CRUISING:
More timely than ever!…
Cruising by William Friedkin
– 35mm Print – 1 hr 42 min
With a warning on the 35mm print you won’t find on the
98 min DVD
Shown with a 35mm optical print
during the “contamination” cycle proposed by the Forum des Images in Paris, Cruising was presented as an immersion into a
hostile environment. The movie followed a screening of Bug and preceded one of The
Exorcist, two more first-rate movies directed by the tremendous William
Friedkin. A conference was also dedicated to the filmmaker’s work: His remarks
and vision, acclaimed and controversial, but remarkably timely, have become
essential again in these days of filmmaking scarcity.
Cruising, an exceptional film if there ever was one, remains a
major cinematographic case in the 7th art’s history. Major not only
for what it reveals about its author, an incredible fighter and great
perfectionist subjected to insurmountable difficulties for the duration of the
project (he almost died of a heart attack shortly after), but also by the
bridges it builds between different movie forms and genres in the 7th art’s
global scene.
Cruising is the story of Steve Burns, a young and ambitious
New York cop who accepts an undercover mission in gay S&M circles to clear
up a series of brutal homosexual murders. Recruited to act as a lure, Burns has
to change his identity and his appearance. In so doing, he gradually drifts
away from those close to him and the life he’s made for himself. He takes on
another personality, another “self” that surfaces in him and affects his psyche
and his whole behavior.
The original idea for the movie,
vaguely inspired by journalist
Gerald Walker’s novel, came from some articles by columnist Arthur Bell about a
series of unsolved murders in New York’s gay S&M bar neighborhoods. William
Friedkin drew inspiration from these news items that gave him the motivation to
start working on this story. He found the material in his close circle: Thanks
to certain stories told by investigator Randy Jurgensen, his friend and
consultant on French Connection, who had to go undercover in gay S&M bars
to unmask a killer, as well as the arrest of Paul Bateson, one of the
radiologist actors in The Exorcist accused of having
sadistically murdered homosexuals. Thanks to certain connections linked to
organized crime, the filmmaker was also allowed to investigate in S&M bars
himself before shooting in them.
It’s clear that Walker’s book,
added to the exposure of certain sexual crimes in the press plus the Big
Apple’s high crime rate at the end of the 70s, made New York in the 80s the
ideal setting for several movies about serial killers: William Lustig’s Maniac
came out in 1980 too (Joe Spinnel, the lead actor, was cast in Cruising),
but also Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and two years later,
New
York Ripper by Lucio Fulci.
The subculture described in Cruising,
a perfect backdrop for the director to develop his ideas, was never considered
by him as being the movie’s main intention. The barrage of accusations leveled
against William Friedkin for having stigmatized the gay community is totally
unwarranted. If Cruising distinguishes itself from the movies mentioned above
by its environment, it’s essentially the way this environment is depicted that
radically differs it from them.
Due to its treatment, Cruising
frees itself from all the current codes and conventions of the day. Thirty-five
years later it appears extremely timely: The midnight blue monochrome
photography, the dark and sensual score, skillfully present and spellbinding,
the directing sometimes clinical, sometimes emotional and impulsive (especially
during the murder scenes where a few subliminal penetration shots can be found;
“That’s how our brain works”, analyzes the filmmaker.), but also the pacing
imposed by the story, deliberately caught in a symbolic vice to expand the
subject, all these key points predate the movie. Cruising is an erotic
crime thriller, but also a slasher that doesn’t really borrow from codes, and
what’s more, it’s a completely reformulated giallo genre.
Symbolism here is pushed to the
extreme to serve the psychological aspect. A virtuoso, William Friedkin takes
us very far. The key to the movie lies in its last scene. It shows a tugboat
crossing the Hudson River; the river is immersed in the grayness that enshrouds
the port, barely lit by the ball of orange sun hanging over it… Consciously or
not, this last scene refers to Monet’s Impressions, Sunrise. What it says about
the movie is that, like impressionist paintings or films from the “first
avant-garde”, it attaches more importance to a fleeting impression, to the
probability of environmental phenomena (in Cruising the environment directly
affects the character’s psychology), rather than to the stable and conceptual
aspect of things.
So even more than the character
himself, it’s the particular world he’s immersed in that determines and triggers
the story. The identity search is, almost as if it was meant to happen, the
theme that truly dominates the movie. This quest results in a fantasy of ideal
virility, which causes physical desire for this virility as well as hatred for
this desire. The filmmaker uses certain visual and audio elements in a
metaphorical way to highlight this masculine desire burdened by repressed urges
(penetrating blades, leather, weight bars, police hats, gay porno magazines,
river water, obsessive voices and nursery rhymes). He also brings in the memory
of paternal castrating authority, something both Burns and the killer are
trapped in: “You know what you have to do”, uttered by the killer’s father,
sounds like a “Man up!” aimed at all the movie’s characters.
William Friedkin also takes us into
late night leather bars where the hero is submerged by so many contradicting
impressions that he ends up not knowing where to situate his desire. One of the
movie’s great strengths is to give us hardcore scenes in a very realistic
manner to make us feel Burn’s disorientation. Although most of these scenes
were cut to avoid the movie being rated X (the extras are real patrons of the
bar!), they fascinate and considerably speed up the feeling of alteration
experienced by Burns. Without the cuts imposed by the MPAA, Cruising would send us into orbit because
William Friedkin is careful to confuse things throughout the movie by showing
us different men’s faces as being the killer’s face (the movie’s first killer
plays the part of the second victim while the first victim plays the part of
the killer in the porn movie theater, etc.)…
If William Friedkin wanted to show
that the dark side of an individual remains a mystery for others, the problems
owing to Al Pacino’s performance probably pushed him to dig a bit deeper. The
choice of Al Pacino, described by some as a casting mistake, is quite
unfortunate since the acting (using only the range of surprise) is dull and
linear… William Friedkin himself says in his memoir (a memoir I will discuss at
length in a later article) that when Al Pacino came on set he didn’t know what
he was supposed to do and hadn’t learned his lines. The actor’s excuse was his
wanting to recreate his character’s surprise on discovering the world of
S&M. In actual fact, we feel a lack of implication in his acting, as
though he were disembodied, except for two action scenes that create a
discrepancy. One can only regret that Richard Gere, the magnificent Julian Kay
in American
Gigolo (released the same year), didn’t play the ambiguous part of
Burns. He was the filmmaker’s initial choice and possessed all the finesse and
ambivalence necessary for playing the role.
True to his lifelong vision between
uncompromising Manichaeism
and skepticism, but also probably because of the lack of ambiguity and
evolution Pacino brought to his character, even though he gradually becomes aware of his true
personality, the filmmaker took some basic measures while editing. Choosing to
suggest that Burns might be either the killer or his copycat, William Friedkin
once again gives us a razor-edged story with a strong theme about the
ambivalence of the human soul: From a mixed-up young cop trying to find his
way, Steve Burns becomes a young cop adrift and a potential murderer!
Just like Burns, who has become not
only a mystery for others but for himself as well, the viewer then becomes free
to wonder about his own dark side as well as that of others…
“There is a lot about me you don’t
know”, Burns says to his girlfriend at the beginning of the movie… Even though
Burns knows himself a bit better, he’s still not out of the woods; his dark
side is a dishonorable mystery to him. A mystery he’s going to hide in order to
move on, just as the movie’s penultimate scene suggests when Burns looks at
himself in the mirror before turning around and staring at the camera while his
girlfriend puts on his punk leather “uniform”…
Emilie Flory
English translation by Cameron
Watson.
