this movie would have inspired people to murder gays in the same way. Having grown up in the casual homophobia of the 90s and 00s, I'm certain the desire for violence and murder was already there. I for one am glad this film still exists even if a lot more footage ended up being lost over time, because within its voyeurism lies a specific kind of restraint which is responsible both visually and narratively for getting Steve read as an outsider, a wolf in sheep's clothing. Through that view we end up just watching a lot of footage of gay men existing in their sexuality and their kink. It's almost objective, in a way, how we look at these scenes filmed in real leather bars with real fags, and then cutting to Al Pacino standing awkwardly in his leather jacket and false yellow hanky, or moving recklessly and awkwardly on the dance floor. Friedkin is comparing gay performance to genuine gay sexuality, and is using footage of the real deal to sell the latter such that you almost have to do nothing to describe the former. A more cowardly movie would try to do too much to manufacture with magic what already existed in the real world, and it is us future generations who truly reap the rewards of that bravery.
Gay and queer sexuality still exists, but it doesn't look exactly like this anymore. With the efforts towards assimilation that is the predominant focus of the mainstream LGBT rights movement, there's probably plenty of gays who would still reject Cruising for its "unnecessarily sexual" emphasis on gay life. Precisely for that reason, it feels powerful to me to still have these images and these memories of that bygone time. It seems ever relevant that art must be made and experienced to resist the cultural forces that wish to separate us from our sexuality in order to make us better fit for mass market appeal. The tyranny of the family will not be expelled purely through bloody raunchy leather boys but god damn it I'm going to enjoy it when I see it!