Critics and the gay community were quick to either dismiss or condemn William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980) during its initial release. But, a contemporary reading, post-eighties and the New Queer Cinema of the nineties seems in order, if not in demand. With a 35mm midnight screening last night at the Ritz Bourse, and an awe inspiring soundtrack reissue from Waxwork Records released earlier in 2019 as well as a Blu-Ray release in the works at Arrow Films, it seems Cruising is coming back into focus.
Officer Steve Burns (Al Pacino) goes undercover to investigate a number of killings that have occurred in the insular world of New York’s gay S&M black leather sub culture. In Cruising the character Steve Burns exists as an avatar for the spectator. Burns is the means by which we see and hear the world of the film, even if his character is one of dual personas (queer and repressed). The first incarnation of Burns we encounter is the blue-collar “average Joe” cop with a loving girlfriend named Nancy (Karen Allen). The second is the undercover man of action and fiery passions, confronted with an alien lifestyle in which he must become absorbed. Friedkin articulates this identity crisis by intercutting scenes of Burns and Nancy throughout Burns’ undercover investigation. With every instance that Friedkin brings us back to Nancy, the relationship between Burns and Nancy becomes more distant and strained. It becomes clearer and clearer that Burns’ undercover identity has taken a hold of him, that he has redefined his sense of self in a reality that, to him, had only ever existed as a distant unreality or subconscious dream, a world of fantasy and media stereotypes.
And that is the point. Cruising is designed to be an immersive exploration of sexual repression and masculine posturing. This is a film that, despite its gritty neo-realist approach to setting, is actually quite stylized and subjective insofar as the world of the film we see is the world as seen by Steve Burns. Friedkin’s script, an adaptation of a novel by Gerald Walker, is full of narrative and visual repetitions as well as graphic allusions that promise a subjectivity while locking the film aesthetically somewhere between “camp” and Italian Giallo films (though these aesthetic approaches seem unlikely to work in tandem, Friedkin is adept enough to pull it off). Friedkin’s sensibilities for rhythm and rhyming images/sequences are primarily why the film is able to transcend being just another genre film and attain something closer to a social critique.
Consider the scene where Paul Sorvino has to convince Al Pacino to keep undercover, to keep going with the case. Sorvino says “I need you”, “We are in this together”, and so forth. This language between two men with a professional relationship echoes the language we hear at the various private clubs Pacino attends. In this moment, as with many of the scenes between Sorvino and Pacino, the intimate and the homoerotic enter the sphere of “work”. The erotic permeates every aspect of life in Cruising no matter the presentation. When Pacino first meets with Sorvino to take the assignment he isn’t wearing black leather, he is wearing a police uniform. But still, the dialogue is very much the same; all the hinting, teasing and flirting is present. It’s as if the erotic voice is constant despite the fluidity of the image. Likewise, the crooked cops at the beginning of the film reverberate throughout; from “Precinct Night” to the discovery of Ted’s body. Cruising, despite the original disclaimer that Vito Russo found so offensive, isn’t so much about gay or queer sub cultures as it is about masculine culture as a whole and all of its different iterations and possible manifestations.
It’s important not to overlook Steve Burns’ remarkable similarity to the title character Pacino played in Serpico (1973). Both men are undercover police officers and both men’s stories function as an allegory for the masculine identity in crisis. Where Serpico and Burns diverge is in the manner of this crisis. Burns, as discussed above, is experiencing a sexual awakening and is beginning to see his world metamorphose to reflect that. Serpico, on the other hand, is more interested in closing off his different personas/characters and locating a single personality that he could call his own. Serpico, the more conservative character of the two, represents the struggle to obtain the mid twentieth century masculine heterosexual male ideal. Burns does away with heterosexuality. Burns’ sexuality is far more fluid and flexible, even though his persona is equally as masculine as Serpico’s.
