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S3E22.5 Cruising

🕑 Added 2024-07-04 23:26:19 +0000 UTC

Comments

Australian Estuary Pirate

The opening with the trans sex workers and then Abigail talking about how this movie depicts the LGBTQ+ community as being unmournable reminds me of how kids would talk about sex workers in the late '00s due largely to Grand Theft Auto. My peers seemed obsessed by the idea that you can hire a sex worker to restore your health then kill her to get your money back. It was up there with Missingno. and the LBJ in terms of noteworthy game exploits and was discussed entirely in those terms, which very much rendered sex workers as unmournable, but I didn't have the vocabulary for why it felt gross until many years later when I saw the video essay that Philosophytube teased in this very episode. Almost like I'm being haunted by that concept, I wonder if there's a term for that...

NowhereMan661

This discussion is pretty difficult to get through due to all of the horrific shit in this movie, and I can only imagine how bad it is actually watching it. I salute you three for getting through it.

BecauseBoomerangs

If we're talking lesbian movies to discuss I would love you folks to do Bound 👀

Daryl Hodge

What Abi is saying about the colocation of gayness and death and it therefore not being a loss when we die.... is hitting very weirdly right now. I was just doing some shopping in the city centre with my rainbow lanyard with my pronoun pins on, and an evangelical Christian comes up to me and tries to give me a leaflet because "it might save your life."

Kerri Green

https://youtu.be/4uik3c--qug?si=tUBxF5pjMQtSRLZF

Kerri Green

I would suggest watching the Q&A with friedkin where he places the film in context of the events of the time and that this would lead more towards Devons thoughts on the film.

Knights Who Say Sledge

When I came out in 1990, on the verge of turning 16, my mother's number one response was also "I'm afraid this means you will get murdered" as well. To share a correlating anecdotal experience to the testimony in the conversation. My take, roughly, on Cruising has long been that it doesn't know what it's saying, it is too tentative about itself to have a thesis but it heavily gesticulates towards a variety of very loaded things which makes both Dev's reading and November and Abbie's readings all not only fully plausible but seemingly all invited actively by the film. The movie feels, to me, very like adolescent rebelliousness from Friedkin. He has become fascinated with a few things coded by society as transgressive and he wants to show it to the world in a very reactionary kind of way, he has become aware of a variety of things that are hot button topics for society (queer people, s&m, police violence, transphopia, etc) and waves his camera at them and shouts "see... this exists," but isn't developed enough as an observer of any of these elements to actually articulate a take on it. Like an adolescent, to my way of thinking, he's mostly just doing "I just discovered this and the newness of my discovery combined with my sense that society isn't open to conversation about these topics is in itself enough of an important act that I don't need to meaningfully consider any of it or actually say anything." This invites really almost any read. And for informed audiences, that means articulating much more thoughtful and meaningful reads than, i think, the film or the filmmaker are actually engaging in. That, for me, has rendered the film equal parts fascinating and infuriating. I'm sorry if that was maybe a bit incoherent at all. I absolutely loved this episode and felt like it connected a bit to my previous reads on the film is all.

Alyssa Eveland

If anyone wants to hear more about the kind of scene depicted in cruising I highly suggest checking out On Guard Cigar Salon. Its a podcast hosted by a group of "old guard" leather gays in SF. Some of the episodes can be a pretty rough listen but it is really great to learn more about the scene (the hosts are also very funny).

Jay P Hailey

I was strongly reminded of the Bruce McArthur murders. A serial killer did his killing in the space opened up by police homophobia. William Freidkin was a good film maker. I was saddened to learn of his terrible attitudes here

Fingerless

if gays live in proximity to death, that makes us a kind of samurai, no?

John Harwood

I second this. Even though Abby and Nova make excellent points about how homophobia is all over the place in this film, I think Devon is spot-on about letting the film do this, and moreover to explore at least some of the reasons for it.

matttt

Please make the Premium episodes available on Spotify <3

Vyvycious

I watched the film twice, once just before listening to this and once more the following evening. I hadn’t expected it to be so divisive between the group but I can see the validity of all points made in each individual take. Personally, I found myself bonding quite firmly with it. For me it falls in line with a lot of slasher/exploitation films of that period; where sex and drugs = death and often bearing reflections of the christian conservative morality politics of that era. So viewing it through a lense of queer horror, I found Cruising to be very comforting; getting the chance to see my own anxieties of all the violence and abuses I fear may be visited upon me for being visibly trans and queer in public play out on screen gave me this safe avenue to process those fears and be emboldened by them to feel less afraid of walking out my front door.