William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980) is an exploitive trip through the seamy leather bars and BDSM scene of gay New York just before that scene was devastated by the AIDS crisis. Gay advocacy groups at the time denounced it for its obsessive conflation of gay life and violence. They still do.
Those critiques aren’t wrong. But they take on some different weight, or history, when you recognize the film’s links to noir, and to that genre’s fascination with, and horror at, the gendered failure of patriarchal order. When men fail to be men and women fail to be women in noir, it’s a sign of corruption and collapse. But it’s also, in a shadowy register, a questioning of norms and a corrupting, seductive possibility.
The corruption and collapse here focus on a serial killer who’s murdering men in the gay BDSM leather scene in New York City. Steve Burns (Al Pacino) is ordered to go undercover and try to attract and capture the killer. Much of the screentime follows Steve as he cruises like a policeman for a suspect while simultaneously cruising as a gay man looking for sex. The viewer is right there with Steve, wandering into sweaty precinct nights at the bar where everyone is writhing against each other in cop uniforms, or sliding into sweaty screening rooms, or meeting the knowing gazes of men in the park.
As often in noir, the decadence on display is supposed to be a repulsive sign of immorality and deviance. And also, the decadence is appealing, exciting, arousing. Steve’s own investment is very uncertain. When his chief, Captain Edelson (Paul Sorvino) asks him, in preparation for the assignment, whether he’s ever had his cock sucked by a man, he laughingly says he hasn’t… and then hesitates as if he’s uncertain whether he has or not. He also tells his girlfriend Nancy (Karen Allen) that “there’s a lot you don’t know about me.” He might be referring to the fact that Nancy doesn’t know he’s an undercover cop cruising gay clubs, since his assignment is secret. Or he might be tipping us off that he’s a gay man, or even the murderer.
We never see Steve having sex with men. But when he cruises men, and particularly in the climactic encounter, he’s very confident with flirtation and with the sexual interplay of the scene. Is he just a good study, or is there more to it? Does he stop having sex with Nancy because the gay underworld has upset him, or because it has excited him?
The film’s flirtation with gay life is, again, exploitative; viewers are encouraged to adopt a voyeuristic perspective which is half-moralistic disgust and half-titillation. But there are also moments when the solicitation of viewer identification is less poisonous and more genuine.
In encounters between gay men on the street and cops, for example, you’re generally encouraged to take the side of the gay men. A couple of beat cops harass and rape a hustler who’s a police informant; he attempts to get Edelson to stop them, and he refuses because he’s a bigot and cops are cops. When Steve brings in a suspect who’s not the murderer, the cops nonetheless terrorize him, sexually humiliate him, and, in the movie’s most bizarre scene, bring in a large Black man in a cowboy hat and a jockstrap to smack him across the face. The gay men in the scene playact male on male violence; the sadism of the cops is much more sincere.
The big guy in the jockstrap hits Steve too to give his undercover identity verisimilitude. Steve has to take the punishment of a gay man, and he is, perhaps as a result, angry at the way the cops mistreat gay suspects. He also forms connections in his work; he befriends a gay neighbor, Ted Bailey (Don Scardino), a sweet aspiring playwright who isn’t in the leather scene. Steve identifies with the gay men around him. He’s not preying on them. He isn’t a cop.
But he is a cop, and there are indications that he may be preying on them. We never get a good look at the killer’s face when he commits his crimes, but he wears the same outfit of leather jacket, policeman’s cap, and sunglasses that Steve sometimes adopts. The killer also at one point sings an odd nursery rhyme (“Who’s here? I’m here. You’re here.”) which the killer sings as well. In the climactic scene, where Steve and the final suspect are preparing to have sex, one of them attacks the other—but it’s not clear who pulls their knife first. And then there’s Ted, who ends up dead from stab wounds after the killer’s caught, and after Steve had fought with Ted’s lover, who believed that Steve was sleeping with him. Is Ted’s death a coincidence? Did his jealous roommate kill him? Or is Steve responsible?
Psycho, with its split personality queer villain, and Taxi Driver, with its hero who’s also a psychopath, are the two most obvious predecessors here. But Steve also evokes fears of knowingness and contagion that cling to homosexual panic—the idea that if you can recognize gay people, if you see them, then they become you. This means that those who observe and regulate gender norms lose their own grip on those norms. If you know, you know. And if you’re a cop tasked with recognizing violence, the knife often ends up in your hand.
Noir rarely presents a liberatory vision, and Cruising doesn’t. Noir also often questions the forces of order, though, and there’s something to be said for a portrayal of gay life which so resolutely paints the cops as a virulent danger to queer people—which cops often are. In the final scene of the movie, Nancy dresses up playfully in Steve’s leather jacket and hat while Steve, in the bathroom, stares into the mirror with a blank expression. What he sees is some overlapping amalgam of gay man, killer, and cop—an uneasy reflection on the ways that policing the borders of gender identity can turn pleasure and play into violence.