Should one be deterred by the general public’s poor taste and lack of imagination? Fuck no. The true Counter-Agent will endure countless failures in his life. History, for better or worse, is on our side. Friedkin made Sorcerer. You didn’t. – The Safety Propaganda Conceptual Manifesto, Part 2
William Friedkin lived so long and gave the world so much that there feels like little to mourn in the wake of his death today, August 7, 2023. The man was born in 1935, smack dab in the middle of the Great Depression and at the dawn of an industry that he would participate in the modernist revolutionizing of some four decades later. From rising talent to Hollywood big wig to antagonistic outsider to meditative old-timer with quite a few tricks left up his sleeve, Friedkin’s career was one of constant evolution. Dizzying heights and startling lows. So, while we celebrate the vitality that carried him through to the end of his life, we also mourn the passing of one of the pioneers of our aesthetically inclined psychological warfare.
Friedkin’s parents, a semi-pro softball player/merchant seamen/men’s clothing salesmen father and an OR nurse mother, were Ukrainian Jews who fled that country during a violent anti-Jewish pogrom in 1903. Given the controversy around the Azov Battalion and other neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine’s army and our financial and militaristic support of them in their futile war with Russia, I genuinely wish Friedkin offered his perspective on the conflict in the last couple of years. Nevertheless, talking bullshit with hack journalists was never this man’s style. He preferred to pour every ounce of ambition he had into his work, and allow the films to speak for him. Sometimes his work could be thematically opaque, particularly for a Hollywood director, but one gets the sense that everything he made was always saying something.
Friedkin was, like your faithful Counter-Agency director here, a late bloomer. A sucky student and a near professional level basketball player, Friedkin didn’t even discover his enthusiasm for cinema until his mid-’20s. The films he saw throughout the ‘60s that warped his perception and attuned him to his inner Asmodeus that would compel him to envision and to create — Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Diaboliques and The Wages of Fear (which Friedkin somewhat remade, more on that later,) and Hitchcock’s Psycho — all wield a nihilistic and bleak cinematic tone that would no doubt find a new vessel in Friedkin’s body of work.
Friedkin moved to Hollywood in 1965 and began his career as an ambitious journeyman, taking work where ever he could get it and making films that he’s less than proud of but nevertheless taught him the discipline of directing a film production. His first film, Good Times, is an utterly retarded genre deconstruction starring Sonny and Cher that Friedkin derided as “unwatchable.” The Birthday Party is a little seen adaptation of a Pinter play that Friedkin nevertheless was proud of. He made a couple other obscure films from different genres to varying successes.
And then, 1971 rolls around. After the achievements of Francis Ford Coppola, Arthur Penn, and Roman Polanski, The Old Hollywood was dead and gone and the New Hollywood reigned supreme, and it was glorious. The “not Jewish” overlords of Hollywood were overwhelmed by the changing tastes of their most important demographics, and had no idea what these young radicals were looking for in the entertainment arts. For that reason along, they gave up more control over their productions than they ever would or ever had, lining the pockets of freaks, dropouts, drunks and junkies. Masterpieces ensued. One of those masterpieces was Friedkin’s The French Connection. The first film to clearly annunciate the complexity of Friedkin’s vision, The French Connection is a landmark film of the New Hollywood and made clear that Friedkin himself was an important fixture in this cinematic movement. You see, Friedkin was able to marry the thematic darkness and existentialist dread of the European avant-garde with the fast-paced Hollywood thriller. Though the film had a familiar cops and criminals conceit, Friedkin’s tone and Gene Hackman’s iconic performance as Popeye Doyle lent the film a grim and hyper realistic atmosphere that was easy to project some deeper meaning unto, making it a film about the idealism of the ‘60s breaking as a new nihilism saturated American life. It also has a great fucking car chase.
Does The Exorcist even need more editorializing than it’s already generated over the last however many decades? It’s a fucking masterpiece and, to this day, perhaps the most shocking horror film ever produced by a major studio. And it’s not just the content that makes it so, it’s Friedkin’s style. The minimalist lighting and harsh staging is more apt for documentary filmmaking than narrative cinema, so watching a young girl transform into a demon feels so unnervingly real. I also love that a film depicting an adolescent girl screaming “Fuck my cunt!” to a priest made boatloads of fucking money and got 10 Oscar nominations. Different times, indeed.
Sorcerer from 1977 marks both Friedkin’s apex as an artist and also his near total collapse as an in-demand bankable studio director. I still don’t quite understand how this film was even made, the sheer audacity of Friedkin’s ambition is something that most men can never understand. Perhaps Michaelangelo would have gotten it, he died trying to complete the Sistine Chapel after all, or Werner Herzog who went mad trying to drag a boat over a fucking hill for Fitzcarraldo, or Conor McGregor who risked his actual body and life to make all his career predictions come true. But, shit! Sorcerer is so good, so big, and so fucking evil that I can’t imagine Friedkin being anything other than a possessed maniac of an artist when I watch it. Sorcerer is Friedkin’s loose remake of Wages of Fear, a film which he believed to be about, essentially, “A world where we all hate each other, but if we refuse to cooperate, we will blow up.” He said that Sorcerer is the best summation of his world view. He’s a pragmatic nihilist, one who believes that human beings are essentially alien to one another and that cooperation is always a necessity, never a pleasure.
So, the movie assembles a plot conceit in which four criminals, each embittered and hateful living in hiding in an absolute shithole in Colombia, have to cooperate. These four men are hired to transport unstable dynamite to an oil spill site on the other side of the country via truck, trekking perilous lands where the slightest bump in the road could cause them all to incinerate. Hot fucking damn. Great performances by the legendary Roy Schneider and by French character actor Bruno Cremer, who also memorably played a despicable child abuser and serial killer in Jean-Claude Brisseau’s under seen A Brutal Game. The film required a brutal, globe trotting production, which culminated with a Herculean effort to film the “bridge sequence,” which sees the actors driving two trucks across a bridge in the jungle that seems totally impossible and completely unstable, that Friedkin described as “the most arduous piece of filmmaking he’d ever undertaken.” Tangerine Dream’s score was so good that the film’s lack of financial success didn’t deter them from becoming some of the most in-demand score producers of the 1980s. After all this stress and blowing his own budget, Friedkin managed to make the most elegant work of film poetry he’d ever make – the greatest testament to his singular vision. The film bombed anyways, though. Sometimes, it’s just fucking like that! Just because the sheep don’t understand our genius doesn’t mean we should adjust our genius for the sheep, fuck them! Friedkin wouldn’t compromise.
Losing his access to big budget money, Friedkin would adjust his approach for smaller films that still sizzle with his dark vision and righteous anger, and the curious cult oddities that would come out of this stage of his career still rank amongst the best of his work. 1980’s Cruising depicts Al Pacino at the height of his fame going undercover in the faggot leather daddy scene of downtown New York to find a serial killer targeting gay men – a bold move for the filmmaker and the actor alike. The film’s depiction of gays enraged, well, gays, but became a cult classic for the dank nastiness of its aesthetic and the angsty performance of Pacino. The film’s closing moments leave the door open to the possibility that Pacino’s detective might actually have been the killer all along, serial murdering the gayness that he hated in himself, or something like that. Lots of critics hated it, but I’ve always found it to be emblematic of Friedkin’s expressionistic courage. 1985’s To Live and Die in LA is an even more unlikely success. The film’s plot — an LAPD detective played by William Peterson tracks down a murderous painter cum counterfeit producer played by a particularly flamboyant Willem DaFoe — sounds retarded. And yet, everything about the movie becomes more than the sum of its parts. The film is as if the 1980s materialistic excess — coke, violence, and naked bodies fucking each other — is stretched out across a massive canvas and in the process becomes a kind of abstract and meditative art piece that deconstructs the decade’s spiritual malaise. I was so into that film when I first saw it that I ended up writing an essay about it for a college class.
To be fair, Friedkin’s financial failures had stacked up, and his constant studio fighting lead to a notable drop in quality in the films he made late in the 1980s and throughout the 1990s. He jumped from genre to genre, producing a middling comedy here, a shitty war movie there, an attempt to cash in on the erotic thriller trend of the 1990s over there. He rebounded somewhat with 2003’s violent action drama The Hunted, where we at least got to watch Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio del Toro in his prime hack each other to bits.
Miraculously, Friedkin ended his career as a particularly dark filmmaker of American indie cinema by adapting two plays by the great playwright Tracy Letts into film. 2006’s The Bug features Michael Shannon as a schizo war veteran (or is he?) who thinks his phones are bugged and that literal bugs have infested his room due to a CIA psychological warfare tactic. It’s a fucking weird one and all takes place in a seedy hotel room, giving it a nice suffocating atmosphere. Even better was the second Letts collaboration: Killer Joe. In it, a family of shitbags (Thomas Haden Church and Emile Hirsch) hire a hyper-charismatic and utterly psychotic detective cum hitman named Joe (Matthew McConaughey) to kill the mom (Gina Gershon) for her life insurance policy. The film gets more disturbing when Joe becomes infatuated with the 13-year-old daughter (Juno Temple) and insists on making her a part of the deal. While Killer Joe often feels like it should have been directed by a 20-year-old edgelord who just got kicked out of SVA for making fun of a kid with Down’s Syndrome, it still has the cinematic mastery of Friedkin’s early work.
After his Letts-assisted career revival, Friedkin adjusted to his role as an elder statesmen pseudo philosopher of film, often giving his opinions in interviews and always displaying his wit, toughness, and charm. He did a two-part interview with Bret Easton Ellis last year where he lamented the dumbed down way that audiences engage with film in 2022. In this memorable interview with the younger filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn — the artist who might be the most “Friedkin-esque” in the way that he manages to turn genre films into hyper-stylized expressionistic art films by minimizing dialog and maximizing images and atmosphere — Friedkin admits that the technique of minimal dialog was actually a technical concession to make his films more relatable to audiences watching them in foreign countries, and also laughs at Refn’s suggestion that his own Only God Forgives is a masterpiece.
The tragedy of the death of the Counter-Agent is that the aesthetic and discipline he cultivated can now no longer evolve. From this day on, Friedkin’s body of work is a closed unit. We can only look back upon the dreams that he showed us. I weep for the masters. I mourn the titans. I long to channel their deliriums and to expel them upon the world through my own warped perceptions! Friedkin – we salute you. We love you. Rest in peace, you old brilliant pervert!
ALAS! A silver lining. Friedkin completed one last film before he died. The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, a legal drama starring Kiefer Sutherland, will premiere this year at the Venice Film Festival.