Queertober Part 3: Cruising

The 80s were, in many ways, one of the most important decades for the queer rights movement. Some of the important things that happened were positive sure; Desert Hearts was a great movie, we all liked Mala Noche and Gus van Sant in general. But there were some negatives; Personal Best, one of the most boring “Queer” movies in existence was released, Ronald Reagan permanently cemented half of the major political parties in America as enemies of the queer rights movement, oh and AIDS nearly completely wiped out a generation of queer men. But we’re going back to before any of that happened. Hell, when this movie was released, Reagan hadn’t even been elected yet.

Cruising exists in a genre that is frankly likely older than film; Some writer or another wants to explore a subculture, so they write an outsider entering it for some contrived reason. In this case the subculture is the New York gay hookup scene, and the contrived reason is that he’s an undercover cop (named Burns) looking for a serial killer preying on gay men. From there, you can probably predict the basics of the plot; False leads, tense confrontations, getting “In too deep” with the subculture.

Here comes the big problem; None of the principals were queer. Not writer/director William Friedkin (best known for The Exorcist or maybe The French Connection), not lead actor Al Pacino, not the writer of the novel it’s based on. As such the film can’t help but take on a voyeuristic, cruel quality. The queer men in the film can be viewed, but never explored or understood.

The premise that Burns is getting In Too Deep takes on a sick quality when you realize the implication is that he’s being corrupted by…viewing gay sex? He doesn’t do much more than stand around and watch, how is this supposed to be corrupting him? The movie goes on at length about how much this work is affecting him, but all he’s doing is going out at night and watching men fuck. None of their acts are harmful to him or to each other, so the premise tastes bitter in your mouth every time they cut from men being intimate with each other to Pacino’s incredulous and shocked face. It’s almost as if the movie is implying that gay men having sex, hell existing, is innately damaging Burns’ psyche.

Okay, I’ll pull my punches a little, but the problem is the movie seems to realize it fucked up, at least a bit. There is, in fact, an opening title talking about how this movie doesn’t actually represent all of the gay experience, but that feels like a dodge, especially in an era where the only representations of gay life were La Cage Aux Folles, The Boys in the Band and this. Honestly, it feels a little like the weak attempts to deflect Buffalo Bill away from the trans community in Silence of the Lambs (a movie I won’t be talking about in this project), a recognition that what you’re doing is harmful but without any desire to make the kind of changes that would make it not harmful.

Honestly, there are glimpses of much better, much more interesting ideas buried in there. There are occasional stabs at talking about some bigger subjects, like the corrupt nature of cops or how little they care about queer people, but this is rarely more than a subplot and never resolves. Perhaps if they’d kept the ending that had Burns turn out to be the killer, framing someone else, we could connect the dots and get to the point “Cops murder marginalized people and see no consequences” but that’s little more than hints at this theme.

I’ve now spent something like a full page talking about this film without mentioning that it’s also just incredibly boring. Queer horror movies like Sleepaway Camp and Dressed to Kill from the same decade might be more overtly hateful, but at least there’s something to hold your attention. Here there’s just nothing, except the fact that like 80 percent of the dialogue seems to be ADR. Maybe a mix of shooting on location and the very overt presence of gay rights protestors on the film blew out a lot of their on set audio, but it’s the only thing that really caught my interest.

So the movie is a wash, limp and lifeless, with disinterested performance from Pacino at the center. It may exist in the same space as Silence of the Lambs, being incredibly damaging to the community it’s depicting, but Silence at least had the courtesy to be an incredibly well made film. But also coming off the 80s, something began to happen. Something I, rather intentionally hinted at when I dropped the titles of Desert Hearts and Mala Noche up top.

Queer people were going to start to get to make their own art. And so next time we’re dealing with Todd Haynes’ Poison.