Cruising celebrity: James Franco’s queer stardom, performance art, and Interior. Leather Bar.

摘要

How’d you like to disappear?” the fatherly Capt. Edelson (Paul Sorvino) asks aspiring young cop Steve Burns (Al Pacino) when offering him the undercover murder assignment that forms the center of William Friedkin’s controversial film Cruising (1980). Chosen due to his physical resemblance to the victims of a serial killer haunting New York’s gay leather scene, Burns soon descends into a queer underworld of SM fetishism, pornography, and recreational sex.A generation later, the documentary Marina Abramovi?: The Artist is Present (Matthew Akers and Jeff Dupre, 2012) captures a discussion occurring among the spectators of the famed performance artist’s eponymous retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (March 14–May 31, 2010). A handsome, thirty-something man stands among the other museum attendees, casually chatting and watching from the wings as Abramovi? performs in the center of the large gallery space. Attempting to explain the difference between “performance art” and “acting,” the young man suggests (with considerable oversimplification) that the only similarity between performance art and traditional stage/screen acting is the physical presence of other viewers during the performance itself. “Are you an actor?” an older museum patron replies—unaware that the younger man is, in fact, movie star James Franco, who responds affirmatively with an amused smirk. In the presence of Abramovi?’s nearby performance, the white male Hollywood celebrity has himself “disappeared,” much to his apparent delight.