The way things currently stand, it’s probably safe to say that William Friedkin has retired. Not that there isn’t still a market for his brand of hilarious, opinionated coarseness—as two recent documentaries, Francesco Zeppel’s Friedkin Uncut, and Alexandre O. Philippe’s Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist can attest—but as a filmmaker, as a director of movies of all kind, movies that are often idiosyncratic, sometimes nakedly commercial, not infrequently provocative, even deeply shocking, he appears to have packed it in. Friedkin is 85 now, so who can blame him, especially when you consider how much longer the gaps between his films had become? He’s made just three in the last fifteen years.
One of those, the last one, is a documentary called The Devil and Father Amorth, which purports to document the genuine exorcism of a woman actually possessed by an evil spirit. I have my doubts about this, but regardless, if that film does indeed turn out to be Friedkin’s last, there’s a neat symmetry to it, as his first picture was also a documentary. The People vs. Paul Crump was made for television, and combines noirish reenactments and interviews with the key subjects to tell the case of Paul Crump, a black man on Death Row for the murder of a security guard during an attempt to rob the payroll office of a Chicago meatpacking plant. The crime occurred in 1953, and Friedkin’s film—which in addition to suggesting Crump was innocent, also asserts that even if he’s guilty, he was rehabilitated—aired in 1962.
The People vs. Paul Crump was very successful, and allowed Friedkin to pick up more TV work until, in the late 60s, he was finally able to begin his career in features. It’s one hell of a wild career, too, one that can be divided into sections that show both the occasionally scattershot nature of his subject matter and the years when his focus on theme and his own specific style was much sharper, which I’ve done. Let’s get started:
I. Do You Recognize an External Force?
There is no better evidence that Friedkin’s life as a filmmaker has been a unique one than the fact that his first feature was Good Times, a kind of sketch comedy film starring Sonny & Cher (and quite frankly starring Sonny more than Cher) that was ultimately kind of a dry-run for their eventual TV variety shows. It co-stars, naturally enough, George Sanders as a movie executive whose pitch to Sonny about getting him and his wife into the movie business leads to a series of fantasies in which Sonny plays the bumbling hero in different genre movies— a Western, jungle adventure, and so on.
I’ll say this much for Good Times: it could be worse. It sure as hell could also be better, and in any case it’s not very distinctive as far as Friedkin’s own work on it goes. The kind of palatable, big-cartoon-flower Laugh-In-style psychedelia of the film doesn’t exactly jibe with the sensibilities and preoccupations that define most of his work. Friedkin would follow up Good Times with another comedy, The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968), a period film about the origins of striptease. Made in collaboration with producer and co-writer (with Sidney Michaels and Arnold Schulman) Norman Lear, the film is, according to Friedkin, a complete shambles, a disaster that threatened to ruin his career before it had really begun. In his memoir The Friedkin Connection, he describes his fraught relationship with Lear, and writes: “I brought what I could to the picture, but I was the director in name only.
Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, I was unable to watch The Night They Raided Minsky’s in time for this piece, but following a Sonny and Cher sketch film and a comedy about burlesque striptease, his next film was an adaptation of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party. “It was the first film I really wanted to make, and felt passionate about,” he writes in his memoirs, and that hunger and inspiration is evident. The Birthday Party is, to my mind, Friedkin’s first masterpiece. Taking place almost entirely in just two rooms, the film stars Robert Shaw as Stanley, a shambolic, drunken tenant of a small boarding house run by Meg (Dandy Nichols) and her husband Petey (Moultrie Kelsall). After a long, strange, almost sinisterly flirtatious conversation between Stanley and the dowdy Meg, two new boarders arrive: McCann (Patrick Magee) and Goldberg (Sydney Tafler). These two men appear to know something about Stanley—indeed, they seem to be there, at this boardinghouse, entirely because of Stanley—and as they charm the naïve Meg into throwing a birthday party for Stanley (whether it is even really his birthday is unclear), the atmosphere of the kitchen, and of the parlor, and of the film, grows increasingly infernal.
When turning a stage play into a work of cinema, it’s a common mistake for the director to overwork the camera, and to block the scenes so that the actors never stop moving, all in a desperate attempt to save the audience from what they imagine would otherwise be immense boredom. A good example of this is Michael Corrente’s film of David Mamet’s American Buffalo, in which Dennis Franz is forever wandering around his pawn shop while he talks to Dustin Hoffman, with no clear purpose behind his movements. Friedkin, on the other hand, waits until the camera needs to do something before he does it. Early on, there’s an elegant shot during breakfast: the camera dollies in on the plate of fried bread that Meg has set on the counter for Stanley. It then moves around the counter and into the kitchen itself. This happens slowly, but is dynamic, and opens up the geography of the space. It also expresses the curious menace of the everyday, which is the psychological level from which Pinter’s play begins.
Later, as the action and dialogue during the party (and especially when the characters play Blind Man’s Bluff) becomes increasingly surreal, absurdist, and frightening—and as good as Magee, Shaw, and Nichols are, the terrifying Sydney Tafler steals the film—Friedkin’s direction becomes more chaotic, switching from color to black-and-white any time the lights are turned off, and employing stark, grainy afterimage optical effects that he would use again five years later in The Exorcist. And the overall impact of The Birthday Party is, for me, that of an unusually powerful horror film. What happens in the film, why it happens, is essentially inexplicable, but at the core is something horrible. It’s the terror of the unknown in the everyday. To me, it most closely resembles the exquisitely unnerving horror fiction of Robert Aickman, and of “Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff,” a novella by horror writer and Aickman acolyte Peter Straub.
By now seemingly obsessed with plays about birthday parties, Friedkin’s next film was an adaptation of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1970). The play, and film, takes place over the course of a day and night, about a group of gay men who are gathering at Michael’s (Kenneth Nelson) to celebrate the birthday of Harold (Leonard Frey). Harold is late to his own party, and acts like a satyr, or Satan, when he does.
The Boys in the Band is a bit more conventional, as a piece of filmmaking, than The Birthday Party, but it’s a good movie, and the first example in Friedkin’s career of his willingness to either consciously buck against, or simply not think about, what, in a given era, is considered polite or tasteful, or to attempt to make mainstream that which others believe should be hidden. The Boys in the Band was, in fact, one of the first American films to focus exclusively on the lives of gay characters. Not all of the actors were gay, but many were, and the tragedy of it all is that several of them, including Nelson and Frey, would die in the ‘80s and ‘90s of AIDS-related illnesses. Another, Reuben Greene, seems to have vanished off the face of the earth.
II. I Am No One
And then suddenly, everything changed. The French Connection happened in a very ordinary way. William Friedkin met and got to know the producer Phil D’Antoni, who one day told him about a non-fiction book by Robin Moore he’d optioned, about an enormous heroin bust, so they flew to New York to meet the two cops at the center of the case. They had to shop Ernest Tidyman’s script around for a while, but that’s not unusual, either. What was unusual was that it was 1971, New Hollywood was taking over, and it was possible to make The French Connection the way Friedkin saw it, and the way it should be made. Or, the way it could be made to work, at least. Friedkin was at the time, by his own admission, an abusive, ill-tempered director. In order to get the performance out of the anxious, uncertain, surly Gene Hackman (playing the racist, ruthless and brilliant cop Popeye Doyle) that he wanted, Friedkin was intentionally tyrannical towards the actor, stoking the rage he wanted Doyle to express: “Gene had to play an angry, obsessive man, and I could provoke that anger in him and let him focus it on me,” he writes in his memoir.
I’m no director, but there are perhaps better ways of handling that. Worse still is the way he shot the famous car/subway chase. From The Friedkin Connection: “I…would not…risk the lives of others as we did, but the best moments of the chase came from this long run with three cameras; pedestrians and cars dashed out of the way, warned only by the oncoming siren.” When Friedkin appeared on Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast, he told Maron that now he would use computer effects to shoot a scene like that. Dubious, Maron pointed out how real The French Connection was, and when reminded by Friedkin that it’s not real, it’s a movie, Maron protested “You just said people’s lives were in danger!” Friedkin gently responded “That’s not a good thing, Marc.”
But two things are unavoidable: no one died or was even hurt in that scene, and to this day that chase scene kills. It is headlong, heedless, as wild and dangerous as it looks. And Hackman’s Doyle, one senses, would just as soon run down the woman with the baby carriage if he didn’t think it would slow him down more than swerving around her at the last second. Suddenly, the world of Friedkin’s cinema was one of terrifying moral uncertainty, both in the stories they told, and in their making.
While making his next film, The Exorcist (1973), based on the best-selling novel by William Peter Blatty, who wrote the screenplay, Friedkin slapped the face of Father William O’Malley, an actual priest who was cast to play Father Dyer, so that when he yelled “Action!” a second later, O’Malley’s hands would shake the way Friedkin wanted, as Dyer gave Last Rites to his best friend, Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller). Further, in order to get the shot of Ellen Burstyn as Chris MacNeil, the harried single mother of the demonically possessed young girl Regan (Linda Blair), being thrown across the room by Regan, Friedkin put a harness on the actress, which was attached to a device that would lift her off the ground and yank her backward. This stunt, for which Burstyn was not fully prepared, badly injured her back, from which she still suffers. In the various documentaries about the making of The Exorcist in which she has appeared, Burstyn doesn’t seem to have ever forgiven him. And of course, the depraved horror imagery of the film remains repulsive. I still cannot believe that the “Let Jesus fuck you!” scene exists in a big budget studio film. It’s mind-boggling, not only that it’s there, but that it passed the MPAA with an R rating.
If any of this sounds like I disapprove of the film, think again. I think The Exorcist is Friedkin’s greatest achievement; I’m one of those boring people who considers it the best horror film ever made. The wintery cinematography casts a pall over the MacNeil home before anything has happened to Regan. Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” playing over the nuns in flowing white habits that Chris sees on the street makes them seem alien and unknowable. The secular world of post-“Is God Dead?” America as represented by Chris (more so than Regan, who probably hasn’t given the matter much thought) is about to have a lot of questions it had never asked itself before. Blatty was very much a Catholic, and Friedkin, who was born Jewish, has an approach to religious faith that is at least complex. (He’s described himself as an agnostic who believes the teachings of Jesus. He and Blatty were close up until the writer’s death in 2017.)
The energizing idea behind The Exorcist is to express both religious faith and Blatty and Friedkin’s belief in mankind’s essential decency through extreme transgression. This isn’t going to sit well with everybody, of course, but that’s finally what The Exorcist is, however many people wish to psychoanalyze Blatty and Friedkin by claiming the film is really about man’s (small “m”) fear of female puberty and sexuality. By which I don’t mean that Regan’s age and gender were chosen by throwing darts at a board, but this reading of the film seems to not only want to treat the ending as meaningless or arbitrary, but to pretend that Father Karras and Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) have no function in the story at all. The still-shocking obscenities in The Exorcist are meant to show the corruption not only of Regan’s innocence, but the natural growth that her puberty is bringing forth, as well. Blatty and Friedkin don’t see her pending womanhood as terrifying—they view the unnatural exploitation of it by the demon as terrifying.
The Exorcist was a sensation. Having won the Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture for The French Connection two years earlier, Friedkin was nominated for both again in 1973. His string of failures was at an end. He seemed to be spending the ‘70s the same way Francis Ford Coppola was, with one incredible artistic and commercial achievement after another. Maybe this is where karma stepped in. If so, the form it took was that of Sorcerer (1977), one of his best films. (I’d call it his best, if not for The Exorcist.) Based on Henri-Georges Clouzot 1953 classic The Wages of Fear, Sorcerer (screenplay by Walon Green) is about a group of men—a hitman (Francisco Rabal), a terrorist (Amidou), a disgraced banker (Bruno Cremer), and a thief and getaway driver (Roy Scheider)—on the run from their various crimes and countries, who find themselves together in Porvenir, a small Latin American town. There they land work transporting crates of unstable dynamite, each stick sweating nitroglycerine, over hills and mountains, across swaying bridges and through violent storms. And so the stage is set for an unbearably tense journey, with every jolt along the way potentially setting off the dynamite and killing them all.
The actions of each of these men have brought them to a situation where every rock in the dirt road could bring instant death, a fact not lost on them. Sorcerer is a film of exhaustion—physical, mental, metaphysical, and existential. A long sequence featuring the two gigantic trucks slowly moving across a rotten, rainswept bridge, is a masterpiece of theme as plot, theme as action. In this moment for these men, inches from being blown to pieces, it seems impossible to move forward, but also impossible to go back. So they move forward. Later in the film, when Scheider is the only one left and his truck has died mere miles from his destination, Friedkin and cinematographers Joseph M. Stephens and Dick Bush film the barren landscape where the once huge, now contextually miniscule truck sits stranded as if these were images from a different planet or a dark, lifeless underworld. It is one of the purest visual depictions of despair I’ve ever seen.
In a way, Sorcerer is a combination of Friedkin’s previous two films: it has all the gritty, hard-nosed cynicism of The French Connection as well as The Exorcist’s quest for something more beyond the Hell of these men’s lives, even if the quest is carried out ignorantly, the goal swept at blindly, futilely. According to Friedkin, he had no doubt it would be a hit. It was not.
III. You Want Bread, Fuck a Baker
Needing to find a way back from the wilderness of Sorcerer to the brief days of his glorious success after The French Connection and The Exorcist, Friedkin’s next film was The Brink’s Job (1978). The film, which is not at all bad, seems like a blatant plea for commercial acceptance. It’s a heist comedy, based on a true story, roughly along the lines of the wildly successful The Sting from 1973 (a film that beat out The Exorcist at that year’s Oscars). Boasting a stacked cast that includes Peter Falk, Peter Boyle, Paul Sorvino, and Warren Oates, it nevertheless more closely resembles Friedkin’s earlier job-for-hire films. It’s well-made, at times pretty funny, and contains at least one great performance, that given by Warren Oates. But it has no personality of its own, which on the one hand is strange considering how distinct Friedkin’s aesthetic had become in the first half of the ‘70s, but on the other hand, given that he is very outspokenly against the Auteur Theory, perhaps it’s not so strange after all.
At any rate, The Brink’s Job was another commercial disappointment, so Friedkin’s response to which was to say “Fine,” and then go ahead and make Cruising (1980). Perhaps the worst career decision Friedkin could have made, it’s also clearly a film that only Friedkin was ever going to make. Based in part on the only novel written by Gerald Walker, editor and journalist for The New York Times Magazine, the story of the film is a fictionalized account of a real series of murders of gay men in the late ‘70s. The killer turned out to be Paul Bateson, a former radiologist at NYU Medical Center, and who appeared briefly, as a radiologist’s assistant, in The Exorcist. However, Walker’s novel was published in 1970, before Bateson’s murders, so in crafting the screenplay (one of only a handful he’s written) Friedkin pulled material from the book, Bateson’s story, and conversations he’d had with Randy Jurgensen, a homicide detective who’d worked a case undercover in much the same way Al Pacino’s cop Steve Burns does in the film.
Set largely amidst the gay BDSM subculture in New York, Cruising is relentlessly grimy—a grime similar to but apart from that of The French Connection—and aggressive, and for this reason it was, and remains, enormously controversial. Gay activists at the time of its release, and even during filming, protested, believing that the movie would only be used to justify the prejudices of the straight world. Friedkin claims that was never his intention, and Pacino, who almost never discusses the film, said the same thing. This is at least partially borne out by Don Scardino as Ted Bailey, Steve’s neighbor after he goes undercover and rents an apartment near the Meatpacking District, where the BDSM culture is strongest. Ted’s just a normal guy who happens to be gay, and whose murder at the film’s end is the final, nasty shock of this nasty, shocking movie. But Ted’s just one character, and it’s not difficult to understand why activists were so upset about Cruising. Add to this the fact that, originally, Friedkin shot footage of explicit gay sex to include in the nightclub scenes (which, to the surprise of no one, he was forced to remove, and which subsequently, according to Friedkin, was lost) and that, later, when he went back to restore the film for a home video release, he added split-second inserts of hardcore sex during the brutal knife murders, well, perhaps you could at least surmise that Friedkin wanted controversy, and he got it.
Which of course does not mean Cruising is a bad film. The central idea—that this investigation awakens something in Steve Burns, having to do with both his own sexuality, but of a dormant violent streak, even a psychotic one—is fascinating, and played with a kind of brash subtlety so unique to the Pacino of that era that he probably could have trademarked it. And Friedkin’s use of Boccherini’s “La Musica Notturna Delle Strade di Madrid, No. 6, Op. 30” is utterly inspired— incongruous, counterintuitive, and absolutely perfect. But Cruising is a film that struggles with itself, one that at turns seems to be trying to wrench a dark, meaningful thriller from the jaws of empty provocation, and throwing up its hands and succumbing. This is also the source of its power.
This all went about as well for Friedkin as you can imagine, and so with his next film he tried again for commercial viability. The resulting film, 1983’s political comedy Deal of the Century (written by Paul Brickman of Risky Business fame) needn’t concern us for very long. It’s about illegal arms dealers, and it stars Chevy Chase, Sigourney Weaver, and Gregory Hines. They’re all pretty good here, and the way Chase, as one of those arms dealers, says, while demonstrating all the features of a newfangled machine gun to a trio of revolutionaries, “There’s a built-in wire cutter here; you got a wire you wanna cut, it’s built in here” is something I find inexplicably amusing. But that’s about it. The biggest problem in a movie that’s full of them is that, especially in the scene just referenced, Chase’s character is supposed to be a tonier version of Steven Prince’s character from Taxi Driver. And, incredibly, we’re supposed to like this guy, even before he develops a conscience. You know, like illegal arms dealers are always doing? It’s misjudged on almost every level, and, again, exhibits none of Friedkin’s most compelling gifts.
A lot of Friedkin’s post-Sorcerer work suggests a “one for me, one for nobody” philosophy was at play, but his next film, at least when looked at within the full context of its influence, is as close to a cross-over hit as he’d had since The Exorcist. Indeed, To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) is still talked about, still watched, still discovered by new audiences, and deservedly so. A crime film about the rarely explored job of the Secret Service to track down and arrest counterfeiters—and based on a novel by Gerald Petievich, a former Secret Service agent who did that same job—perhaps the most surprising thing about the film is that it basically could not have been influenced by Michael Mann. At that time, Mann had only made (outside of some TV work) Thief and The Keep, the latter of which doesn’t apply to this situation. (Miami Vice had been on for about a season). Which means that in the mid-’80s, Mann and Friedkin were roughly, and independently, on the same wavelength. Or roughly the same wavelength, because while Mann’s color schemes tend to be brazen and primary, even neon at times, in To Live and Die in L.A., Friedkin’s take on Los Angeles crime is more pastel, somehow both muted and bright.
What Friedkin does amp up are the shock and sleaze, elements that Mann uses sparingly. To Live and Die in L.A. begins with a suicide bomber exploding (as he falls off a building, no less), for example, and is rather frank in its sexuality. It also may include the only example in film history of its particular type of villain, the sadistic counterfeiter, played here by an almost boyish Willem Dafoe. This man, Eric Masters, is the foil to Secret Service agent Richard Chance, played by William Petersen, who was one year away from starring in Mann’s Manhunter, and whose scary blankness serves him well in both. Here, Petersen is basically doing his version of Hackman’s Popeye Doyle: both men are so eerily focused on catching their prey that all other considerations, including the safety of the public, or of their fellow law enforcement colleagues, fall by the wayside. Similarly, John Pankow—as John Yukovich, Chance’s partner—matches Roy Scheider’s Buddy Russo, in that both men have a perspective and conscience that their partners lack, though Yukovich is a bit quicker to panic than Russo.
To Live and Die in L.A. is perhaps best remembered for its jaw-dropping car chase—at one point Petersen drives against traffic on the freeway—a cop/action movie trope Friedkin has returned to often, finding a new twist on it each time. As with the chase in The French Connection, this one is incredibly visceral. Despite, or perhaps because, of the fact that a chase like this could not possibly last this long without ending in catastrophe, the threat of sudden death is ever-present. It hangs over the entire film, in fact, appropriately so, given where our protagonist ends up. Speaking of which, a curious motif, and always effectively and disturbingly applied, in Friedkin’s crime films is the image of someone getting shot in the face. This goes back as far as The People vs. Paul Crump, appears again in the opening minutes of The French Connection, and occurs more than once in To Live and Die in L.A. There’s no jolt of violence quite as upsetting as that millisecond flash of a human face being ruined. If he does nothing else, Friedkin will make you feel that.
IV. It’s the Devil Station
To Live and Die in L.A. was a modest success, critically and commercially, but it didn’t put Friedkin back on the A-list. His next film, Rampage, was shot in 1987 but due to producer Dino De Laurentiis’s shifty finances, it remained unreleased in the United States until 1992, when it was acquired by Miramax. It did poorly. In The Friedkin Connection, the director describes this experience as the time he “hit bottom”: “There have been successful filmmakers of my generation, before and since, who didn’t survive disasters like Rampage. They never directed another film. It was entirely possible the same fate awaited me.”
Very well, but I happen to think Rampage is one of Friedkin’s most gripping pictures. Based on a novel by former criminal prosecutor William P. Wood, which itself was based on the murders, arrest, and trial of serial killer Richard Chase (and if you don’t know anything about Chase or his crimes, I urge to continue down this path of blissful ignorance), it’s about a murderer named Charles Reece (Alex McArthur) whose vicious crimes lead the Sacramento District Attorney to insist that the prosecutor assigned to the case, Anthony Fraser (Michael Biehn), pursue the death penalty. This despite the belief that no jury would ever find someone like Reece legally sane. And what Rampage turns out to be, quite surprisingly, is a pro-death penalty film. This is a long way from the stance Friedkin took in The People vs. Paul Crump, although wherever you stand on this issue, I’d say Crump is somewhat easier to sympathize with than Richard Chase.
Anyway, on top of everything else, without being as graphic as some of Friedkin’s films before and after this, Rampage contains some of his most disturbing imagery. It begins, bizarrely, on a freeze-frame of Reece from behind, walking down the street. The frame stays like that for maybe a second before kicking into motion. Friedkin wants the audience to start off disoriented, and then proceed from there. Of the violent imagery—very few of the killings occur on-screen—most unforgettably for me is the blood-soaked measuring cup being put into an evidence bag. Rampage also recalls, in many ways, The Exorcist, with Fraser’s flashbacks to the death of his young daughter resembling Karras’s dream sequence in that earlier film. There’s also a disquieting scene that involves a desecrated church.
It really is the damnedest movie: a melodramatic (the Morricone score is relentless) pro-execution polemic/horror film with incredibly tense, absorbing, and occasionally absurd courtroom scenes. There should have been a mistrial about three different times. But it also includes some wonderful character performances—McArthur is chilling, and especially great when the cops show up at the gas station where Reece works, and they know he’s their guy, but he pretends he’s not Reece—and some genuine emotion. The late Royce D. Applegate is especially memorable as a man trying to find a way to survive after Reece murders his wife and eldest son.
Friedkin would spend the rest of the 90s not quite living up to Rampage. His next film, The Guardian (1990, filmed three years after but released two years before Rampage), is the only other horror film he’s made, outside of The Exorcist, than you couldn’t argue belonged to another genre. But while I find the movie kind of fun (there’s a bit where a bunch of young punks are killed by trees, bushes, etc., that I quite enjoyed), and, at least in the scenes that take place in the forest, it has an interesting, low-budget kind of Labyrinth thing going on visually, it’s not actually something to go out of your way to see. Along with Deal of the Century, it’s the only film he doesn’t even mention in The Friedkin Connection.
Better, though flawed, especially at the end, and anyway not especially Friedkin-esque is 1994’s Blue Chips, a sports drama starring Nick Nolte and Shaquille O’Neal(!). Nolte plays a college basketball coach, which is a role I hope we can all agree is the one Nolte was born to play, providing as it does ample opportunities for him to say things like “Jesus Christ” and “goddamnit.”
Friedkin’s most notorious film from this era is Jade (1995), one of the films that lured David Caruso away from NYPD Blue, before sending him back to CSI: Miami. This one’s not much good either, but I’d argue it’s not without interest. One of those erotic thrillers they used to make (many of which were written by Joe Eszterhas, including this one), Friedkin—who over the years has gone from being famous for his out-sized ego to being extremely self-critical—believes Jade “contains some of my best work.” I don’t know about that, but it does have another terrific car chase, mostly slow-speed this time, through a parade in Chinatown (where there is apparently always a parade), resulting in injuries, some possibly fatal, to many innocent bystanders. It would be more interesting if it wasn’t always clear who was responsible for the injuries, David Caruso’s district attorney character or whoever the hell it was he was chasing (I have forgotten), but nobody was prepared to push the protagonist that far to the dark side. It also has a quite grim ending that should have had a better movie behind it, and a shot of Linda Fiorentino, as Jade, on all fours, facing the camera, her features grossly distorted by the stocking pulled over her head, that is more jarring and, in its way, sexually blunt than anything in Eszterhas and director Paul Verhoeven’s thriller Basic Instinct.
V. Abe Says “Where Do You Want This Killin’ Done?” and God Says “Out on Highway 61”
Friedkin spent the first half of the 2000s making a pair of military thrillers. The first, Rules of Engagement (2000), has a script from decorated Vietnam vet, successful novelist, former Secretary of the Navy, and future U.S. Senator James Webb. It stars Samuel L. Jackson as Terry Childers, a Marine colonel who, during a mission to stop an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Yemen, in which members of his platoon are killed, orders his men to fire on a group of protestors. Though Childers gave the order because he believed the protestors were armed and fired on his soldiers first, for various reasons this is perceived by the National Security Advisor (Bruce Greenwood) as murder, and Childers is charged. Childers goes to his old Vietnam buddy Hays Hodges (Tommy Lee Jones), now a military lawyer, to represent him. He agrees, squaring off in court with prosecutor, Major Mark Briggs (Guy Pearce, distractingly accented).
It’s an interesting film, and largely a good one, in my view, but it’s also the sort of thing that attracted an enormous amount of controversy, as it does ultimately support the idea that such a massacre as the audience is witness to can be justified. When the Marines fired down from the roof of the embassy at the protestors, we see, quite clearly, that the crowd includes women and children; this is something from which Friedkin does not flinch, as militarily and morally justifiable. While of course it can be, in the scenario laid out in the film (one can’t expect Marines to not return fire on their attackers), if Friedkin was surprised by the reaction, you do have to kind of wonder how he could be. Then again, at least in The Friedkin Connection, the aspect of the controversy that seems to have concerned him most was those coming specifically from Yemen, and how the film, it was believed, was both racist towards Arabs and would ruin that country’s reputation. Friedkin assures his readers that he was able to smooth things over.
It’s a rather clichéd film too, though, in a lot of ways. The worst example of this is when Hodges returns from Yemen, where he was investigating the incident, and is unable at this point in the film to prove Childers’s version of the story. He goes straight to Childers’s house (drunk, of course), furious with the colonel because he’s starting to believe his friend is a war criminal. Naturally, the two men get into a fist fight, which ends in a tie, both men battered and exhausted on the floor, and then they start laughing. Which is the sort of thing that only happens in movies, and is also the sort of thing that I would have expected Friedkin, at this point in his career, to have cut.
Much better is The Hunted (2003). Written by David Griffiths, Peter Griffiths, and Art Monterastelli, and starring Benicio del Toro and, once again, Tommy Lee Jones, it’s about Sgt. Hallam (del Toro), a former special forces operative turned assassin for the U.S., who, after an especially grueling assignment in Kosovo, snaps. He retreats to the forests of Oregon, where he murders two hunters. It is determined that Hallam is behind the killings, so the FBI agent in charge (Connie Nielsen) asks Lt. Bonham (Jones), the man who trained Hallam, to help with the case. He agrees.
The Hunted is more directly critical of the U.S. military than Rules of Engagement, and what it can force its soldiers to do, and experience, and how these things can warp a person, and turn them into something they weren’t before. Although like the earlier film, its sympathies lay with the soldiers on the ground, not those behind the desk. It is also an absolutely propulsive thriller, so primal that when the action moves from the forest to “civilization,” it feels like the film is stepping out of the world in which it really belongs, into something alien, oppressive, and unfree. It climaxes with what is to me one of the great fight scenes in modern American cinema. We’re back in the wilderness, and Jones and del Toro, armed only with knives, the only two men who belong there, are finishing what was started a very long time ago.
VI. I Am the Super Mother Bug!
The Hunted did not set the world on fire. It probably should have, but it didn’t. Friedkin wouldn’t make another movie for three years, but when he returned, and setting aside The Devil and Father Amorth, he seemed to have come to the conscious decision to end his filmmaking life making two of the best movies of his career. They are also, if I may be blunt, two of the most fucked-up films he’s ever made, which you must admit is saying something; they’re even more fucked up than The Exorcist, because it might be impossible to locate the moral center in either.
Each is based on a play by Tracy Letts, and Letts also wrote both scripts. Another play of his, August: Osage County, was turned into a film by network TV director John Wells, and a third, Superior Doughnuts, was turned into a short-lived network sitcom. I guess you’d have to call that range. Anyway, Friedkin got there first, and as with The Birthday Party, Friedkin took the inherent limitations of a cinematic adaptation of a stage production into virtues and turned Bug (2006) into an expressionistic nightmare. The film is about a woman named Agnes (Ashley Judd) who works as a waitress in a lesbian bar. She is married to a violent convict named Jerry (Harry Connick, Jr.), with whom she had a son, who we discover has disappeared. One night, through a friend, she meets Peter (Michael Shannon), an odd but friendly man with whom she starts a relationship. Peter seems like a charming eccentric at first, telling Agnes that he makes people uncomfortable because he notices things they don’t, and he knows a great deal about insects. But it soon becomes clear that Peter is a genuine madman. His brain is in a constant state of short circuit, bursting with nonsensical conspiracy theories, ranging from the belief that smoke detectors cause illness, to microchips being implanted into every American born after 1982 as a means of surveillance, and even beyond that. Unfortunately, the insanity of all this is noticed by the audience, not by Agnes. She accepts it, and it doesn’t even take her that long to come around. The title Bug applies not only to literal insects, but to the synonym for “virus,” as the story being told is that of Agnes’s infection.
The film itself is also infected. As Bug proceeds towards its ultimate conflagration (check your smoke detectors, people), Agnes and Peter become more and more connected to each other, and less connected to anyone else. At a certain point, Peter rips from his mouth, with pliers, teeth that he considers compromised, and while Agnes screams at him to stop, she soon comes to understand the wisdom behind his actions. This extraction scene goes on and on, at such a high pitch of hysteria—so many teeth are pulled—that you may be forgiven for eventually laughing. Friedkin calls the film a comedy, though I must say I didn’t laugh. I don’t know what’s wrong with the rest of you.
In another scene, their paranoia reaches such an extreme that what they believe is going on outside of their motel room—a sort of attack by intimidation by bugs and the government, some kind of air assault—is shown by Friedkin DP Michael Grady, and felt by the audience: the room begins to shake, blinding lights stream through the window. In this moment, Peter and Agnes are correct in their beliefs. We’re the ones still asleep. The last scene of Bug is bathed in blue light, the motel room is wrapped in foil. All the blood that is spilled in this scene, a not insignificant amount, is black in this light. Judd as Agnes and Shannon as Peter have been completely untethered. And somehow, Judd is not crushed by the Mack truck that is Michael Shannon. Rather, she matches him minute to minute, second to second, as outlandishly magnificent as he is, right down to her final “Oh!”
Then there’s Killer Joe (2012). The only other time I can think of off the top of my head of a filmmaker in his mid-70s releasing a picture as transgressive as this, that so upset so many people, is when, on Christmas Day 2013, Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street came out. Mind you, in that case the larger issue was critics and audiences not understanding Scorsese’s intent (or maybe while they understood it, they didn’t believe you would). In the case of Killer Joe, I don’t think it can be fairly argued that an essential point was missed by those who reviled it. They simply reviled it. (One prominent critic wrote on Letterboxd that those of his colleagues that he respected who had admitted to laughing throughout the film were “making [him] sick to [his] stomach”).
The plot is simple enough: Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch) convinces his father Ansel (Thomas Haden Church) to hire a cop and killer-for-hire named Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) to murder Chris’s mother and Ansel’s ex-wife, Adele. It is Chris’s belief that Adele’s $50,000 life insurance payout will go to his sister Dottie (Juno Temple). Soon Chris, Ansel, Dottie, and Ansel’s new wife Sharla (Gina Gershon) are all in agreement to go ahead with this. The first problem they encounter is that Joe demands payment in advance, but they don’t have the money. So, in lieu of that, Chris and Ansel agree to Joe’s proposal that he be given Dottie for a night.
This is troubling enough, of course, Dottie being a good deal younger than Joe, and it’s simply an unpleasant idea anyway. But wait, it gets worse: at one point we learn that when she was a child, Adele tried to smother Dottie. Since Dottie doesn’t seem as mature as her apparent age would suggest, it’s not a leap to assume that the failed murder attempt by her own mother has resulted in Dottie suffering from some kind of developmental disability. (It is also my belief that she and Chris have, or once had, an incestuous relationship, though I don’t have a lot to hang that theory on.) This does not stop anybody. The subsequent scene between Joe and Dottie involves a bizarre, unsettling seduction, in which Joe tells her to recount to him her first experiences with love and sex. During this, talking to her as if the experience was currently happening, he asks her “How old are you now?” Dottie says “Twelve,” and in a grotesquely impassioned whisper, Joe says “So am I…” Did this make me laugh? Due to the sheer insanity of it, I admit that it did. I still think it’s funny, or “funny,” whichever.
Put simply, Killer Joe just doesn’t care. The long last scene is a small masterpiece of black comedy, discomfort, and escalating horror, ending back at the start with comedy of the darkest kind. The last image, and the cut to end credits, with the most perfect choice of end credits song I’ve seen, is the biggest laugh in a movie full of them, however little you might want to give Killer Joe what it wants from you. And if you don’t laugh, fine. The most controversial moment in the film, and the one that got it an NC-17 from the MPAA (though the uncut version is officially “unrated”), is when, in this last section, Joe, after beating Sharla because he’s learned she was double-crossing everybody, forces her to simulate fellatio on a KFC chicken drumstick, acting the whole time as though it was not a drumstick he was holding. And it’s awful, truly awful, and I don’t think it’s funny. And it goes on and on.
But I believe it’s fair to ask the question, when looked at in the context of the kind of person we understand Joe to be, why should the audience believe he would be better than that? Of course, it’s not because we believe that, it’s because we don’t want to see him do it. And we definitely don’t want to laugh at it. So don’t laugh at it, I’d argue; I certainly didn’t (though I did laugh at the moment when Ansel grabs his son around the waist to keep him from escaping from Joe’s brutal attack, crying “Get ‘im, Joe!”). But too rarely do modern films try to make the audiences squirm. They may make you upset because you disagree with their politics, but the makers of those films don’t care, or even want, you to watch them anyway. Killer Joe wants you to watch it, and wants you to react to it however you react to it. I won’t say it “challenges” the audience, because Killer Joe isn’t pushing forward any particular idea or philosophy. It’s a wild, depraved scream of amoral laughter.
And it would appear to be William Friedkin’s last feature film. When looked at in the context of his entire career, Killer Joe and Bug feel like the work of a man who has spent too much of his career not making the kinds of movies he was passionate about, that it was his natural instinct to make. Then again, the unavoidable and obvious fact of the film industry is that you have to have success, or at least some kind of positive reputation, to make anything at all. If not for his two monumental successes of the early 70s, there’s no way Friedkin would have been allowed, by anyone, to make these last two pictures. His name still meant something in 2006 and 2012, as it does now. Thank God by then he had the power of will, and the ability to put “From the Director of The Exorcist” on a poster, to go back to doing what he does best: shooting the audience in the face.
