long before there were weird american remakes of japanese horror films, there was cruising.
seriously, that's the genre i would stick this film into: american j-horror-remake. except, according to wikipedia, it's not a remake of a japanese horror film, which just sort of adds to the inexplicability. what it really reminds me of is cure, an actual j-horror film that i don't think has been remade by americans...yet...in which a dude researches another dude and eventually kind of becomes that dude possibly.
yeah. cruising is like that. except with a lot of leather and a DESPERATELY unhappy-looking al pacino. i was kind of hoping that maybe his character would get serial killed, just to put him out of his misery--serial euthanasia, i guess--but no such luck. he might be the murderer, and then his girlfriend dresses like a killer, and then there's another tugboat shot, and that's the end. huzzah.
as a self-professed fan of asian horror cinema, as well as a fan of bizarre american remakes of asian horror cinema, i can't just write off cruising. i might say that it's an unfortunate amalgam. if the idea is supposed to be that we're all gay and it makes us all killers (because the passing of the hat/glasses/jacket signifier from character to character seems to be pointing toward the universality of whatever said signifier is supposed to represent), then that's just unfortunate period. if the idea is supposed to be that quashing our natural gayness MAKES us killers, that's still maybe not great, because in the end gayness is still the source of the antisocial instinct (it's like, you know, a holiday ad for liquor: "be queer responsibly"). and if the idea is supposed to be that we all kill gay people, then said idea, though possibly...um, quasi-pro-gay, still has gay people as some sort of bizarre scapegoat landscape object as opposed to at the very least an active part of a legitimate binary (not that i'm a major fan of binaries)*. basically, it's the old rko pictures "we are the monster, the monster is us" conceit...except instead of a monster, you have the gay s&m leather scene.
which is, yeah, you know, objectionable. because the gay s&m leather scene should not necessarily be treated like, you know, a robot from the future, or a series of mummies.
but shall we sneer at the unintelligible just because it takes place on objectionable ground? NEVER!! to unintelligibilities! and beyond! i didn't understand what cruising was getting at in the end, and i like that. it isn't like the player, which irritated me with the self-consciously delicate irony of its heavily ironic ending (all the "touches" of in and out jammed into the last seventeen seconds of a medium-boring satire...urgh! urgh!!!). it's genuinely unintelligible, and for this i say, go go cruising! go go!
end judgment: if you see one film this year, don't make it cruising. if you like j-horror and don't mind a slow beginning (cuz, hello, you like j-horror), go ahead and watch it. dare the indeterminate! find your next year's halloween costume! i know i did one of those things!
*and not that this isn't necessarily on purpose on the film's part. the details of the way that the server dude gets treated by the cops (i make no mention of the guy with the hat and the thong--that part was awesome), as well as the fact that what's-his-face whose print matches the coin gets 8 years if he confesses to like 16 murders, and the sanctimonious attitude of mr. sad-clown eyes superior officer, could be argued to be part of the film for the purpose of pointing to the fact that the gay s&m scene IS being used, like a punch press, as the ground on which various issues can work themselves out--"straight man's burden," etc. it's just that, as with the "white man's burden" argument, pointing out the mechanics of its working doesn't in the end make the ground (aka africa, race relations in africa, africans' rights, etc. [note the "etc."; that's exactly what i'm talking about]) on which it plays out any less commodified. the movie may say, "hey, look how we're commodifying this queer ground, on which various political, psychological, and physical issues from OUR straight world are getting played out--" but it doesn't do much to make said queer ground any less of a commodity. i guess maybe it gives us the redhead neighbor man. yeah, thanks, cruising.
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