CRUISING
CRUISING (1980) has the pedigree to be a cinephile’s wet dream, and despite how fascinating the onscreen and behind the scenes story is, it just feels limp.
Al Pacino stars as Steve Burns, a naive NYC cop who goes undercover (think SERPICO), and loses his moral compass (THE GODFATHER) as he investigates a psycho-sexual serial killer (PSYCHO) preying upon the gay men in the heavy leather BDSM club scene in late 70s Meat Packing district of New York City. Directed by William Friedkin, who won a Best Director Oscar for THE FRENCH CONNECTION, a film portrayal of an obsessed NYC Police Detective who repeatedly breaks the law in order to uphold it.
Friedkin was approached multiple times by producers who wanted him to direct a film based on a New York Times article about a serial killer in the gay community, but he repeatedly turned it down. It wasn’t until he visited Paul Bateson, a medical assistant who was featured in a scene of THE EXORCIST, who was arrested in 1979 for killing a film journalist and claimed to have killed many gay men in NYC, that Friedkin decided to take on the material. In a method acting approach to directing, Friedkin went undercover in a jock strap to see for himself what was happening in the underground clubs. CRUISING is trying to tell numerous stories (a police drama, a subculture documentary, a slasher flick, and a charactery study), but it struggles to tell them well. Friedkin’s attempt to be objective yet esoteric comes off as directionless and vague.
A POLICE STORY: Showing the varying motivations of police officers is the film’s strongest insight. Burns (Pacino) is reluctant and unqualified to take the undercover job, but accepts because it’s a good career move. Captain Edelson’s (Paul Sorvino) heart is aching to do what is right and protect and serve. The Chief of Detectives isn’t willing to pin a scapegoat for a public victory. The two cops in the cruisers (character actors Joe Spinell & Mike Starr) use their badge as a license to prey on those without protection. That abuse of power by the police is what led to Randy Jurgensen going under cover in the gay community in the 60s and made him the consultant for Al Pacino as well is an actor in numerous Friedkin films.
DOCUMENTARY: In THE FRENCH CONNECTION, Friedkin’s documentary experience added a frantic and kinetic energy that made you feel like you were undercover and part of the chase, and it earned cinematographer Owen Roizman an Oscar nomination. With CRUISING, rather than taking a fly on the wall cinema verite approach that would allow access to everything that is interesting, the camera merely pans on a tripod from a safe distance and you get no sense of the sexually liberated culture that inspired Friedkin to set the story in these clubs.
SLASHER FLICK: Throughout CRUISING, the camera feels detached from the characters leaving the audience as a distant observer rather than an intimate participant and this visual approach and cohesive tone is thrown out the window for the slasher scenes which would have been a better fit in HALLOWEEN (1978) or FRIDAY THE 13th (1980). The blue lights, cutting through the green leaves to highlight the red blood draw you into Central Park at night, but remove you from the rest of the film.
CHARACTER STUDY: It’s hard to tell where Burns (Pacino) is going internally because we have no reference to where he is coming from. His story starts when he accepts the job, and the only hints to his past is an anxious look when he receives word that his father tried to call. With the vast majority of the film showing Burns undercover as Forbes, the only glimpses of his life off the job are brief bedrooms scenes, and morning after conversations with his partner (Karen Allen). Is burns cracking under pressure from the job? Is he repressing is own sexuality? Is his libido turned off by the hardcore acts of public sex he witnesses? Is the constant threat of violence tearing him apart? Or is all of this seducing him? Pacino had to build this character internally, because there’s so little on the page to work with. Another barrier to the performance is that many scenes needed ADR, because protests from the gay community on set made the sound unusable.
Throughout the DVD bonus features Friedkin implies that many of the choices he made on set were instinctual, and producer Jerry Weintraub says “Story isn’t as interesting as cinematic value.” While this approach to focus on mood rather than plot worked for Friedkin three years earlier on SORCERER (1977), CRUISING lacks a focused style, and rather than embracing a psycho sexual dream logic, the film feels cloudy and confused.
But, “good art raises more questions than it answers,” right? CRUISING has a runtime of 1 hour and 46 minutes, and leaves a lot to be desired. So much so that I rewatched the film with directors commentary, watched two making of documentaries, read multiple articles, and have spent a few hours writing this critique. But rather than inspiring introspection on behalf of the protagonists, I’m left just as confused as the man in the interrogation room that just got slapped to the floor by a muscular cowboy in jock strap who never says a word.
Where I’m left hungry for answers, others are eating this up, and the influence can still be seen decades later. James Franco co-directed a meta-film that explores the boundaries between documentary and pornography in INTERIOR. LEATHER BAR. Like Friedkin did in Cruising, David Fincher has spliced in frames of pornography (FIGHT CLUB), set scenes in sex clubs (SEVEN), and use multiple actors to play one serial killer (ZODIAC). And, Nicolas Wending Refn has called CRUISING a masterpiece, and with Refn’s ability to capture mood, sexuality and violence with cinematic flair, he could pull off a hypnotic remake if he wished.
And despite all this, CRUISING is still captivating with its tease of sex, violence, obsession, and repression, but that is primarily due to the subculture that Capt. Edeleson warns is “Not in the the mainstream of gay life. It’s a world unto itself.”