Reducing the film to its hook does absolutely nobody any favors, but let's anyway to get things rolling: somebody is murdering and dismembering homosexual men in New York, linked only by their general appearance and their frequenting of a handful of leather bars in Greenwich Village. Capt. Edelson (Paul Sorvino) of the NYPD homicide division has his job on the line if he can't crack the case, so he goes for broke: from the rank and file, he plucks up one Officer Steve Burns (Al Pacino), who physically resembles the victims, to go deep undercover. Specifically, Burns is to infiltrate the Village leather scene and offer himself as bait, in the hopes of flushing the killer out. But when this straight cop - who glides through Edelson's crass questioning of his sexual history, and has a female girlfriend, Nancy (Karen Allen), and everything - enters the bizarre realm of gay BDSM, handkerchief codes, and easy anonymous sex, things become far more troubling and distressing than just the ordinary stress of being undercover.
What, exactly, starts to happen in Burns's mind is exactly what Cruising remains steadily ambiguous on, but it seems in any case to begin with the sheer rampant Otherness of the leather fetishists. Writer-director William Friedkin took enormous pains to make sure that everybody understood that he wasn't making claims about gay men in particular, or even about the very narrow substrata of gay male life that serves as Cruising's backdrop, but it's hardly besmirching the film's aims or its effectiveness to suggest that it adopts a boggle-eyed confusion bordering on terror bordering on dreams in depicting the bars and clubs where Burns - hiding under the name of "John Forbes" - goes cruising for the killer. The way the camera peers around with prurient revulsion is half Alice in Wonderland, half David Lynch (or would have been, if there was a good base of David Lynch films to speak of by 1980), and while nothing in the film suggests that it, or Friedkin, or anybody else involved has any actual negative feelings about gay people per se, it's obviously the case that we are meant to feel spectacularly confused and disturbed by our plunge into that environment, which is presented with deliberately confusing editing and unearthly lighting and a very tense, darting camera. It is a waking nightmare, pure and simple.
This is not all that surprising a direction for Friedkin to take, given his career-long commitment to the idea that everything is awful, and people are corrupt and prone to wickedness, especially the ones who should most especially be held to a higher morality. The weirdness of the leather bars isn't a referendum on gayness so much as a referendum on humanity, and it's the rawness, visual distinctiveness, open sexual activity, and above all things the mainstream unfamiliarity of the setting that recommends as the backdrop for what is, ultimately, not the story of how a mysterious killer is (or isn't?) found out, but how a cop can have his identity broken and reassembled incorrectly. Undoubtedly, there's a healthy impulse to shock the squares present in the hard-R depiction of what goes on in Those Places, but it's not ultimately what Cruising is about.
What it is about can be a little difficult to parse. The most generous possible reading of the film would be to think of it as something of a riff on the more florid of the Italian gialli made in the idiom of the New Hollywood subgenre of filthy, gritty stories about street life in New York. Glance at a still frame, and you'd guess from James Contner's grainy, color-parched cinematography that it's one of the handful of attempts around the turn of the decade to desperately pretend that it was still 1975 and artfully artless urban docurealist filmmaking was still all the range. But put it in motion, pair it with the tinny, pasted-on sound design (a happy accident: the film had to work around protesters trying to ruin the shoot with noise), and Jack Nitzsche's industrial droning that passes for music, and you start to get a sense of sickly, creeping terror. It is a film whose visual and audible textures feel entirely ill, doom-ridden and death-soaked even without reference to the specifics of the plot, portraying a world of men doggedly, madly pursuing sex in the face of a well-publicised threat right in their midst, mysteriously selecting victims and killing them for their sexual behavior (one could say it predicts the AIDS crisis, but it's best, I think, not to risk adopting Cruising's corrosive cynicism as a frame to ever think about the spread of AIDS).
So the generous reading, again, is that the film is anxious to work first on the level of mood and impression reached more by Italian genre films (primarily; other examples can be found throughout Europe), to impart a sense of inexplicable awfulness, to work as a stylistic exaggeration of a cop story. Even the murder scenes, each of them a wildly different collage of violence with jarring visual discontinuity, have a certain European flair. And the blank slate Burns, an empty vessel into which we can pour all the psychoanalysis in the world only to find it all draining out immediately, would be perfect in a giallo.
That generosity stumbles a bit in facing what Cruising actually is, though. Whatever Friedkin's aims might have been - his career isn't marked by the kind of disconcerting non-realism I'm trying to make a case for, but it's not a complete out-of-nowhere curveball - the film itself is a bit more muddled than it is deliberately obscure. The biggest problem is Burns himself, or at least Pacino's performance; while there is value in giving the cop no backstory and only whispers of an interior life before it starts to be torn down by his disorienting experiences, and it's clear what Friedkin hoped to achieve by casting that actor of all actors (quintessentially masculine, but in a very delicate, breakable way, and he's weirdly "pretty" despite looking in no way effeminate), I don't see in Pacino's face the impression that he was making those connections. Instead, he seems to be largely walking, uninfected, through scenes that deny him any kind of Method hook to get into the character. And it's plainly uncomfortable - not in a way that reinforces the film's attempt to build discord, but in a way that reminds us that we're watching Al Pacino standing in front of a camera trying to decide what his character things about watching men screwing. It's alienating in the worst way for what the film wants to achieve.
There's also the whole matter of the script, which simply doesn't gel. Not in the sense that things don't make sense all the time - they don't, and a legendary cut 40 minutes is perhaps to blame - but that the film simply plops things together and expects story and meaning to emerge from the fact that they are now adjacent. It's most ineffective when it starts to flesh out the maybe-probably killer near the end, and the attempt to balance Burns's increasing fragmentation with the flat, generic crime movie staging of all the scenes finds the film tripping over rake after rake for some 30 straight minutes. But there's a nagging disconnect between how the film "feels" and what it does much earlier, such as when Burns is given a chipper gay sidekick in the form of Ted Bailey (Don Scardino), or every time Burns retrenches to the arms of the horribly underwritten Nancy, a series of gestures that don't suggest normalcy, self-delusion, or anything other than a calculated attempt to remind a skittish audience, at intervals, that the protagonist for real really likes pussy.
I want to admire the stylish madness of Cruising; but the film makes it incredibly hard to do so. It's certainly not the grotesque failure of art and morality described in 1980: as failures go, it's a tremendously interesting one. But a failure nonetheless: a failure at digging into a subculture with any kind of class or insight, of marrying a pointedly inscrutable psychodrama with Friedkin's muscly directorial style, a failure of building a basic meat-and-potatoes cop picture that fits together comfortably.
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