The Boys in the Band is a very difficult film to sit through, especially now since we know that many of the actors died so young, most of them from AIDS. It is, however, extremely well acted and well directed by Friedkin.
Cruising, on the other hand, is not a very good movie. The protests only served to drive Friekdkin further from the script and make a film that was sensationalistic on one hand and incoherent on the other. I will say, though, that I disagree that Pacino gave a bad performance. He is actually quite good within the limitations Friedkin put on him.
Cruising
Penelope wrote:to see it now being presented as some kind of misunderstood "classic" is just, well, astonishing.
.
You are absolutely right. Cruising is messy, badly acted (especially by an over-intense and at the same time strangely unexpressive Pacino - I know, it's an oxymoron, but see the movie), populated with uninteresting, cliched characters, and - though this wouldn't necessarily prevent it from being even a masterpiece of course - yes, let's say it, still obviously homophobic. The fact that nowadays it is just laughably homophobic, and actually often unintentionally funny, it's one of its few points of interests: what was (understandably, I think) threatening once, in a different social and human context, can be looked at now in a more distanced way, and gives an extremely accurate insight of the way gays were perceived - and feared - almost 30 years ago (in the same way that American paranoid anticommunist movies of the 50s say alot about the political climate of their time - and Cruising is a typical example of American paranoia).
In the grotesquely distorted world of this film, gays aren't portrayed as human beings - they are bidimensional puppets who just have to serve their function of either dangerous serial killers or deservedly-punished victims - or preferably both, since in an "original" (!) director's touch, the same actors play all these roles. This adds to the confusion about who killed whom - but the confusion is intentional, since the killer - and the victim - is obviously homosexuality itself, a self-destructive monster which spreads like a dangerous disease and can infect even the weakest heterosexuals who dare to come close to it. Very soon an actual disease would have sadly applied to real life the perverted metaphor of the movie.
From the artistic point of view, Cruising is even less worthy than the (often equally fascistic) poliziotteschi movies made in Italy in the 70s - it's simply very bad, and objectively it can't be compared with the best movies made by its director. But historically it IS interesting, and the fact that American gays can look at it without feeling unconfortable is I think a very good sign (though typically, now some of them mistake their own changed, relaxed approach to the film for a kind of previously underrated artistic value - but ok, this is America and we love it the way it is).
The Boys in the Band, while stagily mechanical and sometimes predictable, is a much better effort - but since its bitter truths and generally pervasive guilty feelings are, it seems, still relevant to some, it is - unlike the ridiculous, ineffectual Cruising - rejected by the gay community. Yet with all its flaws and exaggerations it's a much more realistic, though more disturbing, portrayal of a certain way (not the only one luckily, or not anymore) of being homosexual - and seen from inside (self-loathing can be as wrong as pure loathing, but it's unfortunately more understandable). One day hopefully it will be seen from the same distance we can look at Cruising today.
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I have already been accused of being a self-loathing homo for giving Cruising a positive (albeit one overflowing with qualifying asides) review, but I think I essentially agree with the Slate writer and flipp and argued in my review that the film's reassessment is fine by me as long as we're all clear that the film is now a time capsule. (Artistically speaking, I think the film easily eclipses both French Connection and Exorcist, but that's almost beside the point.)
I can understand the initial outcry from the gay community with regard to Cruising. In an industry with such a dearth of positive portrayals of gay men, this film must've felt like two, maybe three steps back to the gay men who, at that point, had fought so hard just to be able to walk down the street without getting bashed. I was only a gay toddler at the time of this film's release, so I don't have a firsthand account of the mood of the times. However, to a community who had yet to endure the AIDS epidemic, Larry Kramer's Gay Men's Health Crisis, Bowers v. Hardwick and Andrew Cunanen, this depiction of an admittedly on-the-fringe subset of their community would've seemed appropriately major in its ability to cast a disheartening shadow over all gay men, whether or not they wore hankies in their back pockets.
Trenton Straube, the writer of this article, really hits the nail on the head though WRT the fact that closeted, Republican faggots working against the gay community through their legislation, fueled by their own self-hatred while simultaneously seeking out discrete encounters in public restrooms and Congressional page congregations, are far more dangerous than any depiction found in Friedkin's film.
To be honest, I found the scathing self-hatred portrayed in The Boys in the Band released only 11 years earlier, to be far more damaging to the audience's and gay men's own perception of themselves than anything in Cruising. The leather daddies and cruisers, for the most part, know who they are and live the way they want to without worrying about being judged by the outside world. The characters in The Boys in the Band hate themselves and each other, no matter how lighthearted and faux-bitter their banter may try to soften that self-loathing. I remember feeling dirty and depressed after watching it. It just made me feel awful about myself.
Both films are snapshots of their time and valuable to gay cinematic history in that sense but I'm not exactly mourning the lack of modern-day access to The Boys in the Band while the DVD release of Cruising seems somewhat apropos. Isn't that the pot calling the kettle beige.
Edited By flipp525 on 1189632861
Trenton Straube, the writer of this article, really hits the nail on the head though WRT the fact that closeted, Republican faggots working against the gay community through their legislation, fueled by their own self-hatred while simultaneously seeking out discrete encounters in public restrooms and Congressional page congregations, are far more dangerous than any depiction found in Friedkin's film.
To be honest, I found the scathing self-hatred portrayed in The Boys in the Band released only 11 years earlier, to be far more damaging to the audience's and gay men's own perception of themselves than anything in Cruising. The leather daddies and cruisers, for the most part, know who they are and live the way they want to without worrying about being judged by the outside world. The characters in The Boys in the Band hate themselves and each other, no matter how lighthearted and faux-bitter their banter may try to soften that self-loathing. I remember feeling dirty and depressed after watching it. It just made me feel awful about myself.
Both films are snapshots of their time and valuable to gay cinematic history in that sense but I'm not exactly mourning the lack of modern-day access to The Boys in the Band while the DVD release of Cruising seems somewhat apropos. Isn't that the pot calling the kettle beige.
Edited By flipp525 on 1189632861
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
What does the board think of the sudden re-estimation of William Friedkin's Cruising? I have to admit, it surprises me; I last saw the movie about 20 years ago, on VHS, and came away neither impressed with the subject nor with the pedestrian artistry of the project--to see it now being presented as some kind of misunderstood "classic" is just, well, astonishing.
From Slate:
Scent of a Man
Al Pacino hunts a killer in New York City gay bars in Cruising.
By Trenton Straube
The people at Warner Home Video must be giddy. Months ago, they decided to finally release Cruising on DVD and picked a Sept. 18 street date. The movie, directed by William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection), stars Al Pacino as a cop investigating a string of murders in New York City's gay underworld. It touched off impassioned protests from the gay community when it appeared in 1980, and Warner perhaps hoped that memories of the controversy would stoke curiosity in the DVD. But never in their wildest imaginations could they have dreamed that just as the disc was hitting store shelves, the senator from Idaho would make cruising front-page news. Maybe now, thanks to Larry Craig, Cruising will at long last get its due.
Pacino plays Steve Burns, a rookie cop who goes undercover to attract a psychopath who has been butchering gay men in their late 20s. Burns rents an apartment in the Village and ducks into a gritty shop along the crowded Village strip, where he nods at a display of handkerchiefs. "What are these for?" he asks the store clerk. "Light blue hankie in the left back pocket means you want a blow job," the guy answers. "Right pocket means you give one. Green one: Left side says you're a hustler; right side, a buyer. Yellow one: Left side means you give golden showers; right side, you receive … See anything you want?" "I'm gonna go home and think about it," Burns stammers.
Before long, however, Burns perfects the Tom of Finland look and becomes a regular on the scene, cruising Central Park and the Village bars. But as the corpse count keeps rising, Burns is forced to find more suspects and seek out more intimate, and more dangerous, sexual encounters. In one bungled sting, his fellow cops discover him trussed up and nude on a hotel bed.
The last third of the film squanders some of the intensity the first two acts build up, as the final act is given over to a prolonged cat-and-mouse game between Burns and a killer with some serious daddy issues. But the ending is surprising, and haunting. Latent homosexual tendencies, the movie suggests, may lead to homicidal ones.
Activists took offense at that message. The movie appeared barely a decade after the 1969 Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village, generally credited with sparking the modern gay rights movement. At the time, television and movies offered few images of gay men, and when they did show up, they often didn't make it to the end credits alive. By the time Cruising was in production, the gay community seems to have had enough. While Friedkin was filming in 1979, Village Voice columnist Arthur Bell predicted that the film would be "the most oppressive, ugly, bigoted look at homosexuality ever presented on the screen." Bell seems to have assumed the film would hew closely to the 1970 book Cruising, a more incendiary tale told partially from a bigoted cop's point of view. (Friedkin abandoned that device.) Bell implored his readers to "give Friedkin and his production a terrible time if you spot them in your neighborhood."
They did just that. As production executive Mark Johnson recounts on the commentary track of the new DVD, protesters sounded whistles and sirens during filming. They perched on rooftops near the set and used reflectors to shine spots of light onto the scenes, ruining the takes. Eventually, thousands marched in the streets of Greenwich Village in protest. (Though, it should be noted, other segments of the gay community also showed up, to protest the protesters.)
When the film finally arrived in theaters, the National Gay Task Force likened it to Birth of a Nation. According to The Lavender Screen, Boze Hadleigh's book about gay film, 20,000 fliers appeared on the New York gay scene, with a warning: "This is not a film about how we live, it's a film about why we should be killed."
Cruising is at times a violent, brutal picture. In the opening scene, ominous synth chords portend the discovery of a severed limb floating in the East River. Moments later, punk rock washes over a crowded bar as an ill-fated hookup transpires against a backdrop of sweating, mustachioed men—a scandalous netherworld Friedkin paints with a dark palette of black leather and Levi's blue. And with its depiction of countercultural, homo hedonism, Cruising was understandably not the first impression a burgeoning gay rights movement wanted to project to mainstream America. Nor did the movie offer a comforting welcome to anyone apprehensive about coming out.
Yet watching the movie today, it's a bit hard to understand what everyone was so upset about. Friedkin worked to ground his film in reality. Before shooting began, he befriended patrons of bars like the Anvil, Mine Shaft, and Ramrod, and even paid them as extras, lending the movie an admirable authenticity. Some real leather daddies—granddaddies today—will no doubt complain that Friedkin exaggerated the barroom bacchanalia for dramatic effect. In one memorable scene, Burns and an admirer huff ethyl chloride on the dance floor as a fantasia of debauchery transpires around them—disco lights illuminate an orgy in one corner of the bar, and an ingenious use of Crisco in another.
Yet from the outset, the film makes clear that this scene is on the fringe. Burns' boss, Capt. Edelson (Paul Sorvino), describes the world the murder victims inhabit as "not the mainstream of gay life. They were into heavy leather, S&M, a world unto itself." And once Burns becomes immersed in that world, he never comments on its morality. That decision is left to the viewer.
Perhaps as a result, neither the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, as it is called today, nor the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, a media watchdog organization, plan to issue statements this month denouncing Cruising, which in addition to being released on DVD is also being revived in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
"Today we have other movies, other representations, other media to help counter negative images," says Damon Romine, GLAAD's entertainment media director. "We know now that not all gay men are bad guys."
We also now know that some gay men are bad guys. We can explore the idea, as Cruising does, that sexual confusion can push a disturbed person over the edge. Friedkin believes this was the motivation for some of the real-life murders the film was based on: "A lot of dirty, sick people questioned their own sexuality and found a lot of question marks—and took it out on gay people," he told me recently.
Such an exploration is incongruous with the upbeat "gay" entertainment (Will & Grace, Queer Eye, etc.) we're consistently fed today. Even gay thugs and murderers—Vito Spatafore on The Sopranos, or Bree's son Andrew on Desperate Housewives—are somehow likable these days. Cruising, on the other hand, never serves up any witty brunch banter or fabulous shopping sprees. It also avoids the emotional heartbreak of a Brokeback Mountain or just about any AIDS drama. The leather men in Friedkin's movie don't complain that they're victims of a prejudiced society, but they also make no apologies for their "lifestyle."
It's strange that such a portrayal so offended gay activists at the time. But it's reassuring to see that that community seems to have learned something over the last generation. When the Larry Craig story broke, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force quickly worked to steer the discussion toward the hypocrisy of the family values set. Closeted, self-loathing men still pose a danger to the gay community. But the ones in William Friedkin's movie aren't the ones we need to worry about.
Trenton Straube is the editor of the New York Blade, a gay and lesbian weekly newspaper.
From Slate:
Scent of a Man
Al Pacino hunts a killer in New York City gay bars in Cruising.
By Trenton Straube
The people at Warner Home Video must be giddy. Months ago, they decided to finally release Cruising on DVD and picked a Sept. 18 street date. The movie, directed by William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection), stars Al Pacino as a cop investigating a string of murders in New York City's gay underworld. It touched off impassioned protests from the gay community when it appeared in 1980, and Warner perhaps hoped that memories of the controversy would stoke curiosity in the DVD. But never in their wildest imaginations could they have dreamed that just as the disc was hitting store shelves, the senator from Idaho would make cruising front-page news. Maybe now, thanks to Larry Craig, Cruising will at long last get its due.
Pacino plays Steve Burns, a rookie cop who goes undercover to attract a psychopath who has been butchering gay men in their late 20s. Burns rents an apartment in the Village and ducks into a gritty shop along the crowded Village strip, where he nods at a display of handkerchiefs. "What are these for?" he asks the store clerk. "Light blue hankie in the left back pocket means you want a blow job," the guy answers. "Right pocket means you give one. Green one: Left side says you're a hustler; right side, a buyer. Yellow one: Left side means you give golden showers; right side, you receive … See anything you want?" "I'm gonna go home and think about it," Burns stammers.
Before long, however, Burns perfects the Tom of Finland look and becomes a regular on the scene, cruising Central Park and the Village bars. But as the corpse count keeps rising, Burns is forced to find more suspects and seek out more intimate, and more dangerous, sexual encounters. In one bungled sting, his fellow cops discover him trussed up and nude on a hotel bed.
The last third of the film squanders some of the intensity the first two acts build up, as the final act is given over to a prolonged cat-and-mouse game between Burns and a killer with some serious daddy issues. But the ending is surprising, and haunting. Latent homosexual tendencies, the movie suggests, may lead to homicidal ones.
Activists took offense at that message. The movie appeared barely a decade after the 1969 Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village, generally credited with sparking the modern gay rights movement. At the time, television and movies offered few images of gay men, and when they did show up, they often didn't make it to the end credits alive. By the time Cruising was in production, the gay community seems to have had enough. While Friedkin was filming in 1979, Village Voice columnist Arthur Bell predicted that the film would be "the most oppressive, ugly, bigoted look at homosexuality ever presented on the screen." Bell seems to have assumed the film would hew closely to the 1970 book Cruising, a more incendiary tale told partially from a bigoted cop's point of view. (Friedkin abandoned that device.) Bell implored his readers to "give Friedkin and his production a terrible time if you spot them in your neighborhood."
They did just that. As production executive Mark Johnson recounts on the commentary track of the new DVD, protesters sounded whistles and sirens during filming. They perched on rooftops near the set and used reflectors to shine spots of light onto the scenes, ruining the takes. Eventually, thousands marched in the streets of Greenwich Village in protest. (Though, it should be noted, other segments of the gay community also showed up, to protest the protesters.)
When the film finally arrived in theaters, the National Gay Task Force likened it to Birth of a Nation. According to The Lavender Screen, Boze Hadleigh's book about gay film, 20,000 fliers appeared on the New York gay scene, with a warning: "This is not a film about how we live, it's a film about why we should be killed."
Cruising is at times a violent, brutal picture. In the opening scene, ominous synth chords portend the discovery of a severed limb floating in the East River. Moments later, punk rock washes over a crowded bar as an ill-fated hookup transpires against a backdrop of sweating, mustachioed men—a scandalous netherworld Friedkin paints with a dark palette of black leather and Levi's blue. And with its depiction of countercultural, homo hedonism, Cruising was understandably not the first impression a burgeoning gay rights movement wanted to project to mainstream America. Nor did the movie offer a comforting welcome to anyone apprehensive about coming out.
Yet watching the movie today, it's a bit hard to understand what everyone was so upset about. Friedkin worked to ground his film in reality. Before shooting began, he befriended patrons of bars like the Anvil, Mine Shaft, and Ramrod, and even paid them as extras, lending the movie an admirable authenticity. Some real leather daddies—granddaddies today—will no doubt complain that Friedkin exaggerated the barroom bacchanalia for dramatic effect. In one memorable scene, Burns and an admirer huff ethyl chloride on the dance floor as a fantasia of debauchery transpires around them—disco lights illuminate an orgy in one corner of the bar, and an ingenious use of Crisco in another.
Yet from the outset, the film makes clear that this scene is on the fringe. Burns' boss, Capt. Edelson (Paul Sorvino), describes the world the murder victims inhabit as "not the mainstream of gay life. They were into heavy leather, S&M, a world unto itself." And once Burns becomes immersed in that world, he never comments on its morality. That decision is left to the viewer.
Perhaps as a result, neither the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, as it is called today, nor the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, a media watchdog organization, plan to issue statements this month denouncing Cruising, which in addition to being released on DVD is also being revived in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
"Today we have other movies, other representations, other media to help counter negative images," says Damon Romine, GLAAD's entertainment media director. "We know now that not all gay men are bad guys."
We also now know that some gay men are bad guys. We can explore the idea, as Cruising does, that sexual confusion can push a disturbed person over the edge. Friedkin believes this was the motivation for some of the real-life murders the film was based on: "A lot of dirty, sick people questioned their own sexuality and found a lot of question marks—and took it out on gay people," he told me recently.
Such an exploration is incongruous with the upbeat "gay" entertainment (Will & Grace, Queer Eye, etc.) we're consistently fed today. Even gay thugs and murderers—Vito Spatafore on The Sopranos, or Bree's son Andrew on Desperate Housewives—are somehow likable these days. Cruising, on the other hand, never serves up any witty brunch banter or fabulous shopping sprees. It also avoids the emotional heartbreak of a Brokeback Mountain or just about any AIDS drama. The leather men in Friedkin's movie don't complain that they're victims of a prejudiced society, but they also make no apologies for their "lifestyle."
It's strange that such a portrayal so offended gay activists at the time. But it's reassuring to see that that community seems to have learned something over the last generation. When the Larry Craig story broke, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force quickly worked to steer the discussion toward the hypocrisy of the family values set. Closeted, self-loathing men still pose a danger to the gay community. But the ones in William Friedkin's movie aren't the ones we need to worry about.
Trenton Straube is the editor of the New York Blade, a gay and lesbian weekly newspaper.
"...it is the weak who are cruel, and...gentleness is only to be expected from the strong." - Leo Reston
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster