When the head of the American film ratings board saw William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980), he, at least according to the director in his memoir The Friedkin Connection (2013), was deeply disturbed. He told the director of such classics as The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973), “There aren’t enough X’s in the alphabet for this picture!”
For a director who made the Citizen Kane of horror, which features a scene in which a demonically possessed girl thrusts a crucifix into her crotch while exclaiming “Let Jesus fuck you!”, then grabbing her mother’s head and telling her to “lick me” … you’ve got to wonder what it was that so offended Richard Heffner, the MPA (Motion Picture Association) boss. Could anything top such a mad spectacle? Apparently so. The entire film freaked him out, not any one scene in particular.
Faced with this roadblock and the threat of the NC17 rating – the kiss of death at the American box office – Cruising (1980) was re-cut for release, and the film’s excised materials have since entered movie folklore. What became of the work print cut and its missing 40 minutes? Friedkin says it was nothing but hardcore pornography, footage shot in the S&M clubs, and graphic imagery during the murder scenes. But ever the provocateur, Friedkin still put in subliminal shots of anal sex during the murder sequences. His idea was to draw upon the phallic symbolism of the knife as a weapon, and the killer’s psychology … orgasm and murder as moments of the sublime.
Cruising started out as a novel by Gerald Walker, published in the early 1970s. He wrote a story about a cop going undercover in New York’s gay community to catch a killer. What piqued Friedkin’s interest was a series of grisly homicides documented by Village Voice scribe Arthur Bell. Bell reported on a series of disappearances and killings related to patrons of the city’s gay S&M scene, centred around bars with names like the Ramrod, the Mineshaft, and the Cock Pit, all located in the Meatpacking district on the Lower West Side. Body parts were being fished out of the Hudson and East Rivers by the NYPD and they couldn’t crack the case. Secondly, his friend, the detective Randy Jurgensen, spoke to Friedkin about his time undercover in these S&M clubs. The third piece in the puzzle goes back to The Exorcist.
Paul Bateson had been arrested in 1977 for the murder of Variety theatre critic Addison Verrill. Friedkin was stunned when he opened up the New York Daily News to see a man he’d worked with briefly being accused of murder. Bateson appeared as the radiology nurse in the famous scene in The Exorcist, where Regan undergoes tests in the hospital to see if doctors can find out what’s troubling her. Friedkin said he remembered Bateson had both ears pierced and he wore a leather bracelet – things he said made the nurse stand out in the early 1970s. Bateson was apprehended because he’d used an NYU Medical Center bag to get rid of Verrill’s body parts. The NYPD hoped to pin the other murders on Bateson. Facing life in prison, the killer cut a deal, admitting to the other killings in return for a lighter sentence (whether he did all of them or not). This troubling bargain inspired the ending of Cruising and aided in the film’s eerie sense of ambiguity and haunting lack of closure.
Cruising is easily the most controversial picture William Friedkin ever directed. How could it not be? A murder mystery set in a gay subculture with a penchant for heavy leather, based around consensual domination, submission, and humiliation, it was bound to cause a stir.
Cruising inspired emotionally-charged accusations of homophobia, which is strange really because the movie makes zero moral judgement on the scene or the people involved, and neither does it depict gay lifestyles for straights to laugh at. The character Ted (Don Scardino), the next-door neighbour who befriends undercover cop Steve Burns (posing as John Forbes, played by Al Pacino), his lifestyle is clean-cut, he’s a nice lad, it’s a positive depiction of a gay man living his life in a society struggling to accept his sexuality. Neither does Cruising play S&M or leather bars for laughs, like a vast majority of movies. Look at the Police Academy movies or most other American pictures sniggering at whips and leather costumes. There is none of this in Cruising. Friedkin is documenting, his famous aesthetic, what he calls ‘induced documentary’ is deployed, which gives his best work a gritty realism and street-level sense of time and place.
The film was protested heavily during production and its theatrical release. The reviews screamed the movie was bigoted, homophobic, but again, is it really? Friedkin was putting something on the screen – in a mainstream movie – that hadn’t been depicted before, for sure, but again, there’s no moral judgement about the clubs, the activities of the clients, the cruising scene. That there’s a killer(s) on the scene simply provides an intriguing narrative, as well as the truth that people prey on others. It doesn’t say anybody is asking for it because they go cruising or hook up with strangers … millions, if not billions, gay and straight, hit clubs, and have one-night stands. According to Friedkin, an organisation called the National Gay Task Force declared the movie akin to The Birth of a Nation. What an extraordinary, ridiculous and frankly offensive claim to make.
Here’s the thing. Nobody gives a single damn about any of the reviews written back in 1980. Not a single one. Nor the protests. At least the latter came from a place of genuine concern, even if they were wrong and ultimately the film’s enduring legacy proves it so. Cruising didn’t inspire anybody to do anything other than go see a unique film. Fear of art has been around since novels became popular in the 18th century. Books were decried as a corrupting influence. Then in the 20th century, it became movies, especially horror movies, porn, or porno literature, then video games, and social media, anything widespread and popular delivers the fear factor. But can a work of art or whatever spur somebody into action? To quote the Marquis de Sade: “Can we become anyone other than who we are?”
The controversy of 1980 was an overreaction of the times (like it was with feminists 10 years later when Basic Instinct was released in 1991, or in the early 1980s with slasher movies and video nasties in the UK). Art always gets somebody’s knickers in a twist. Cruising is a cult film because it captured a subculture of the time on screen that no longer exists. It shows a broken-down, financially bankrupt city on screen that no longer exists. It unfolds under the silently growing shadow of the AIDS crisis. It shows how a counterculture developed from a prejudiced society. It shows the lingo and codes and rituals of cruising for sex. It has become a historical document as much as an amazingly nightmarish genre flick. This is the film’s legacy. No one remembers the reviews or protests. It’s recognised as a brilliant film – which it always was.
Friedkin says he earned a reputation as a gay basher for directing Cruising. But he was simply misunderstood. The charges don’t stick. In 1970, Friedkin directed the landmark gay picture, The Boys in the Band. Most directors wouldn’t have touched it with another person’s barge pole if they were truly homophobic. Plus, you’d be a pretty rubbish homophobe if you ended up directing two classic pictures centred on gay topics in your career.
Based on a hit stage production written by Mart Crowley, Friedkin ended up directing it because he was seen as a talented filmmaker who’d yet to really show what he could do. He’d also directed – very well indeed – a screen adaptation of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party (1968). A homophobe wouldn’t have directed The Boys in the Band or Cruising. Why would they? They’d be too embarrassed or put off to be associated with material of that nature. Simple as that. Friedkin even shot a scene of two men kissing passionately for The Boys in the Band but was forced to cut it out because of sensitivities at the time of its release.
The Boys in the Band too was the story of a birthday party, a gathering of gay male friends who, over the course of the evening, explore and examine what it means to be a gay man in modern society – the repression, the fears, the desires to fit in, the having to hide their true selves. Of course, detractors hated it because they saw it as a film that wallowed in the cliché of the tortured gay. But surely these things were – and are – accurate and authentic emotions? You can’t blame a film for being made in the time it was set in – only a few years after homosexuality was decriminalised and gay people still faced enormous challenges to be socially accepted and treated equally. The Boys in the Band is a great and important film. Of its time? Sure. But it’s a benchmark, nonetheless. It’s also the film mainstream US picture ever to use the C word (beating Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge by a year). But importantly, like Cruising, it offers no moral judgement regarding the gay community. It’s not sniggering at men detailing their emotional issues any more than Cruising is judging men into fist-fucking, bondage, golden showers and having sex with strangers in parks after dark. To Friedkin, the heavy leather scene was nothing but a backdrop for his serial killer thriller, only those with an agenda aggrandised and warped its intentions.
Cruising is also unlike any cop movie before it in terms of its formal qualities. Friedkin shot the movie as a linear police procedural. In the editing, he found the movie and pushed it into darker territory. The premise sees a cop with a resemblance to the victims (and the killers) going undercover in the S&M clubs. But then the film unfolds as a surrealistic portrait of identity. Friedkin ingeniously had a trio of actors play both killers and victims in the film’s murder sequences. At the time, the film was accused by critics of being incoherent, but its incoherence is not brought about by a filmmaker struggling to put a cut together, it’s brought about by Friedkin having a ‘eureka!’ moment; finding a way to make a twisted story even more frightening. Even Al Pacino, who more or less disowned the picture and has rarely if ever spoken about it in 43 years, was outraged upon seeing the final cut, because Friedkin insinuated heavily Steve Burns was also likely one of the serial killers operating in Cruising, and that the film was not a linear cat-and-mouse serial killer thriller but a shattered mirror. To quote Kraftwerk’s The Hall of Mirrors, from the album Trans-Europe Express (1977): “Sometimes he saw his real face and sometimes a stranger at his place.” This is Friedkin’s modus operandi in the film.
Friedkin brilliantly upends the traditions of the lawman clapping the baddie in irons and restoring justice. To emphasise his spooky point, at the start of the movie, there is a shot of a man in a leather jacket entering a club from across a street at night. At the end of the picture, we see the same thing … a guy in a leather jacket entering a club. Who is this person? It doesn’t matter. It’s a cycle of doom.
The film’s penultimate shot – Burns staring into the mirror and then looking into the camera, essentially but discreetly breaking the fourth wall – the director has said his intention was to end the movie with a question to the viewer: does anybody really know a person? Cruising is about the things we hide, from others, from ourselves. That by day you’re a working stiff, or a doctor or a lawyer, and by night you get your leathers on and have this whole other identity, persona, the psychological mask is replaced for a literal one stinking of body sweat. Others outside this secret world will struggle to comprehend it. When a crossdressing male prostitute named DaVinci complains to Paul Sorvino’s Captain Edelson about police harassment, that one of his officers, DeSimone, is gay and targets male prostitutes for sex, the informant, before he’s told to take a hike, gives the police chief the beat cop’s name and precinct number. At a crime scene near the end of the film, Edelson meets this officer that DaVinci (the informant) was complaining about by chance (the cop is played by Joe Spinell, and we also see him in the Ramrod earlier on in the film, staring at Al Pacino). Captain Edelson realises the black-and-white world he knows is more shades of grey.
The same theme reappeared in Friedkin’s notorious 1990s bomb, the erotic noir thriller Jade (1995), a film which rode on the coattails of Basic Instinct and Sharon Stone’s brief career headlining bonkbusters (along with 1993’s Sliver). Jade was written by Joe Eszterhas, as were Basic Instinct and Sliver, though Friedkin pretty much re-wrote Jade to fit his own vision, leaving Eszterhas apoplectic and threatening to take his name off the picture.
Cruising and Jade are His and Hers films on the same theme: what we do in secret, the double life, and our hidden selves. It’s kinky sex after dark, but in daylight, people lead their ordinary lives and nobody knows any different. What Jade lacks is Cruising’s formal daring (though its story is convoluted), and it deals more classically with themes of loyalty and betrayal in a marriage, complete with noir embellishments such as the hero being blindsided by what he knows and thinks he knows and the femme fatale figure at the centre of the storyline. What’s interesting about Jade – in the same way Cruising depicts a cop as a killer – clinical psychologist Katrina Gavin (Linda Fiorentino) is set up to be the femme fatale villainess, but she’s actually a victim of powerful men playing corrupt games and punished because she likes to fuck and works as a high-class hooker, using the name Jade. Friedkin again upends our expectations for her character. She turns out to be a sympathetic figure … the opposite of cop Steve Burns, who is likely a serial killer.
A sumptuous film, it swaps late 1970s NYC grime and urban decay for the glossy world of the San Francisco elites, who surround themselves with lavish things in expensive houses, while giving into their desires and their murkiest impulses to dominate and control others. In this context, Jade – a film considered one of the worst films Friedkin made (though the car chase generally praised) – actually connects well to Cruising, thematically, meaning it isn’t a total write-off and has interest beyond its historic position as a movie tapping into the early and mid-1990s popularity for erotic sex and murder mysteries penned by Eszterhas. It becomes a thoroughly Friedkin affair about identity and secret lives. Back to Cruising. The film cleverly ends how it begins – again the cyclical at work – with a tugboat on the NYC river very likely about to find another chopped-up body part in the water. A murder mystery partially solved but which opens up more questions … it is the opposite of a traditional cop thriller narrative and its lack of satisfying justice marks it out. Cruising is another of Friekdin’s bravura and fearless depictions of our dark world where easy answers are hard to come by. He shot it as a thriller but in the post-production phase truly found his movie and delivered something far beyond just a genre movie with a shocking backdrop.