My Year of Flops (38 page)

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Fiasco

Bicurious, Hankie-Waving Case File #63: Cruising

Originally Posted August 30, 2007

Cruising
arrived at a transitional time for gay culture. By 1980, the drug- and alcohol-fueled party that was gay sex in the '70s had been replaced by a punishing hangover of STDs and shattered idealism. AIDS lurked just around the corner, and with it a revitalized gay-rights movement blessed with a messianic sense of purpose. The American public hadn't yet had its consciousness raised by earnest message movies about how gays are just like you and me only with a more sophisticated understanding of musical theater and interior design. The world had yet to witness a deluge of reality shows in which gay men function as magical elves put on earth to help straight people eat better, dress better, and pick the perfect wine.

AIDS and the full flowering of the gay-rights movement pushed
homosexuality out of the celluloid closet, but for much of the '70s and '80s, serious movies about gay life were so rare and weighed down with noble intentions that each was received as a major referendum on homosexuality. The emergence of AIDS made every television show, movie, or TV movie about gays an Important Cultural Event first and a work of art or entertainment a distinct second. Message movies were filled with noble, asexual Gay Martyrs who suffered for the audience's sins and showed us all how to withstand discrimination with quiet dignity.

Cruising
functions as the moody antithesis of the Gay Martyr movie. In the time-honored tradition of its director, William Friedkin (
The Exorcist, Sorceror, The French Connection
), it's a film devoid of good intentions or moral uplift, a sleazy wallow in the depths of human depravity. Friedkin set out to make a brutal murder mystery that just happened to take place in the underground gay S & M clubs of New York, but he couldn't have been surprised when the film was perceived, even before it finished shooting, as a movie about what senior citizens refer to as “the Gays.” Friedkin, who also directed the landmark gay drama
The Boys In The Band,
certainly didn't intend for the film's glowering, muscle-bound leather boys to be representative of the rich and multifaceted gay community. But in the absence of more positive depictions of gays outside of Billy Crystal on
Soap,
it was perceived that way. Is it possible to remove politics from a movie as provocative as
Cruising
? Probably not. The film carried considerably more political and social baggage than it would if it were released today.

Loosely adapted from Gerald Walker's 1970 thriller
Cruising: A Shocking Novel Of Suspense
but updated for an era of leather bars and S & M clubs, the film casts Al Pacino as Steve Burns, a cop who goes undercover as a leather aficionado in New York's sleaziest underground sex clubs to track down a serial killer targeting the community. But first, Steve must prove himself up to the task. When trying to ascertain Burns' suitability for the job, his superior, Captain Edelson (Paul Sorvino), indelicately asks him, “Ever had a
man smoke your pole?” (Strangely, that was also the first question in my job interview for
The A.V. Club
.)

Steve stumblingly learns the ins and outs of cruising for sex with anonymous leather-clad bruisers. Powers Boothe has a strange cameo as a “hankie salesman” who matter-of-factly informs neophyte Steve that he should wear his colored bandanna in one back pocket to indicate that he is in the market to receive a golden shower and/or blowjob, and the other pocket to show that he's eager to deliver the same. Apparently they don't cover that at the police academy.

As Steve plunges deeper into the subterranean realm of S & M, Friedkin cultivates a dread-choked atmosphere heavy with tension and menace, where every anonymous hook-up is charged with intimations of violence and brutality, as well as sad undertones of vulnerability and tenderness. But then a 6 5” black man clad only in a Stetson, necklace, and athletic supporter (an emissary, perhaps, of the NYPD's elite cowboy-hat-and-jockstrap division) comes out of nowhere to bitch-smack Steve for no discernible reason while he and a suspect are being hassled by cops, and I wondered, “What kind of motherfuckery is this?”

Also, Karen Allen is on hand to remind viewers that even though Steve spends all his time hanging with the leather daddies over at the Ramrod, this is the '80s and he's down with the ladies. Or is he?

In a bid to overturn stereotypes, Friedkin has the primary suspect write a thesis on the roots of musical theater between trips to the leather bars. To help offset the idea that all homosexuals are scowling sadists or masochists, Friedkin gives Steve an affable, mild-mannered sidekick named Ted (Don Scardino), whose sitcom perkiness clashes with the brooding intensity of the rest of the film.

Like many of Friedkin's films, especially
Bug, Cruising
flirts continuously with high camp, with purplish dialogue like, “I know this dude, too. Seen him on the Deuce. He gives the best beatings, like, six ways to Sunday.”
Cruising
sometimes reads less like a missive from the front lines of sexual transgression than a bad pulp paperback come to life.

Much of
Cruising
's ominous atmosphere comes from its sound design; Jack Nitzsche's score is unsettling, and Friedkin exploits the ominous clanging and jangle of zippers and buttons for maximum creepiness. In part because gay activists sabotaged
Cruising
's sound on location, much of the film is post-dubbed. This can be frustratingly distancing for a film that prides itself on verisimilitude, but it can also be haunting, as when the same eerily disconnected voice comes out of several people's mouths.

The film's character arc traces the psychological damage that working deep undercover has on Burns' psyche, but since we never get to know Steve before the investigation, his psychological descent doesn't really register; he begins and ends the film an enigma. Part of that ambiguity is intentional: Friedkin wants the audience to suspect that Steve himself might be a murderer, so his character remains intentionally cryptic. The specter of AIDS casts a ghostly, funereal pall over the film. It's sobering to imagine how many of the film's extras—recruited from real S & M bars and directed to act as naturally as a hard-R rating would allow—wouldn't survive the decade
Cruising
ushered in on a singularly dark note.

Cruising
explores seamy places Hollywood still fears to tread, delving deep into an ominous world redolent of sweat, fear, Vaseline, and sticky floors. In the three decades since its release,
Cruising
has come full circle and become a part of gay history, a strangely affecting time capsule of a subculture otherwise ignored by pop culture and the media. Today, it's compelling primarily as a sociological document of a dirty, dangerous New York where sex and death seemed inextricably linked even before AIDS. In its shameless excavation and exploitation of the killer-queen archetype—the gay man so riddled with self-loathing and guilt that he feels an insatiable urge to kill and punish others—the film is filled with bad politics and dodgy, flawed filmmaking, but it's weirdly resonant and haunting all the same.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Fiasco

Rat-Brained, Man-Animal-Friendly Case File #66: Battlefield Earth

Originally Posted September 11, 2007

I can't believe I somehow made it 66 entries into a feature about historic failures without writing about John Travolta, an actor who makes so many flops that when other actors fail, they have to pay him royalties. Yes, rat-brains and puny man-animals, I am finally writing about 2000's
Battlefield Earth
.

When
Battlefield Earth
was released, all the resentment toward Scientology that had been building up throughout the years exploded into a worldwide orgy of schadenfreude and Bronx cheers. A legendary disaster well before it was completed, the film hit theaters with a “Kick Me” sign on it so massive it could be seen from outer space.

The movie became a vessel through which people could vent their frustrations with Scientology without coming off as bigoted. I, of course, have nothing but respect and admiration for Scientology and the powerful Scientologists who control the world, but plenty of deluded souls who aren't my family, my co-workers, or myself inexplicably resent the wholly legitimate religious enterprise. They resent the way Scientology is as secretive, paranoid, and litigious as Disney, yet far more devoted to spreading fantasy and make-believe. They resent those obnoxious human-interest stories where Johnny CareerTrouble opens up to
People
about how Scientology helped cure him of his debilitating marijuana addiction. They resent the way Scientology seems to have made kissing up to celebrities the central component of the faith.

They resent those self-righteous press releases comparing the German government's treatment of Scientology to the Holocaust. They resent prominent Scientologists lecturing about the evils of psychology on television and condemning women who use psychoactive drugs to treat postpartum depression as weak-minded pawns of the pharmaceutical industry. They resent the idea that a hack science-fiction novelist could be a religious leader on par with Jesus.

Of course, if a preeminent figure in my faith had a sideline writing pulp fiction, I'd probably downplay that aspect of his life. If, for example, Moses used his downtime while writing the Torah to hastily compose fantasy novels exploring the adventures of Thoretta, She-Ogre, I'd probably steer clear of publicizing his side gig too aggressively. I wouldn't try to lure Brigitte Nielsen into starring in a feature-film adaptation of
Thoretta, She-Ogre
as a way of bringing converts to Judaism.

John Travolta doesn't feel the same way. For him, producing and starring in one of the great masterworks of L. Ron Hubbard (a book that reportedly sold more than a bazillion copies, including several to non-Scientologists) was primarily an act of religious devotion. I love John Travolta, but I love laughing at him even more. If you can't enjoy a laugh at Travolta's expense, then you aren't really living.