CHASING HELL: The Films of William Friedkin (original cut) Kim Nicolini
When most people hear the name William Friedkin, they think of The Exorcist, his notorious 1973 blockbuster film about demonic possession. The Exorcist put Friedkin on the mainstream cinematic map, so when people think of his films, they tend to think of young Linda Blair puking pea soup and abusing herself with a crucifix. But Friedkin’s films, including The Exorcist, are less about the anatomy of young girls coming of age and taking the devil inside their bodies and more about the masculine landscape, the geography of men and the demons that are internalized and externalized through their characters.
Sure, The Exorcist is about a girl’s demonic possession, but it is also largely a film about a man – Father Damian Karras (Jason Miller) – struggling with his own personal demons and going through his own hell in regards to his faith, his relationship to his mother, and his identity in general. Karras is the real tragic figure in this film, and it is no surprise that the film leads him to a tragic end while the young girl walks away fairly unscathed with no memory her hellish days when the devil occupied her body and her bedroom. The real possession takes place within Karras’s tormented psyche.
Many see The Exorcist as an outsider in relation to other Friedkin films, especially those of the 1970s and 80s. But actually, The Exorcist fits right in with Friedkin’s other mid‐career films which portray variations of masculine identity crisis within a landscape that comes pretty damn close to Hell on Earth. The French Connection (1971), Sorcerer (1977), Cruising (1980), and To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) all show men whose internal hell is materialized through the external world and the geography they occupy. Friedkin’s men fight, steal, die, deal, kill and chase each other as they try to outrun their own demons and master their identity in a world of hellish chaos.
The Exorcist shows a very literal battle between good and evil, but Karras’s doubt in his faith, his guilt over his mother, and his desire for the young Regan’s mother Chris muddies his identity as a vehicle of God. Not to mention that when he’s not working as a priest, he’s running around a track and boxing to stay grounded in his masculinity. Questioning faith and showing the murky line between good and bad, law and crime runs through all of these films. Cops are corrupt racists who shoot sympathetic criminals in the back (The French Connection). Counterfeiters are workers doing their job while police are egotistical, sexist, violent and corrupt assholes (To Live and Die in L.A.). A terrorist, embezzler, assassin, and robber become tragic anti‐heros (Sorcerer). The leather‐clad BDSM gay scene in underground New York looks hellish, but really it is the Ivy League privileged frat boy who is the “evil” killer (Cruising). The cop who hunts him (Al Pacino) goes through a massive identity crisis questioning his own masculinity and sexuality while on the “hunt” for the killer.
The hunt resides at the heart of Friedkin’s films in which the men are on a perpetual chase. They’re chasing demons, drug dealers, counterfeiters, money, murderers, and each other. This snippet of dialogue from To Live and Die in L.A. captures the essence of a Friedkin chase in a nutshell:
Guy 1: “Man, why are you chasing me?” Guy 2: “Why are you running?” Guy 1: ““Cause you’re chasing me.”
Men are always on the run, never entirely clear who they are running to or from. They are caught up in the chase for the sake of chase. The plot is inconsequential as men chase each other for illusory drugs (French Connection), fake money (To Live and Die in LA), or for sex and murder (Cruising).
Friedkin’s Sorcerer (his 1977 adaptation of the Henri‐Georges Clouzot’s 1953 classic Wages of Fear) embodies the epitome of the chase at its deepest level of insanity. Four men (an embezzler from Paris, a church robber from New York, a terrorist from Israel, and an assassin from Mexico) find themselves living in exile in the epicenter of hell, an unnamed village in the Dominican Republic, and landscape soaked and dripping with oil pumped out of the earth and running through pipelines. A massive explosion at a drilling site sends bodies flying and littering the landscape with tragic bloody and charred gore. The disaster brings the four men together when they are hired to drive trucks filled with nitroglycerin across a treacherous landscape with the intent of putting out fire with fire – blow up the site of the explosion to stop it from burning. The body count in this movie is astounding. Bodies drop in visceral gore as men chase money and each other. Blood spills through car wrecks, suicides, murders, and explosions while the four men try to escape the inescapable (their fate being caught in the endless loop of the meaningless chase). They travel through an insane vision oil‐soaked, rain‐drenched, blood dripping hell only to face the meaninglessness of their lives. As all the men drop dead except for the desperate, battered and delusional Roy Scheider, he drives the truck mumbling “Where am I going? Where am I going?” The answer is clearly nowhere, the same destination of the other Friedkin films.
The French Connection (1971) and To Live and Die in LA (1985) sandwich Sorcerer (1977), and both movies are “landscape films”. They are about the landscape of men chasing each other within an urban landscape. One set on the congested streets of New York and the other in the smog‐suffocating geography of outer Los Angeles, they are both movies about traffic. Drug trafficking, money trafficking, literal car traffic – the men in these movies are always chasing each other through and getting stuck in chaotic traffic. Both films feature amazing centerpiece car chases – one on the streets of Brooklyn under the elevated subway tracks and the other driving the wrong way on an L.A. freeway. In between the critical chases are no end of “minor” car crashes, cars stuck in traffic, crushed cars, junkyard cars, and cars being disassembled and blown‐up. Men drive cars through city streets, aqueducts and freeways. They drive at night and drive during the day. They run down people and garbage, chase trains, chase drugs, chase money, and chase each other with no end but the chase itself. The cars, the streets, the chase are the glue of the movies as men chase each other through a grid that circles on itself like a closed circuit that keeps shorting out and starting over but to no end except the end.
In his chapter on The French Connection in his recently published memoir The Friedkin Connection (HarperCollins Publishers, 2013), Friedkin writes:
“The chase” is the purest form of cinema, something that can’t be done in any other medium, not in literature nor on a painter’s canvas. A chase must appear spontaneous and out of control, but it must be meticulously choreographed, if only for safety considerations. The audience should not be able to foresee the outcome. It helps to have innocent bystanders who could be “hurt” or “killed.” When I see vehicles in a film whipping through deserted streets or country roads, I don’t feel a sense of danger. Actual high‐speed chases take place in big‐city traffic or on crowded freeways. Pace doesn’t imply speed; sometimes the action should slow to a crawl, or even a dead stop. Build and stop, build and stop, leading to an explosive climax . . . Whether he’s on horseback, behind a wheel, or on foot, the chase must be a metaphor for the lead character: reckless, brutal, obsessive or possibly even cautious.
Not only is the chase a metaphor for the lead character in Friedkin films, but it is also a metaphor for Friedkin himself and his particular brand of adrenaline‐producing filmmaking in which he chases the impossible to make great films. In his mid‐career films, Friedkin doesn’t just depict men on the chase in a fictional setting. He actually behaved like one of his characters as he shot film the literal streets, jungles, cities, and towns (in New York, Los Angeles, Georgetown, Mexico, Israel, the Dominican Republic). He only shot on location and incorporated the literal physical and human geography into his films. In doing so, Friedkin projected the interior of his characters onto the exterior of the real world. The mechanisms of shooting the movies often blurred the boundaries between reality and fiction, just as the boundaries between good and evil are blurred in his movies.
The infamous chase scene in The French Connection is an example of Friedkin’s obsessive filmmaking process. When he was disappointed with the original shoot, Friedkin took a camera into his own hands, got in the car and filmed the scene with the driver going 90 mph for 26 blocks straight down Stillwell Avenue in Brooklyn without any permits to shoot the film. There were no street closures, no “extras” on the “set.” In fact there was no set. There was Friedkin, three cameras, a driver, and a cop in the back seat in case they ran into any problems. There was the real traffic and real pedestrians on the streets and sidewalks that Friedkin and his crew dodged as they sped down Stillwell filming. During this shoot, Friedkin could have easily been one of the characters in his films.
In his filmmaking, Friedkin often “crossed the line” and muddied up ethical and legal boundaries (not unlike the characters he depicts), and his process reflects the times. These were films made during the era before censorship really put a stranglehold on media. They are movies bookmarked by the Nixon and Reagan presidencies. During the Nixon years,daily news was plastered with stories of corrupt cops and governments while Reagan set the wheels in motion that would put the clamps on freedom of speech. Friedkin’s films slipped into this window of time when he could cross the boundaries to make viscerally real cinema before it would become legally impossible to produce the kinds of films he made. In The French Connection, he used real heroin and visited “shooting galleries” with cops to see the heroin trade on the front end. He used real cops, real train conductors, and real pedestrians in the film. In To Live and Die in L.A., Friedkin arranged for an actual counterfeiter to get paroled so he could teach Willem Dafoe the art of counterfeiting. Dafoe is literally producing counterfeit money in the film, and in fact Friedkin had the Feds breathing down his neck for counterfeiting. Friedkin often put himself, his crew and the general population at risk to produce adrenaline‐fueled, impressionistic, documentary‐ style cinema. His films seem real and intense because they were produced under real and intense circumstances. During the Israel scene in Sorcerer when Friedkin was staging the bombing, a real terrorist attack occurred two blocks down the street, so Friedkin rushed his crew and cast down to the blast to capture the true intensity of the bombing.
His use of the “real” to produce a hyper intense cinema doesn’t stop with locations. It also includes people. In talking about how he likes to minimize artificial lighting to create a more natural and documentary feel to his films, Friedkin writes about The French Connection: “Handheld natural light, push the exposures, no big lights at night, no lights at all on the streets during the day, bounce lights off the ceiling on interiors. We’re going to shoot practical locations, no sets – police stations, bars, hotel rooms – and the shots have to look like they were ‘stolen’.” The truth is that many of Friedkin’s shots are “stolen”, and that’s what gives the films such a sense of visceral immediacy. In The Exorcist, when Karras goes to visit his mother in Bellvue, Friedkin filmed actual hospitalized mental patients with hidden cameras. In Sorcerer, he captured village people, laborers, and other “locals” on film giving the movie the gritty hellish economic desperation of the real climate in the Dominican Republic and Mexico. In Cruising, Friedkin shot inside actual underground sex clubs, and he threw Al Pacino in the middle of the “scene” where real men are performing real sexual acts with each other. This forced Pacino to deliver an incredibly intense performance and gave the film a seething reality that makes it leap off the screen. In other words, there are no “extras” in Friedkin films. He used people as part of the landscape as much as he used the streets, and the end result is that his films immerse us entirely in an experiential cinema that never feels staged because Friedkin’s staging (including his source material which was often based on real reportage) is always grounded in and inclusive of the real.
Like The Exorcist, Cruising could also seem like an “outlier” in his films from the 1970s and 80s. What did a serial killer stalking gay BDSM clubs have to do with the hetero‐masculinity depicted in films like The French Connection, Sorcerer, and To Live and Die in L.A.? When asked about the homosexual content in Cruising, Friedkin replied, “To me it’s just a murder mystery, with the gay leather scene as a backdrop. On another level it’s about identity: do any of us really know who it is sitting next to us, or looking back at us in the mirror?” Questioning the identity of the man in the mirror seems to be at the core of many Friedkin films. The gay men in Cruising are not the effeminate gay men that were usually depicted in Hollywood films. By using the leather underground as the backdrop, Friedkin showed (gay) men hyper‐ performing masculinity – dressed as construction workers, prison guards, and cops. In one self‐reflexive scene, the cop Al Pacino ends up in a club on Cop Night, and in that moment what he sees in the mirror completely fucks with his identity. What is he anyway? A real cop? A man in a costume? A straw dog with a badge?
That same question could be asked to all the lead men in these films. They are all thrown into a middle of an identity crisis – are they good guys, bad guys or just guys which implies that they are neither? Friedkin’s original title for Sorcerer was supposed to be Ballbuster, and on some level that could be the title of all his movies including The Exorcist in which Damien Karras’s balls are busted so badly by his religioin, his mother, his desires, and his guilt that he literally takes the Devil into himself and commits suicide to relieve the burden on his balls.
All of these films show men in crisis, men on the brink, men trapped in their own identity and chasing each other like shadows. The movies mark the end of an era of filmmaking that couldn’t be duplicated today. The French Connection was made in 1971 during the height of Nixon’s reign and the horror of the Vietnam War. To Live and Die in L.A. was made in 1985 when Reagan was sworn into second term, and we entered the era the new global economy, censorship and control. The Reagan presidency marked the beginning of a more heightened “police state” in every corner of culture, including film production, and it marked the end of the type of films Friedkin directed in the 70s and 80s. His newest films Bug (2006) and Killer Joe (2011) move largely off the streets and indoors. They are much more insular (depicting the insane paranoia of surveillance culture and the dysfunction the nuclear family). These films are still Friedkin’s vision of the world as Hell; we’ve just moved into a new Hell – a sanitized, sterilized and highly censored stage of Hell. Friedkin could not make the films he made in the 70s and 80s today, but he is still finding ways to push boundaries and set us reeling.