Imagine it’s New Year’s 1980. A new decade arrives, sharp and breathless, and the natural high of the ’70s—its sensuality, its permissiveness, its beauty and brutality and the art that exploded from that tension—seems to be fading by the minute. A month ago, the founders of Studio 54 were sentenced to jail. In a year, the first case of AIDS will be reported in the U.S.
A New Year’s party in Hollywood might have been particularly charged with that heady blend of possibility and dread. Nearly all of the auteurs who had defined the decade—Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now), Martin Scorsese (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver), William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist), Paul Schrader (Blue Collar, Hardcore), and Brian De Palma (Carrie, Obsession) among them—stood at a crossroads in 1979: basking in their triumphs, yet burdened by debt, doubt, or disappointment. Would any of their upcoming releases rise to define the new decade, or would they find themselves out of sync with the culture they landed in?
Two would quickly find out. American Gigolo, written and directed by Schrader and starring Richard Gere, opened on February 1, 1980. Cruising, directed by Friedkin and starring Al Pacino, opened two weeks later on February 15. Both movies depict men compelled to perform specific, charged versions of masculinity as a means to an end, mistaking performance for personhood along the way. With their shared motifs of mirrors and doubles, both films visualize themes that would define 80s cinema: a cultural shift toward spectacle and style, where the self was increasingly understood as something curated, externalized, and possibly unstable.
In American Gigolo, Gere plays Julian Kaye, a high-priced male escort in Los Angeles. Kaye has crafted himself for consumption: he drapes his body in Armani suits and cruises the Pacific Coast Highway in a Mercedes-Benz to the pulsing synths of a Giorgio Moroder score. His apartment is less a home than a showroom: a place to train his body, coordinate his wardrobe, and conduct appointments with wealthy older women. He claims to speak five languages. But when Julian is framed for the murder of a client and finds he has no alibi, he quickly realizes the danger of a life built on appearances. He’s abandoned by his clients, his handler, and even his preternatural good looks can’t save him—in fact, it’s his resemblance to the killer that condemns him.
In Cruising, Pacino plays Steve Burns, an NYPD officer who is assigned to go undercover in New York’s gay S&M club scene in order to catch a serial killer who is targeting gay men. He’s selected because he fits the profile of the killer’s victims: small, fit, with dark curly hair. Burns begins living a double life, moving out of the apartment he shares with his girlfriend, starts working out, and plunging into the underground leather scene. It doesn’t take long for Steve to start questioning his own identity and desires, which unnerves him to the point that he tries to quit the assignment. Denied, he descends further into the investigation and becomes increasingly disconnected from his former self.
Though rarely compared, the two films were linked from the start: Friedkin originally wanted Gere for the role of Steve Burns in Cruising.
“I think he would have been wonderful,” said Friedkin, “because he had a strange, ambiguous quality about him.” Gere was interested, too, but was muscled out of the role by Pacino, who was fresh off his fifth Oscar nomination and considered a more bankable star.
Instead, Gere brought that same enigmatic quality to American Gigolo‘s Jules, a man whose careful facade begins to crack under the pressure of a murder investigation, as well as an unexpected connection with a senator’s wife, played by Lauren Hutton. Gere’s coiled, sleek performance—not to mention his almost inhuman beauty—would make him a star.
American Gigolo has been called “gayest non-gay movie ever made,” in an oral history published in 032c Magazine: “This is a homo-hetero conspiracy. This is sex as aesthetics. This is color in place of emotion. This is surface and sound.”
Much of this queer aesthetic can be attributed to crucial members of production, including designer Giorgio Armani and production designer Ferdinando “Nando” Scarfiotti. They were both Italian, and openly gay. A former collaborator of Bernardo Bertolucci’s, Scarfiotti was hired because Schrader wanted to capture Los Angeles through a sleek, almost anthropological lens that would set Gigolo apart from the neon-soaked daze of his film Hardcore (1979) or the noir-ish shadows of Chinatown (1974). And Armani? His sleek, lightweight silhouettes would revolutionize menswear and give the character of Julian the closest thing he had to a soul. According to Schrader, “To me, the clothes and the character were the same. I mean, this is a guy who does a line of coke in order to get dressed.”
It’s not so difficult to read Julian—who insists he doesn’t “do gay stuff anymore,” who specifies he “only brings women” to his spotless apartment, suggesting his preferences might shift with a change in scenery—as a gay or bisexual man who has decided to override his own preferences for the sake of his career and social status. He’s as tightly wound as the luxury watch on his wrist: a perfectly calibrated lover, whose business is your pleasure, not his own. One can hardly imagine this mannequin of a man truly giving himself over to his desires, whatever they may be.
Schrader claims: “Julian was not as gay as he would be today. At the time, we thought we were being brave, promoting this androgynous male entitlement. Now I look back and we were being cowardly. It should have been much more gay.”
Upon release, American Gigolo was trashed by most mainstream critics, and even faced accusations of homophobia, because its villain is a Black, gay pimp played by Bill Duke. But Gigolo has since been reevaluated as a defining film—maybe the defining film—of the 80s, and is celebrated as a sleek, propulsive depiction of aesthetic anesthetization that has aged as beautifully as Gere himself.
Awash in a sickly blue glow, with kinetic club scenes and sleek homages to the slasher genre, it could be argued that Cruising is just as stylish and visually exciting as Gigolo. But if Gigolo was all smooth, spit-polished surfaces that signified queerness through aesthetic choices, then Cruising was the darkened basement underneath, where the gay leather scene, camp horror, and a police procedural collided in the shadows. It’s grimy, sweaty, and visceral.
Notably, director Friedkin opted out of using the disco hits of the day on the soundtrack, choosing instead to feature hardcore punk and hard funk by acts like Willy Deville, the Cripples, Mutiny, and the Germs instead. Per Pitchfork, “DeVille’s sinewy blues-rock grooves and the Germs’ smeary attack helped establish the fetid atmosphere of dread and danger the film was gunning for.”
Like Julian, Steve occupies a liminal sexual space, although he’s being pushed towards queerness, not away from it. But unlike Gere, Pacino is no Adonis here: he sports a bad perm, and the clothing he adopts never really stops looking like a costume, either hanging too loosely or clinging too tightly. He gets reprimanded at the leather club because he doesn’t know how to signal correctly, and he is visibly uncomfortable through most of the film (something Friedkin, who hated working with Pacino, complained was genuine, although he admitted it served the character).
We see this divide further reinforced in how the men use mirrors: in Gigolo, they are opulent and ornamental, reinforcing the curated image Julian has built so methodically, reflecting something beautiful but hollow. In Cruising, the mirror is the site of Steve’s transformation: his mirrors are smaller, more intimate, and reflect something messier and in process.
In one scene, Steve paints his eyebrows in the mirror, elongating and thickening them as he prepares to go to a club for the first time—almost adolescent in his initial approach to transformation. And in one standout scene, he lifts weights in front of a round mirror in his new apartment, never breaking eye contact with himself. As Steve pumps, he yells: “Yes! YES!” It’s a charged, masturbatory moment that is crucial to Pacino’s performance and Steve’s arc. The intensity of his gaze, the strain, the release, the ecstasy: something shifts. “YES”—he consents, giving himself over to something new. There’s pleasure in the surrender, something erotic about self-obliteration, the brief moment when you feel liberated from everything you thought you wanted or thought you were.
It would seem Steve’s journey is less one of self-discovery or becoming than it is annihilation. Think of who he’s been tasked to embody while undercover: a victim, a voyeur, an anonymous fuck. He’s stuck in limbo, subsumed by a world that seems to be awakening something in him, but with no future there beyond his assignment. And the old Steve is fading, something we see expressed by his increasing agitation when talking to his boss or girlfriend.
Cruising ends with Steve returning to his old apartment after allegedly catching the serial killer. He silently steps in front of the bathroom mirror and begins to shave. As he gazes at himself, carrying out this quotidian task, the viewer wonders: is he coming back to himself, in a grounding ritual? Or is he dissociated and hollow, going through the motions in an effort to coax himself back towards humanity?
A possible answer lands when his girlfriend playfully tries on his undercover gear: a cap, a pair of sunglasses. We realize that we’ve seen this look before, on the killer.
After this reveal, Friedkin ends the movie—leaving us staring, like Steve, into a surface that gives nothing back.
The themes of self-alienation and erotic disconnect in American Gigolo and Cruising feel less like dated anxieties than a prologue to the present. The rise of incel culture, the “male loneliness epidemic,” declining sex rates among Gen Z men, and long-term impact of pornography consumption point to a generation of men for whom intimacy has become anxious, disconnected, and transactional. Were Schrader and Friedkin eerily prescient, capturing the inflection point when male isolation began mutating from private crisis to public epidemic? Or were they tapping into something perennial and lurking, and filtering it through the aesthetics of their new decade: draped in expensive silk, and bathed in neon?