The Talkies / Cruising
Podhoretz, John
"The Talkies / Cruising" Since the collapse of the internal censorship system in Hollywood, American movies have become increasingly explicit in their portrayals of sexual practices and violent acts. In...
...Cruising wants only to nauseate, and it succeeds...
...There is only the camera prowling incessantly, watching people whose behavior is repellently incomprehensible...
...So Richards is psychotic...
...It tells us nothing about the world it shows us at such obscene Iength...
...Why then must he be homosexual...
...The new movie is almost assuredly the most sexually explicit and possibly the most violent movie yet to come out of big-money Hollywood...
...then The Exorcist...
...trate, finds himself falling into its dark and awful way of life...
...The master of this oneupmanship is Sam Peckinpah, whose brilliant and violent The Wild Bunch led to the merely violent Straw Dogs and finally to the grotesque excesses of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, in which said head is toted about in a saddlebag, out of which it frequently tumbles...
...It only shows us what men look like in leather underwear...
...today it is quite possible that it would be given a "PG" rating...
...And now, with Cruising, it appears that William Friedkin has been playing the watch-me-top-this game as well...
...He cannot cross a streetcorner where there are not scores of muscle-bound men scantily clad either in strips of black leather or in garb vaguely resembling the uniform of a Hell's Angel...
...There is even the suggestion, at the film's end, that he may have taken over the role of murderer from Stuart Richards, the schizophrenic Columbia University student responsible for the killings...
...Even after he catches, and stabs, the murderer, he is unable to get away from the Greenwich Village waterfront that is the center of the sadomasochistic homosexual world...
...He refuses because his movie is a Work of pornography, in which logic and clarity disappear and sensation becomes everything...
...Does Friedkin even care...
...And so his movie comes across as the work of a peeping Tom who is peeping at a world he himself has created...
...The movie forsakes plot, characterization, accurate detail, and all the other things that make movies worthwhile for a two-hour look through a telescope at your neighborhood S-M bar...
...It appears now that Friedkin has one goal only: to make his audience sick...
...And he is an extremely gifted filmmaker...
...In 1967, there was an outcry over the ending of Bonnie and Clyde, in which the title characters are massacred in slow-motion by machine-gun fire...
...In fact, the only performers who stay in mind at all are the obviously homosexual extras, doing that which they almost certainly do even when cameras are not fixed upon them...
...There are perhaps a hundred lines of dialogue, recited by a cast, headed by Al Pacino as Burns, that seems halfway asleep...
...Despite the performances of the extras, Cruising is not a convincing depiction of this sadomasochistic, unnatural world...
...Cruising shares none of the stomachturning honesty and conviction of by John Podhoretz Larry Kramer's satiric riovel Faggots, nor does it exude the kind of selfhating knowledge that a little British film called Nighthawks does...
...What is driving Steve Burns to homosexuality and murder...
...Just as the destructive strains in the rock-music world led to the rise of punk-rock and groups like the Sex Pistols, whose lead singer bit the necks of live chickens on stage, so have the escalating trends of sexual "honesty" and "realistic" violence found their apex in the sheer gratuitousness of Cruising...
...CRUISING S i n c e the collapse of the internal censorship system in Hollywood, American movies have become increasingly explicit in their portrayals of sexual practices and violent acts...
...It seems clearly the product of a writer-director who has had little or no contact with the real "subculture" he is attempting to portray in such a realistic fashion...
...Richards kills on command from/sis father, who we subsequently learn has been dead for ten years...
...First, The French Connection...
...In this day of "tolerance" and of easy psychologizing, Friedkin refuses even to give lip service to the irksome questions the movie raises...
...now Cruising...
...today such a scene would certainly merit only the slightest of reactions from its audience...
...How entertaining...
...The music pounds ominously, Pacino's eyes drop and his face hardens--but never again is any mention made of the father...
...There are no answers...
...Each time a certain level of explicitness is reached, it seems, Hollywood outdoes itself...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1980 23...
...There is, it is true, one moment when Burns' girl friend tells him that his father called...
...Why are these people drowning in bestiality and cruelty...
...Cruising is surely a landmark in the history of cinematic unpleasantness...
...What about Richards himself leads Burns to take over the killing...
...Is it praise to say he has achieved that which he set out to do...
...What has driven Stuart Richards to murder...
...The camera prowls around like a beserk voyeur, pausing lovingly on men whose tongues are touching, panning across the contorted face of someone being buggered, stopping magisterially over a figure, being whipped, whose arms and legs are bound together...
...Cruising is a movie, then, that derives all of its gruesome fabric from its camera alone, and thus it is not surprising to note that it comes across almost as a silent film with, of course, the necessary musical accompaniment...
...Burns, who must affect homosexuality and dress in the leathered garb of the little society he has been assigned to infilJohn Podhoretz is a student at the University of Chicago...
...The movie misses no opportunity to capitalize on the juiciness of its subject matter...
...What leads him to kill homosexuals...
...Burns cannot enter a room which is not populated by dozens of homosexual couples kissing or engaging in some disgusting sexual practice...
...And the murder scenes are dramatized with especial flourish: We hear the knife enter the victim's back, we see the victim's agonized face, we see the knife raised up and plunged down again and again into the victim's body, and at last we see the victim dead, lying amid quarts of his own blood...
...S t e v e Burns, the protagonist of Cruising, is a patrolman on the New York City police force who is given a special assignment: to attract, and apprehend, a murderer whose victims are exclusively homosexuals who are "into leather" and whose sexual behavior is, to say the least, bizarre even for the mainstream of the "gay subculture...
...In 1970, A Clockwork Orange received an "X" rating...
...in the process, the air is necessarily and evilly befouled...
Vol. 13 • April 1980 • No. 4
