Sunday, February 9, 2014

Cruising

Cruising (1980) directed by William Friedkin 
“If it were true that sovereignty and freedom are the same thing, then indeed no man could be free, because sovereignty, the ideal uncompromising self-sufficiency and mastership, is contradictory to the very condition of plurality.” -Hannah Arendt
A controversial film which sparked protests and outrage from the gay community, stars a young Al Pacino as a police officer who is investigating a series of murders involving gay men in the New York underground club scene. When the officer goes undercover in the S&M and leather bars, he finds himself in too deep, swept up in a world of sex and drugs.





I could have easily opted to discuss any number of scenes in Cruising because the film is interested in the anxieties around public sex, or sexual culture, specifically urban gay male.  Because Delany spends most of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue reminiscing about his time in porn theaters, it feels only right to go straight to the scene in Cruising that takes place in a porn theater.  In typical thriller-horror film style, we get a glimpse into the life of the serial killer’s next victim.  After cruising down the street in his convertible, the victim stops by a gay porn shop and theater.  Punk music blasts as the young man walks through a blue-lit hallway (a midnight blue is seen throughout the film) lined with potential hookups.  Following the serial killer into a private booth, the man proceeds by performing oral sex on the killer.  With the man on his knees, unzipping the killer’s fly, we see a knife revealed.  The silhouette of the knife projects onto the screen that plays an amateur gay fetish film.  The killer stabs the man repeatedly, exclaiming, “you made me do this,” before fleeing the scene.

Watching Cruising, I am continually reminded of the backlash against the film, the protests that were spurred because liberated gay men in urban centers were tired of being represented as villains and victims in mainstream media.  It is almost impossible to remove this history from the imagery in Cruising, no matter how campy or artificial these images appear today.  At the same time, one cannot deny the beauty and sexiness of the film, an aesthetic that seems to take from 1970s gay pornography.  We then arrive at the very paradox at the heart of liberation politics of the 1970s: Wanting to be seen as “like you,” not as outsiders or freaks or villains or weirdos, but as normal people, so much of liberation politics was embedded in subcultures of leather bars, bathhouses, porn theaters, drag balls, dance clubs, etc.  Sexual liberation and gay liberation meet here.  We are forced to ask, then, whose view of culture were the activists who protested Cruising seeking to change?  Was it their own, that of themselves as self-loathing, or was it of straight hegemonic culture, seen completely outside of their subculture and thus overpowering?

Samuel R. Delany enters the question of liberation from a dramatically different angle, one that I would audaciously state mirrors Al Pacino’s character development to an extent.  For Delany, the complex psychic life of the city can trump any form of visible activism.  “Let them think what they want,” Delany seems to say, “we know what we experienced in those theaters”.  This is what allows Delany to discuss the sexual mingling of men who identified as either straight or gay—he is not beholden to any ideal of identity promoted through any kind of identity politics.  This is perhaps what makes Cruising so queer—not that it gives us an “in” to the underground scene of pre-AIDS gay subcultures, or that it depicted those subcultures for a mainstream film-going audience—but that is sees the imaginative possibilities for sexuality within the central character of the undercover cop in sexual crisis.  This is why I decided to include the quote from Hannah Arendt.  We are reminded that true freedom manifests through plurality, and that sovereignty is, in fact, the suppression of that ideal.  

In a scene that should come to represent the whole film—the porn theater as site of anonymous sexual contact and exchange as a site of vulnerability and its exploitation—ironically reads better with Samuel Delany’s understanding of the porn theater, as a site of anonymous sexual contact and exchange, a site that mainstream culture is free to do with it whatever it wants, that the complexity lies elsewhere—in this case, in the character of the undercover cop. 
                    
                                                                                                                     -M.N.