Cruising
The Sound of Violence
By Adrian Martin

In a famous essay of the early 1980s titled "The Incoherent Text," the British critic Robin Wood drew special attention to William Fredikin's Cruising (1980) - a film which had been vilified by many gay critics - as "extremely audacious" because "its surface is deliberately fractured, the progress of the narrative obscured." But Wood added that, despite or perhaps because of its formal experimentation, the film was "not necessarily artistically successful." In his analysis, Wood compared Cruising to Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) and Richard Brooks's Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977), and this corpus was founded on a gnawing ambiguity: was the incoherence of these texts, their dynamic contradictions, voluntary or involuntary, crafted or merely symptomatic? 

The cinema of William Friedkin presents, in fact, a richly ambiguous borderline case within contemporary American cinema. Rather than evoking Scorsese and Brooks, one might place Friedkin's work within a certain cinema of hysteria that includes auteurs like Oliver Stone, Mike Figgis, Adrian Lyne, Tony Scott, and Zalman King - or, further back, Ken Russell. The cinema of hysteria is a mode of filmmaking that actively cultivates incoherence: structured upon moment-to-moment spectacular effect, it aims for the sudden gasp, the revelatory dramatic frisson, the split-second turn-around of meaning or mood, the disorientating gear-change into high comedy or gross tragedy. Many Friedkin films, from The Exorcist (1973) to Rampage (1992), artfully evoke an intense atmosphere of hysteria - within both the fiction, and its spectators. Yet, at the same time, his films also display a level of control that acknowledges a large debt to the classical cinema of Ford, Hawks or Lang. And so it is within the highly coherent incoherence of Cruising that we can locate its substantial artistic success, and evaluate it as one Friedkin's finest works. 

Cruising is a masterpiece of '80s cinema, taking Friedkin's style to the furthest reaches of disorientation and ambiguity. In this mystery about a serial killer in the New York gay scene, Friedkin systematically confuses every variable of the culprit's identity, including his body shape and voice tone. Inevitably, the cop Steve Burns (Al Pacino), who goes undercover to crack the case, becomes psychologically contaminated by all this shape-shifting frenzy. By multiplying, to the point of a vertigo of contagion, this network of echoes, mirroring effects and doppelgangers (the hero is like the killer, his wife dresses in leather in the final scene . ), Cruising becomes far more than a generic mystery-thriller set in the underworld of the gay, leather-bar, sado-masochistic subculture. The film is not about an individual killer or his string of victims, but an entire social system running on sexual repression and twisted, murderous impulses.  

For Friedkin, this society is founded, above all, on the Law of the Father. Cruising is full of Real, Imaginary and Symbolic fathers, from the twin fathers that undercover Burns must deal with (his biological father and his police chief, Edelson [Paul Sorvino]), to the fearsome patriarch that the disturbed Richards (Richard Cox) constantly hallucinates. Within the logic of collective violence that the film builds up, whenever the social order is menaced, the Father's command is to eliminate the threat: Richards imagines (or remembers?) his father telling him "you know what to do ." before his hysterical acts of murder. Indeed, Friedkin makes it emphatically clear that Richards is - like Norman Bates in Psycho (1960) - literally not himself when he kills: he speaks with his father's voice, becoming the possessed vessel of an aggressive Other. 

The dynamics of voice construction are particularly remarkable in Cruising, and it is this aspect of the film's complex sound design that I will concentrate on here, as an indication of Friedkin's stylistic mastery over his deliberately fractured narrative. But first, it is necessary to look at a little of the under-recognised history of the disembodied voice in contemporary cinema, beyond certified classics like Psycho or Lang's The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1932), which have been well analysed by Michel Chion. 

For complex reasons of social and biological conditioning, voices in cinema - voices that are detached, for a moment or for an entire film, from identifiable bodies, faces, lips tend to be hard to place. This explains why feature animations, especially from America, must so strenuously publicise their voice-stars as if they were body and soul in the film: without that advertising, most viewers would never realise they were listening to Scarlett Johansson or Billy Crystal dubbed onto a lion or a pig. Certain films - particularly within the contemporary horror and mystery-thriller genres - play very cleverly on our general inability to place, identify or recognise a voice. In Robert Benton's Twilight (1998), for example, we hear the killer clearly speak a few lines off-screen during a crucial scene - and the filmmakers rightly bet on our inability to not realise that we have already encountered this character, seen and heard him speak in the usual full-disclosure manner, earlier in the plot. Joel Schumacher's Phone Booth (2003), written by Larry Cohen, likewise depends on the likelihood that viewers will not place Kiefer Sutherland's voice for the first 87 minutes of the film, until he appears in the final moments - thus allowing a red herring plot twist to be unveiled just before that point. 

Some thrillers weave exaggerated peculiarities of voice production into the very fabric of the plot, and make them integral to the texture of their cinematic effect. Such films exploit the difficulty of placing voices in two senses - being able to recognise them, and also being able to physically, spatially locate them (a more recent example of this deliberate confusion can be found in Alexandre Aja's remake of Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes). This is one of the properties that characterises the stalker/slasher/serial killer thrillers that emerged since the late 70s, picking up the thread of Dario Argento and others. In Donald Cammell's The White of the Eye (1987), for instance, the psychopathic central character, deranged husband Paul (David Keith), is a hi-fi expert - he employs a strange ritual of standing in the lounge room of his customers and emitting a strange hum, in order to gauge the acoustics of the space. At the end of the film, when he is pursuing his wife through a large canyon with various passageways, he will stand in the middle of this space and once again repeat his chilling resonance technique.  

In a telefilm of great, minimalistic complexity, Fred Walton's When a Stranger Calls Back (1993), the little-known sequel to his When a Stranger Calls (1979), there is a virtuoso opening sequence in which the stranger who talks to a babysitter through the front door of the house is never seen, and is only ever an off-screen voice for some twenty minutes. This sequence plays, on a rising graph of tension and dread, upon ambiguities of spatial location (when is this mysterious guy standing outside the door and when isn't he?); and, eventually, is there someone else, or this same person, possibly inside the house - and if so, how and when did he get in? The sequence uses all the dependable devices of aural shock and unease, like long patches of silence, suddenly ringing phones at top volume, and single held synthesizer notes cued by loud staccato sounds within the scene (like an object falling to the floor). Everything that happens in the long opening sequence of When a Stranger Calls Back becomes all the more remarkable in retrospect, when we learn at a much later point in the narrative that the mad genius killer of the piece is in fact a professional ventriloquist, able to expertly throw his voice across space to create such confusions and deceptions as we saw in the opening set-piece. Therefore, what makes the killer in this story so terrifying is his indistinctness on all levels - visually he is able to appear and disappear in any space, through an ingenious use of bodily camouflage; and aurally he can project himself anywhere in a space. So this guy is truly a cinema villain, a kind of cinematic apparatus in and of himself - he seems to sneak in and do his dirty work between the frames, and in that all-pervasive, ambiguous zone beyond the frame where an unplaced voice speaks and acts. 

But, of all the films in this modern tradition, none are as militantly intent on exploiting ambiguities of vision and hearing as Cruising. The principle generating the film's matrix of hysterical contagion is the strong suggestion, at every point, that the person we assume is the killer may not be the killer - indeed, we are led to suspect, in one way or another, that virtually every character in the film could be the killer, potentially or actually, in the past, present, or future of the narrative. It is this radical concept of rampant ambiguity that generates the film's social critique - rather than this reading being cleanly superimposed upon the fiction as a humanist message or moral. 

The sound design of Cruising is extremely controlled, logical and systematic - as well as being very stylised and pared down, since the film is in the Sidney Lumet mode where scenes are presented as brute facts, without undue establishment or lingering. Specific foley noise effects - such as footsteps, and the killer's jangling keys or cuffs - are eerily isolated in the sound mix; while other expected atmosphere effects, such as street noises, are sometimes elided altogether for the sake of an autonomous texture of post-synchronised voices. Around 80 per cent of the film, by my reckoning, uses post-synchronisation for the voices, as well as for the rest of the sound atmosphere - an astonishing sign of how stylised the film really is.  

Cruising sets up a system in which different sorts of places or locations have their own distinctive sound, including their own kind of music. All scenes of police work (police procedurals, interrogations, investigative discussions and so on) occur against a background of grim silence, except for stray, specific, unnerving sounds like the saw used on bodies in an autopsy room. Scenes of Burns undercover talking in daytime cafes are rendered in direct sound. Domestic scenes showing Pacino's interactions with his wife, Nancy (Karen Allen), are accompanied by a classical-style cello theme ("Three Day Moon" by Barre Phillips, collaborator with Robert Kramer and Rivette) that is mixed with a high degree of echo. And the scenes in the underground gay bars are associated with punk-style rock tunes, all of them provided by the film's illustrious rock composer, Jack Nitzsche (whose proudest achievement in cinema was his contribution to Cammell and Roeg's Performance [1970]). However, as soon as this discrete system of differences is established, the film begins overlaying and superimposing its diverse kinds of images and sounds - shortly before his death Nitzsche recalled Friedkin's rather Godardian penchant for stacking - i.e., running several pieces of music at the same time. But the sudden cutting or shuffling between different pieces of music can be just as jarring and significant as the stacking in Cruising. A love scene between Burns and Nancy is accompanied by a rock song that we have already heard in the bars; and the repetition in the final image of the film's first image - a boat entering frame, about to find the remains of a dead body - comes with "Three Day Moon," by now deeply chilling in its effect and connotations. 

Alongside these kinds of juxtapositions, the film explores - like When a Stranger Calls Back - many kinds of ambiguities of sound placement. For instance, the film systematically makes it difficult to discern when a song is diegetic (happening inside the scene) or extra-diegetic (overlaid on the scene as commentary). In one of the gay bar scenes, Friedkin jump-cuts the songs in a way that clearly removes them from occurring within the scene, as we at first imagine them to be. A later bar scene retains and hellishly exaggerates a single diegetic sound effect - patrons blowing their police whistles - but replaces the music that would be playing in this space with an atonal wall of sound used at various points of the film's score.  

I have already mentioned the cinematic filiation of the Father's Voice in Cruising with the Mother's Voice in Psycho - and the way in which both voices are psychotically channelled through the body of the murderous son. Many casual viewers of the film are unaware that the killer speaks, in fact, in two radically different voices - his own, and his father's - according to the situation that he is in; and that, in at least one scene, he passes directly from one voice to the other. The Father's Voice is a very particular kind of voice: very low, heavy, always post-synchronised, almost obscenely close to a microphone. Indeed, I believe that Friedkin stylised the film's entire sound design to such an extent in order to build everything around this voice as the central element - so that all other voices diverge from it or resemble it, in varying and shifting degrees. 

A particular sequence from Cruising can be used to illustrate a number of these devices and strategies in their tight interweaving and fusion: a murder scene in a park, which is followed by a transition to a domestic scene between Burns and Nancy. One of the ongoing complexities in the mix of the music in Cruising has to do with how much reverb or echo is placed on the songs - and this differs, for the same songs or pieces of music, from scene to scene. The park scene creates a small but unsettling kind of sound ambiguity with the echo it adds to the song "Spy Boy": it seems almost like ambient, diegetic sound, something that could be playing in the park during this communal cruise, like an extension of the bars and their music - although logically, realistically, this could not be the case. As in Cronenberg's Crash (1996), Friedkin uses the image of people receding into the distance as a stylistic cue for fading out the music. Friedkin continues the strange effect created by this song straight after the murder has been committed, when - after a brief and virtuosic sound transition involving screams, musical punctuation, traffic noise and the sound of a train whistling past - we go to Burns walking down the street, and that same song "Spy Boy" is coolly back on track. Then, in the following domestic scene - breaking the sound pattern that has previously been set up in the film - Burns and Nancy have sex with this song still overlapping the scenes, in place of the previous placid "Three Day Moon" theme. Just as our confused cop has forgotten to take off his undercover leather wristband before intimate marital relations, the sound, too, helps to scatter the bases and muddy the hitherto distinct categories of place and identity.  

Throughout the park scene, the killer speaks in his father's voice. (At this point in the plot, it is important that we do not see his face clearly.) This voice is given a further inflection in the high-pitched childlike chant that the killer uses - "Who's here? I'm here. You're here." This chant also focuses us on the deadly problems of placement in a modern thriller, of knowing exactly where the killer is positioned, or what the linguistic shifter here concretely pinpoints. Friedkin uses the hallowed techniques of the stalker/slasher genre but, like Walton, exaggerates them to radical ends: the killer's voice-off occurs over a flurry of shots, in concert with sudden entrances into frame by both the victim and the killer, and the killer's subjective point-of-view plunging off into some undecidable clump of dark foliage.  

Another hallmark of the contemporary stalker-slasher-serial-killer thriller, from an aural point of view, is the manner in which the conventional role of words, of dialogue, is progressively downplayed for the sake of utilising voice as pure sound: screams, grunts, mindless chants, sinister games with vocal mimicry, and so on. In Cruising, this process of transforming voice into pure animal sound carries over from the killer and his victims to all of the characters, including the nominal cop hero Burns and his marital partner: hence the sex scene, which evacuates dialogue altogether for the sake of an exaggerated (and again post-synchronised) sequence of bodily exclamations. For William Friedkin, this abstracted, disorienting collage of noises is the very sound of violence. 

Adrian Martin
© FIPRESCI 2008

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