On the occasion of the DVD release of 1970's The Boys In The Band, Andrew O'Hehir has interviewed William Friedkin. Friedkin is best known to the general public as the man who engineered the back-to-back successes of The French Connection and The Exorcist, then flopped forever more. For hardcore film nerds and auteurists, he's either a constant failure or an underrated master.
Aside from small cult affairs like 2003's The Hunted — a fairly brilliant pared-down continuous chase film derided for its deliberate lack of characterization — the reason Friedkin annoys a lot of people are a twin pair of gay-themed films viewed fairly continuously as homophobic. The Boys In The Band annoyed post-Stonewall gays for its ostensibly stereotypical portrait of self-loathing queens going at it for condescending straight viewers having their worst fears confirmed. 1980's Cruising — cop Al Pacino vs. gay murderers in New York's S&M scene — was reviled even before it was filmed; as Trenton Straube wrote when the film was re-issued on DVD last year, the Village Voice's Arthur Bell predicted it would be "the most oppressive, ugly, bigoted look at homosexuality ever presented on the screen." When it was released, the National Gay Task Force compared it to The Birth Of A Nation.
Whether or not the films are inadvertently homophobic is beside the point. What O'Hehir's interview shows is something I've suspected for a long time: Friedkin is a director so sociopathically honed in on exploring environments, he's completely indifferent when it comes to any sense of social responsibility.
Even in his two biggest hits, plot takes a back story to location shooting: The French Connection is far more memorable for its locales (and the way they ground the famously intense car chase) than the plot. The Exorcist qualifies as an odd horror film, one which spends at least as much time showing you the mechanics of hospital surgical proceedings as the symptoms of Regan's possession. The pattern continues to the present day: in his last film (the underseen Bug), Friedkin gave the actors room to stretch out, but he was equally concerned with capturing, with impressive pungency, what it feels like to live your life in small, cheap motel rooms, or what America's worst rural roadside bars look like.
In the interview, Friedkin says "I never remember talking even once to Mart Crowley [who both wrote and produced the film] about trying to make a statement about gay people. The story wasn't about gay people." In other words, he was oblivious to any sense of alleged social responsibility he might have. (Friedkin also seems to be equally oblivious to the idea that having gay people represented on-screen in any context isn't necessarily desirable in and of itself. "We paved the way for 'Will and Grace,' he says. "I really believe that." Some of us might think that's not such a good thing.) This kind of obliviousness is mildly sociopathic in its disregard for consequences, but it's also the stamp of a true if myopic artist: Friedkin sees the world in terms of atmospheres and sub-cultures. How they play to the outside world is no concern of his. Whether or not the films deserve their current re-evaluation and (sort of) welcome back into the fold is one question, but whatever you think of them, whatever message is there isn't Friedkin's doing; he just doesn't care.