I just watched this for the first time tonight but I missed alot of the climax.
At the end was it revealed that Pacino was the killer?
Can someone explain what happened?
I don’t know why, but I read the title of the OP as Cruising w/Pinnochio.
Even William Friedkin admitted he doesn’t understand what happened at the end of Cruising. And he directed the damn thing.
Yes, it’s strongly implied, not that Pacion is the killer responsible for the earlier murders, but that he has become a killer because of the tainting influence of those awful gays.
Pacino’s character may have committed the last murder, his neighbor the young writer. But the ending is intentionally ambiguous, just as it is in Friedkin’s other NYC movie, The French Connection. And ambiguity has its virtues.
Ah… so there are spoilers in here… :smack: :smack:
Not that it’s a new movie by any means, but it’s one I’ve been trying to see the end of for ages! Neeever mind.
I actually saw this in the theaters when it originally was released. My impression was that the gay neighbor was murdered by someone unconnected to the serial killings–a lover jealous of what he suspected Pacino was doing? My cop uncle had told me that gay crimes of passion tend to be a lot grislier than they straight variety, so this view didn’t seem like an unusual reading of the ending. Of course, this was fifteen years before OJ.
Dude, the OP is clearly asking for spoilers. I get as pissed off about unboxed current spoilers as anyone, but when the OP is asking for spoilers, don’t get upset when you read the thread and get spoiled.
“Gay crimes of passion are more grisly than straight crimes of passion”? I’d be interested in some empirical proof of that.
The director admitted that he didn’t know whether there was one killer or more than one, or whether Pacino murdered the neighbor or was a final undiscovered victim of the known killer. He also, oddly, claimed that all of the violence in the film was committed by heterosexuals.
Ultimately, the most important question raised by Cruising will most likely forever remain unanswered. That question being what the fuck was with the enormous black man in the jock strap and cowboy hat wallopping guys during interrogations?
It was presented as late 70s cop lore, not a factual claim. That’s why I added the OJ reference.
You know, I’d always heard that too. I think I read it in one of Joseph Waumbaugh’s novels (former LAPD cop turned novelist) and in some of the true crime police books I used to read voraciously. And the murder of Joe Oton by his lover with a hammer kinda reinforcd the idea in my mind. It may have been a common (but unfounded) bit of police lore in the 70’s.
The way I interpreted the story was that Pacino’s character had to immerse himself so much of the serial killer’s milieu to catch him — to live like him, to dress like him, to visit the same bars as him, to cruise for sex like him, to immerse himself into the whole NYC gay leather lifestyle of the early 1970s — that he gradually came to assume the very personality of the killer. The whole process touched into some deeply buried gay S&M persona within Pacino’s cop that he couldn’t handle. We do know that Pacino’s character gets into a psychological crisis, when he breaks down in tears telling his boss he can’t go on with this assignment. And we know that the assignment was causing a rift between Pacino and his girlfriend, a possible crisis of heterosexuality which seems to be at least temporarily repaired at the end of the movie, after Pacino’s gay neighbor is murdered (a misplaced attempt at killing the gay within himself?)
The most ambiguous moment of an already ambiguous ending is the last scene, when his girlfriend stands in front of a mirror in his apartment and puts on the aviator sunglasses and leather cap that Pacino wore when cruising. What does it mean? It could mean a lot of things, but I think it is within the broader theme of a shift in psyche (gazing in a mirror usually means gazing into the psyche in movie symbolism) being triggered by the assumption of an external change. It is the slightest hint that the girlfriend is beginning to understand what happened to him.