In the Flesh: Cruising

The closer homophobia gets to its subject, the more it’s forced to reckon with the inescapable reality of homosexual existence, the more it becomes a reflection of that existence’s complexities. Joy and struggle, squalor and tedium, love and resentment; all the workaday building blocks which together make up existence as a gay individual in a larger gay community. Director William Friedkin’s infamous Cruising, a film which follows ambitious beat cop Steve Burns (Al Pacino) on an undercover assignment in pursuit of a serial killer operating in New York City’s gay S&M community, brings its focus so deep into that world’s context that the straight world begins to vanish in its rearview mirror. The slick of sweat. The seething beat of dance music. The soft ripple of light on polished leather. The film’s viewpoint on gay life is as expansive as its glimpses of heterosexuality are minute and suffocating.

Take the apartment of Steve’s girlfriend Nancy (Karen Allen), an expansive Brooklyn loft bathed in natural light. We see it only in intentionally cramped shots, a character filling one half of the screen, the other occupied by a narrow sliver of hardwood floor and the black aperture of an open door. When the couple make love we observe from a smotheringly close remove, focused entirely on the inhuman landscape of a rippling back, or on Steve’s dead-eyed stare as Nancy rides him. In Central Park and in gay bars and hookup spots like The Cock Pit and The Ramrod, by contrast, the world is full of space and motion. Figures flit and kiss and make love in fairytale thickets. Men pass through the dim, echoing tunnels of brickwork arches under foot bridges. The demimonde has the vitality and crackling danger that the sunlit world lacks.

There is a complex exploitative element at work in Friedkin’s approach to be sure, with its brutal depictions of police violence against trans sex workers and gay men, and in its giallo-esque serial killer sequences, but through faithful reproduction of homophobic circumstances it by necessity creates a deeply human simulacrum of gay life in the New York of the late 1970s. Pacino is a ghostly cipher as Burns, a man as unsure of himself as, by the end of the film, we will become. “Something’s happening to me,” he tells Nancy haltingly after dissociating through their lovemaking. Many critics have accused Friedkin of making “incoherent” changes to the film’s assembly cut in order to generate the open, uncertain ending he wanted, but to dismiss the contradictory events of Cruising’s final act is to ignore the richness of its characterization, the blurring of lines — cop and killer, gay and straight, man and woman — so essential to understanding both Burns’s dysfunction and the tangled, unspoken yearning which propels him ever deeper into the underworld of hardcore gay S&M. The point is not events or names or faces, but the collision of discrete but overlapping realities, the creation and destruction of new understandings of our place in the world in that primal fire of cataclysm.