in absentia: a film
obscuring its own character
by Douglas Messerli
William Friedkin (based on the fiction by Gerald
Walker) (screenwriter and director) Cruising / 1980
I have quite purposely
waited for several years to review this film, in part to let all the resentment
and anger that William Friedkin’s film Cruising produced upon its
release to die down, and also because I, myself, wanted to view it with an as
objective eye as I might be able to.
I was there when this film appeared, and I
had some New York friends who were actively involved in the protest of the
film. Although the LGBTQ+ community had not yet been established, gay
liberation and it’s sense of openness had truly evolved, and the gay community
were rightfully afraid that focusing on the S&M scene in the context of a
murder story would demean not only the leather crowds of bars like Ramrod and
the Mineshaft—both of which I had occasionally visited in my year in Manhattan
in 1969—would once again confuse a world unacquainted with the gay world into
believing that this was what homosexual life was all about, in the same way the
previous generation were frustrated by the closeted, quick-witted Noel
Coward-like figures in The Boys in the Band had represented the gay
experience in the previous decade. Just as importantly, the first reports of
AIDS, then described as a gay disease were beginning to be heard by the already
embattled male gay community. Was this really the appropriate time to feature a
movie in which an BDSM lurker was busy killing off his fellow gay men? As Vito
Russo argued a year later in The Celluloid Closet, in the movies all gay
men have to die.
In fact, Freidkin was using the setting
primarily for its shock value, to explore how a world in which young men in
leather who symbolically play out the most masculine values of the heterosexual
work, including torture and punishment, might easily allow, unwillingly,
someone into their midst who could actually take just such tropes further,
cutting up bodies and tossing them in the Manhattan rivers or literally
slashing his victims dozens of times.
I recall visiting the art gallery only a
few years later (1985) of Andrew Crispo, who after a few moments of discussing
their current show of Robert Mapplethorpe’s flower paintings, he began to joke
that perhaps he should lock up Howard in one their closets. Howard quickly
laughed it off, but I, now wide-eyes and terrified, knew something was amiss
and quickly maneuvered our departure.
A few weeks later, a partially burned body
of a 26-year-old man was found in a Rockland County smokehouse clad only in a
leather hood. The young man had been drugged under Crispo’s control, and along
with Crispo’s friend Bernard LeGeros, demanded that the victim kneel as he shot
him, the gun later found in his 57th Street Galley. Crispo was charged with
kidnapping, sodomy, assault, coercion, and unlawful imprisonment, but
eventually go off when LeGeros took the fall for him, admitting to the crime,
Crispo later being jailed simply for tax evasion.
As the scenes of Friedkin’s movie reveal,
those very bars, owned by the mafia, were wild places of open sex in those
days, not so when I visited them in 1996, although clearly, as even the bar I
regularly attended, there were back rooms with sex orgies. Since I was never
into S&M behavior, I didn’t bother to visit them.
A
young cop, who shares the look of one of the gay men who was killed, a Columbia
professor, is asked if he might like to temporarily join the detective squad,
with a possible promise of advance if he can help catch them. The ambitious
young man, Steve Burns (Al Pacino) agrees, although when told when he will have
to do, go undercover, leave his girlfriend Nancy Gates (Karen Allen) behind,
and act for several months as a S&M gay man, regularly visiting the gay
bars such as The Ramrod and the Mineshaft on the lookout for the possible
killer, at first does startle him a bit; but he agrees to the assignment,
putting his previous life behind as he moves into an apartment in the West
Village, not then nearly as tony as it is today, befriending a fellow gay man
who down the hall Ted Bailey (Don Scardino), who shares an apartment with an
abusive partner.
In many senses, it is clear that Burns has
no comprehension just how much the police are hated. Just previous to his entry
into the film we have seen to abusive cops arrest two crossdressers, who they
threaten with jail unless their perform sexual acts upon them, meaning presumably
offering the copes blowjobs. One of the crossdressers complains to the police,
but absolutely nothing comes of it. Clearly the police are heads, including
Captain Edelson, who has hired Burns for his job, are willing to take any
action against their own.
The
confusion between the abuse by police and men who prey upon the gay community,
accordingly, merely helps those such as the killer hide out in the shadows,
which might in the shadows, which might be anywhere from the bars downtown to
the Rambles in Central Park, or even Columbia University itself.
For a long while, the movie simply settles
in to watch Burns’ slow assimilation on the gay scene he attempting to impersonate.
But gradually, as he subtly queries bartenders and others, he begins to
discover the dangers and joys of the scene, not only that of killers, who in
fact in those days were not just singular, but the police themselves.
One
might say that he slowly gets sucked into the world he is investigating. And he
feels uncomfortable with what he is experiencing, running back, against the
strictures, to his lover and their comfortable apartment in several instances,
just to remind himself of who he really is—or at least used to be.
The major trouble with this film is not
its lurid presentation of the S&M gay world, of which there are several
glimpses, but the fact that, perhaps because of the backlash of the gay
community, the director was terrified of actually showing his character in any
real involvement in the scene. We have to simply assume that in some of his
meet-ups, with gay men in the Rambles and elsewhere result in sex, but Friedman
dare not show any real relationships, but simply hint at them, which even
further alienates both his character and his audiences from feeling any true
sympathy, which does in fact make this a film simply about a community which he
and his character can never penetrate, even if we sense he is now firmly entrenched.
He even bothers to learn from a local purveyor (played by Powers Boothe, who
later played a true gay true monster Jim Jones, who killed most of his
religious followers in Jim Jones in Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones
that very same year) about the meaning of the various colored hankies worn in
various pockets. And his friendship with his neighbor Bailey deepens. But we
get no sense of how he describes on his various trips back home to his increasingly
confused girlfriend, whom he cannot tell of his undercover job, is truly
changing him, which would have turned this film into a perhaps much more
profound work.
In his
1980 review Roger Ebert detected the problem and put it quite simply—he was
never as profound reviewer as he was imagined to be:
The validity of these
arguments [those of the protesters against the film] is questionable and I plan
to discuss them in another article. For the purposes of this review, however,
let it be said that the dramatic power of “Cruising” seems to have been very
negatively affected by the protests against the movie. There’s evidence here
that key elements of Al Pacino’s central role were altered or compromised so
that Pacino’s own involvement in the events of the plot is deliberately left
unclear. Since the movie is about his involvement – much more than it’s ‘about’
the challenge of solving the killings – what we’re left with is a movie without
the courage to declare itself.”
Keith Phillips in a 2022 review in The Reveal, summarizes
the entire situation much more fully, and I quote at length accordingly:
“….We’re never shown what happens when Steve
wanders off with other men at the end of scenes, and Steve seemingly never
admits his new (?) feelings to himself. If you’re not paying attention, you
might miss this subtext entirely. Friedkin bakes ambiguity into the film in
ways that are stylistically fascinating but also kind of gross. Though they
speak in the same overdubbed voice, different actors play the killer in each
murder scene. (Shades of Zodiac.) Is there more than one killer? Is it a
comment on the way participants in the scene lose their identities in the roles
they play? Or is it a not-so-subtle equation with the leather scene—and
homosexuality in general—with death? The film’s infamous climax—and, yes,
spoilers ahead—suggests that Steve might have become a killer. Or maybe he was
the killer all along?
Ultimately, Cruising ambiguous-es
itself to death. It makes villains of homophobic cops who harass cross-dressing
sex workers (and demand sexual favors of them) and depicts Steve’s gay neighbor
(and maybe love interest?) Ted…with tremendous sympathy— if not enough sympathy
to avoid turning him into the trope of a tragic, doomed gay man. But it mostly
wants to gawp at what it sees, lingering on lurid details in ways that feel
designed to shock rather than invite consideration. As Phil Nobile Jr. put it
in a 2012 look at the film, the ‘extreme subculture is more exploited than
explored.’ In 1980, depictions of gay sexuality of any kind in mainstream films
were pretty rare and usually pretty tame. Though less explicit in the released
version than in Friedkin’s original cut, Cruising drops viewers in the deep end
with explicit depictions of an intentionally insular gay subculture. Today, a
thriller set in a gay nightclub scene would be one of many depictions of LGBTQ+
existence. Unschooled viewers in 1980 with no point of comparison were given no
reason not to mistake it for the whole of LGBTQ+ existence by a film that
invited them to view it with, at best, wariness and suspicion. (Even the
terminology making distinctions between L, G, B, T, Q, and + wasn’t in place
yet.)”
There are moments when the film almost
redeems itself, as when Burns, mistakenly it appears, focuses on a young local
waiter Skip Lee (Jay Acovone), who working at a steak restaurant uses knives
quite similar to those which killed the victims, and actually lures him into bed,
with talk of tying the policeman up and having sex. Losing reception outside in
a police truck, the cops get terrified about the situation and come rushing to
Burns rescue before he is even able to begin any sexual contact or discover whether
or not the young man is dangerous. Still, he is arrested and beaten by the
police and to protect Burn’s identity, he too is roughed up by a near-naked
black cop who enters and punches him in the face, a sort of marvelous role,
given the justification it proposes of a black man hired to thump dirty white
boys for just who they are.
Finally, disgusted by the police’s gay bashing, Burns threatens to quit
the job. He is convinced by Edelson to continue as he reprimands the officers
involved with Lee’s interrogation. But still, he doesn’t seek out other street
cops who have long been abusing gay figures.
Nonetheless, Burns returns to his job,
focusing now on a student of the Columbia professor, one of the first to be murdered.
Burns now suspects, through searches of class pictures, Stuart Richards, a
graduate music student whom Burns has seen previously at one of the bars.
Richards seems outwardly ordinary, but when Burns breaks into his apartment he
discovers S&M attire, and a box of highly disturbing letters he has written
to his deceased father. He also discovers a knife in his closet, again matching
the one used by the murderer.
Luring the young man out of his apartment,
he follows him later to the park where he cruises for sex. Richards, now
knowing Burns is on to him, cannot help but play the sexual game, as Burns asks
Richards to lower his pants. Richards pulls out his knife, but the policeman
quickly disarms him. Later, taken into police custody, medical figures argue
that the letters indicate schizophrenia, and forensic specialists determine
that his fingerprints on the knife match those discovered at other murder
sites.
In a sense Burns becomes a sort of “hero”
whom Edelson can finally congratulate. That is until
Ted Bailey, Burns’ friend down the hall is found
to be brutally stabbed, perceived a lover’s quarrel with his abusive partner
Gregory (James Remar). But when Edelson discovers that his own man lived just
down the hall, he has now his own suspicions that change the entire film.
I don’t see that there is any evidence of
Burns’ involvement. Just a few days previously, he has almost violently
confronted Gregory for his abuse of Bailey, and throughout the film Bailey is
one of his only true friends. And there is utterly no evidence that he approached Bailey for sex and was turned down, the only other logical explanation for such an act.
Why the director suddenly wanted to shift
blame to Burns himself is more than inexplicable and almost disgusting,
suggesting perhaps that anyone into bondage or S&M can quickly move into violent
territory.
If nothing else, there is now clear
evidence that Burns has changed his sexual identification, which again is
something that the directorial team has not quite figured out. Is sexuality
simply a matter of being exposed to it, or is it inborn. In 1980 there were no
clear answers which increasingly, of course, we now see to be inborn with perhaps
some social-parental issues also playing a role.
In
the film, however, Burns, having finally made up with Nancy, promising now to
tell her about his role after he shaves, discovers Nancy dressed in his leather
jacket, hat, and aviator glasses, while he looks off, as the Wikipedia article puts it, "blankly into the mirror." He appears he will not find it easy going back to regular heteronormative life.
In short, Cruising in 2026 is not
the monstrous film it was once seen to be, but just a failed and confused film
by a talented director who should have done far more research on his subjects
and locations before even imagining the he might be able to capture the issues
it attempts to explore. Cruising might have been a far better film if
only it wasn’t shot in 1980, at a time when the gay movement was coming into
its identity, and was understandably nervous about how it was portrayed,
particularly given the S&M focus of this work. Friedkin’s arguments that
his film was never really about the gay world but was a murder mystery are
rather lame in retrospect. But had he fully embraced his themes, expanded some
of his characters and made them truly human, with his directorial talents he
might have made a brilliant gay film long before such a work was even imagined.
This movie merely escapes from really exploring its own subject.
Los Angeles, August 14, 2026
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(August 2026).
