William Friedkin is going to explain himself to us if it takes him all night. His latest telegram from his subconscious is an article in the Guardian to which he has signed his name, ostensibly on the subject of the release of The French Connection on Blu-ray. "The myth of the incorruptible lawman persisted until policing scandals started multiplying [in the late 1960s]. The age of innocence was over with the Kennedy and King assassinations and the Vietnam War, so that after Watergate in 1972, people would believe anything about corruption in all walks of life." According to Friedkin, "Those of us who made films in the 70s were not following the zeitgeist: we shaped it. We no longer believed in a man on a white horse. We knew he was flawed because we were flawed." This all has such a nice ring to it that you kind of hate to point out that everything Friedkin writes seems to be canceled out by his next sentence. Either he "shaped" the zeitgeist instead of "following it", which would seem to indicate that he was out ahead of the curve, or The French Connection, with its racist, trigger-happy supercop antihero Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman), was a reflection of attitudes that people had already formed from reading the newspaper. When discussing what set Connection apart back in the day, one factor that Friedkin doesn't bring up is Costa-Gavras's Z, the 1969 political thriller that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and whose slam-bang style, with its percussive editing, was heavily influential on Friedkin's picture. Friedkin was very open about his debt to Costa-Gavras back when he must have thought that it was real artistic for a commercial Hollywood director to know enough about European movies to copy his moves from one. To judge from his deep thoughts here about how all the best cops have a lot of the dark side in them--"Actually, the best cops are the ones who can think like criminals; and there is a thin line between the policeman and the criminal that street cops cross every day. In spite of a series of laws designed to protect the accused, cops can go off the rails in a crisis, and it has to do with adrenaline and the authority the police officer has to exercise power."--Friedkin may have concluded that it would give his reputation a boost if people got the impression that David Milch filched his world view from him.

Nobody asked me, but...while my esteemed colleague Vadim Rizov recently made an intriguing case for the argument that Friedkin has no sense of social obligation, I can't shake the feeling that it's something else that really sets him apart and that helps to explain why, for two years or so, he was the hottest director in Hollywood as well as why, for the 25 years since then, he's been, well, not so much. Looking down his nose at the young hotshots whose movies make more money than his stuff, Friedkin complains that "cop films have become more visceral, less realistic. The levels of violence that were allowed in the 1970s opened the doors to young film-makers who want to push the envelope beyond all limits." Pushing the envelope beyond all limits is, of course, what Friedkin did in both The French Connection and his other blockbuster, The Exorcist. It was shocking at the time, and can still get your pulse rate rising today, but it was silly at the time when some people, trying to find a justification for how exciting the movies seemed, to claim that Friedkin was introducing a new level of "realism" by having his cop so much meaner and the violence more in-your-face than audiences were used to. The Friedkin of The French Connection wasn't the Strindberg of cop operas, he was a hungry, ambitious young hotshot trying desperately to get the attention of an audience that demanded bigger and better shocks at a time when everyday life provided plenty of them. Over the course of two big hits, Friedkin really mastered the exploding-funhouse style that, thanks in no small part to him, set the standard in big commercial thrillers. Then he got a little complacent, and new directors arrived who contrived shinier, louder explostions.

It's not quite true to say that Friedkin is indifferent to how his movies are seen to reflect, or to effect, society. He did make at least one genuine message movie: Rampage, one of the biggest duds of his career, a courtroom drama about a beyond-evil serial killer which he first filmed in 1987 and which only won limited release in 1992, and which Friedkin tinkered with to turn it into a brief for the death penalty. And he did care enough about the charges that Cruising was a homophobic movie that linked homosexuality with psychotic murderousness by holding that unfortunate press conference where he said that he himself had no idea who had committed the murders in the movie or what the killer's motives or sexual orientaton might have been or what the hell the ending was supposed to mean. It's easy to believe him, because The French Connection and The Exorcist are themselves full of plot holes and loose ends and logical stretches out of the Bizarro World, but when Friedkin was truly on his game, the movies just plowed over viewers in a way that kept them good and distracted from that sort of thing. By the time he had finished The Exorcist, Friedkin was a master at the special craft of keeping viewers transfixed by how ugly and repellent everything onscreen was. He got in trouble with Cruising not because he had anything to say for or against gay lifestyles but because he was still working in the same way that had made him a hot ticket, but this time, because of the setting, the movie boiled down, not as "Ewwwwww!! Heroin dealers shot down in cold blood!" or Ewwwwww!! A little girl vomiting on a priest!" but Ewwwww!! Guys dancing together!" It could be that his subsequent films, such as Jade and To Live and Die in L.A., haven't been as successful just because his moment passed: other directors have stolen his thunder, and no matter how brutally he stages his chases and fights, they no longer pass for daringly ugly commentaries on What We've All Come To. And as his attempts to do something different, such as the "comedies" The Brinks Job and Deal of the Century show, it's not as if he knows how to do anything else.

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William Friedkins Has No Sense of Social Obligation