A David Attenborough trip into heavy leather

Scan page 8

It's difficult know where to begin.

"Ever had your cock sucked by a man?" The captain of police knows his officer. Young Sergeant Burns behaves with respect toward his superiors, so he' doesn't start throwing punches. And he's a liberal cop, so he doesn't even spit or swear. Just acts surprised, embarrassed as he answers NO.

He's cool. But he'll need to pack plenty of ice-cubes to stay that way where he's going, down into those burning hellholes of flagrant vice and sickening perversion (and I don't mean the cinema).

A killer is at work-stabbing, dismembering bodies among the gay heavy leather bars and clubs of New York. Sgt. Burns is to act as bait to lure and trap the murderer.

The scene is set for a fim lousy way beyond your worst expectations.

As a detection thriller, Cruising has all the gripping tension of an empty washing line. Graced with tired, routine camera-work and dialogue that would utterly disgrace Starsky and Hutch, the plot has just about the strength to lurch along with monotonously predictable fits.

Setting

True, there is the shock of the first murder, projected with a violent visual effect in The Exorcist tradition. But that's soon over, and in the end, after three murders and one mistaken arrest, yes Al Pacino (Sgt. Burns) gets his man.

But of course it's the setting we're expected to thrill to-to be repelled by the images on the screen yet still unable to tear ourselves from our seats and demand our money back.

And surely this setting Is a director's gift? Sex and violence are brought together neatly in this mysterious world, the dark lurking underside of normal urban life. What with fashionable interest in homosexuality and the inevitable guilty excitement that comes with approaching an area of taboo such as S/M (sado-masochism), Friedkin must have thought he was laughing all the way to Fort knox.

Yet whenever Cruising plunges into the underworld of gay S/M, something very strange happens to the film. In the police offices, in the girlfriend's appartment, even (though only just) in the street scenes, the film is working within the conventions of the cop film.

Although the images are carelessly handled and obsiinately unmemorable, still they do form an effective coherence. They are all selected from one stable code, familiar from a thousand earlier cop films and easily read by a contemporary cinema audience.

No image But gay leather bars do not have a place in this code. Far more to the point, they do not have any image in the dominant culture of imperialism. As yet their image is to be found only on the glossy magazines and grainy films of pornography; in police reports and sociological surveys: within the restricted media of the wider gay community. For Hollywood that is no image at all.

So how does Friedkin cope with this fundamental problem?

Stuck without an off-the-peg image, he is forced to fashion his own substitute. But there are limits to even Friedkin's creative imagination, and the result is not so much the creation of a fresh and living image as the carrying-through of an accomplished improvisation based in DAVID WHITFIELD reviews the controversial film 'Cruising' now on general release.

the techniques of documentary and pornography.

Sgt. Burns is sent to immerse himself in the leather bars and their community. He has to pass as a legitimate inhabitant. But when Al Pacino bobs down the steps into a cellar club, he is no longer a cop on an undercover job.

Suddenly we are presented with a roving reporter, working on the latest assignment of investigative journalism.

Camera-angle and Al Pacino's movements are contrived in the well established traditions of documentary: an impression of informal naturalness is produced to suggest the reporter's intimate, authoritative knowledge, but the unmistakeable traces of careful rehearsal are left to establish the detachment of the reporter from the area of investigation.

Inside the club, the camera pans steadily across the room, displaying the general features and activity, pausing now and again to focus more closely on some telling detall.

Men, in leather, belts, studs, straps, caps, beards, dancing, drinking, heavy metal music, trinity these ents.

The documentary is the zoo of the screen, displaying the alien for entertaining observation. Whether its area of investigation is zoological, anthropological or sociological; however compassionate or committed the intentions of its makers; the documentary is saturated ineven structured by the domineering attitudes of colonialism with which its social roots are enmeshed.

Al Pacino in the leather bars is like Michaela Denis with a leopard in her lap, or David Attenborough playing gorillas: it's somehow wrong that he doesn't turn, as the camera zooms in, to offer a confidential commentary. At the very least there should be a voice-over.

Pornography

It is the absence of this commentary which reveals how Cruising is also located in the world of pornography. A recurrent feature of visual pornography is the painstaking naturalistic attention to superficial detail-a quasi-scientific observation which mirrors aspects of documentary.

This deadly literalness is indeed essential to pornography: without it, art may be more or less erotic in various ways, but it cannot be pornography. As with documentary, pornography produces only one subject, but here it is the viewer alone who forms that subject. It is the observation of the viewer tic of the whole film, and it's largely produced around Al Pacino.

None of the film's contradictions and confusions is genuinely resolved: instead, all are displaced into the development of the Sgt. Burns character.

This development provides the only real tension in the film (and it's a fitful, flickering tension at that), substituting for the inadequacies of the detection plot.

It is Sgt. Burns who gives the entree into the leather clubs, and it is into his confused response that the film projects both the confusion of the viewer and, necessarily, the original confusion of the director.

With all this burden falling in the one place, it's scarcely surprising that Cruising emerges increasingly as a film centred unshakeably in the developing character of the young cop.

One of Hollywood's dominant and defining characteristics is its enduring obsession with the socialisation of the innocent young man, his passage into the full virility of American manhood, with all the superiority of its compasion born of painful experience.

Like so many noble and inglorious predecessors, Cruising is shaped to embody this initiation rite.

Temptations

Stripped of his badge and his which Friedkin makes of all male homosexuality with gay S/M. Of course that is a ludicrously unreal identification -even Friedkin is forced to make a strictly token admission of that.

But the argument is surely an inappropriate one, that can be based only in misplaced moralism or divisive (and ultimately counter-productive) political tactics.

(Space forbids any defence here of S/M or explanation of what can be learned about sexuality and sexual relationships from its structures).

Threat It is the presentation of S/M itself which is a travesty, and it is only when Friedkin has established this dangerously reactionary image that he can, as he certainly does, allow it to stand as an image of all male homosexuality.

Within the tilm, S/M serves two purposes: as sensational setting, and as the threat to Sgt. Burns progress to manhood. In both cases any attempt to go beyond caricature would be not only unnecessary but actually destructive.

For Cruising, S/M is violent sex in bizarre clothes, and that's almost all there is to it. Makes you sick, doesn't it?

Well, it should do anywaysick with excitement, Friedkin had his way.

By the structures of documentary and pornography, S/M locked in a recessed hM.! dimension, one far less approachable than the comfortably familiar, comforting fiction world of the cop film.

It's over there, out there, down there; and those peoplethey're not you, not me, the viewer. They're alien, The Other: not really human, or at least not 'healthily' human, certainly not the American Way of Life.

And lurking in the darkest corners of this foul web of darkness is the murderer, a psychopath, analysed for our instruction.

Sterile

He has been unable to adjust to the death of his father, and so haunts the leather bars to pick up guys who look like his father, and have sex with them (so we gather) before murdering them brutally. Oh, and he's sterile.

So you see, we're safe really: psychiatry can tell us why these people behave in the disgusting way they do, and it's not natural and it couldn't happen to you or me.

But something is happening to Sgt. Burns as he passes his days and nights in this environment, and he doesn't know what it is. Or, at least that's what he keeps telling us and his girlfriend (perhaps I should have mentioned earlier that his girlfriend is called Nance).

Like the 'corrupted" spy, or the 'dehumanised' spacetraveller after long sojourn in an alien culture of science-fiction, Sgt. Burns is being sucked into the cess-pools of corruption.

While he's making it with his girlfriend in her spacious and airy appartment, it's the heavy metal music from the leather bars that swamps his mind... Will this dere at timenin en it pervert our hero' to its own ends? Will we be shown Al Pacino giving head in the last reel?

Well, no, of course notthat's just part of the titillation. Sgt. Burns arrests the murderer, passes through his ordeal and emerges to receive the token of manhood from the captain of police: Welcome to the Detection Department'.

But Friedkin doesn't let us go even with that emphatic conclusion.

"Unstable"

Sgt. Burns has actually become friendly with one of The Gays-he's another nice guy, ineffectual, and not into leather. (They don't make it together sexually, of course, but the good sergeant does make a jealous scene with Ted's jealous lover).

But there's no getting away from it: even if not every queer is a psychopath, then they're all unstable, neurotic, emotionally incapable.

Just look at Ted. No sooner is the mass murderer locked up, than Ted gets himself murdered. It's what happens to you if you live in that vicious, violent world.

At this point,, the editing plants a suspicion in our minds that Ted's killer is none other than Sgt. Burns, transformed by his repulsive experiences into the avenging sword of god. The ambiguity must have gladdened the hearts of the 'Kill a Queer for Christ' mob, but it's only Friedkin teasing us again. A moment's detective work identifies the real killer in Ted's passionately jealous lover.

But it's true that Sgt. Burns doesn't seem altogether happy with his achievement. There he is, back in the normal world, shaving in his girlfriend's appartment-but can we be sure that he has not been tainted? Perhaps homosexuality is, after all, a contagion, even a pestilence. Is that really Sgt. Burns, or has some vile thing taken possession of his mind and soul, occupied his body?

Nance comes in. She sees the strange leather gear lying on a chair, she picks it up and, o god she's dressing up in those clothes.. The jacket, the cap, and now she's posing in that black garb before the mirror in the middle of her clean-limbed appartment.

They've taken our sons, our brothers, our friends-and now, our women! Is nothing precious to be held sacred, safe from the clutches of that loathsome tide which rises to overwhelm us?

O God, O Ronald Reagan, O Peeping Friedkin, make haste to save us, for the Beast is nigh and the hour of our destruction is surely even now at hand.