Recommendations of the Editorial team
The unintentionally funniest moment in William Friedkin’s 1980 thriller, hyped up as a “scandal film” about a cop (Al Pacino) who is supposed to investigate a murderer in the New York queer scene, is an interrogation scene. A black police officer with the body of a football player enters the room, wearing only a loincloth and a cowboy hat, and knocks Pacino off his chair with a slap in the face – just to intimidate a suspect who is also present.
A “Friedkin Movie” or a “Freaking Movie”?
The cowboy: a gay, violent bear, but just as stiff American officials imagine and costume one of their own.
Even before the premiere, lesbian and gay associations were up in arms, and Pacino later distanced himself from the “exploitation flick.” After the flop of “Sorcerer” (1976), Friedkin finally lost his position as an A-director – the “Friedkin Movie” was derided as a “Freaking Movie”.
The connection between sexual identity and instinct-driven crime is as old as it is problematic in Hollywood and has long been at the expense of marginalized groups: Hitchcock’s “Rope” (1948) with its gay murderer couple, “Basic Instinct” (1992) with the image of the ice pick-wielding lesbian, De Palma’s “Dressed to Kill” (1980) with its gender-confused psychiatrist or “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991) with his psychopathic transsexual.
“Cruising” is exploitative and voyeuristic of S&M culture, which probably made many more curious than they would admit. But it is the investigators who give a bad impression: overwhelmed, full of prejudices.
The idea that homosexuality is “contagious,” as the conclusion suggests, is dangerous nonsense anyway. What stuck, however, was that David Bowie was supposedly inspired by a “cruising” corpse for the contorted posture on the “Lodger” album (Plaion Pictures).
