Cruising | October 2019

JASON SHAWHAN

As I write this, I can feel the spirit of Saint Vito Russo hovering over the computer, radiating concerned disappointment. Cruising is one of those legendary films maudits in the history of gay cinema: it is a lightning rod for the community and a rallying point for folks tired of having their collective reputations used as narrative spice for another movie about a cop who gets in over his head and discovers social inequality among a minority group.

But, like its chrome bisexual sister, Basic Instinct, Cruising has found its reputation bolstered over the years and its critical rehabilitation fully underway. Now, Cruising is a snapshot of pre-AIDS New York City, valuable as a document of the leather and BDSM scenes, as well as illustrative of how the queer community is viewed by institutions of patriarchal power.

Steve Burns (Al Pacino) is an up-andcoming police officer who just happens to fit a type. This type of man (“party-size”) has been turning up dead because of a killer operating on the periphery of the underground sex clubs in the meat-packing district. The police decide to recruit Burns for a deep cover operation to infiltrate the leather community and stop the murderer. So the wide-eyed ‘young’ cop gets introduced to a whole new world, one with a (doomed) kindly playwright but also stuffed to the gills with fisting, poppers, roleplay, hanky codes, and so many daddy issues of all sorts.

The film is still a tonal mess. It can’t decide if it’s a travelogue into decadence, a down and dirty mystery, or a social issues movie, and it vacillates back and forth. It’s not an antigay film, but it’s surprisingly gay-ignorant for a film so deeply devoted to leather daddy verisimilitude. It’s got these weird experimental touches around the edges that have aged the best, as well as several surprisingly great performances, but this crashes into some surprisingly tone-deaf choices (inserting subliminal frames from actual porn into a violent stabbing scene has never been a woke option). But, in a way, this tension in its very structure helps keep it relevant in a way that more ideologically-focused films simply aren’t. Toxic emotional legacies are never a thing of the past, sadly.

The new blu-ray release of Cruising from Arrow Video is somewhat controversial, mainly because any time one of his films gets an HD release, director William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection) tends to mess around with the color timing, edits, and textures of the image. Having never seen an original 35mm print, I can’t compare the new transfer on that level. But the disc looks good, with strong colors and accurate-looking grain structure (and no color-strobing during the poppers sequence). There’s a couple of audio commentaries, and some featurettes that provide some interesting contexts.

Cruising, for all its many issues, deserves a spot in gay cinema history. After almost four decades, any film that retains that kind of controversial power deserves some kind of respect, even if grudging. And Karen Allen in a leather daddy outfit is a timeless lewk.