_{^{Editors note: this essay is a critical response to Stranger by the Lake and therefore contains spoilers.}}

A CAR PULLS into a dusty, sun-drenched carpark. The driver, Franck, is a handsome young man. Alone, he strides though the scrubby forest and soon comes upon a shimmering lake where naked men are lounging along the pebbled shore. Franck is there to swim, socialise and cruise. Among the trees men linger and stalk, and then, if both parties find it favourable, they will kiss, suck, fuck. But an inexplicable violence courses beneath the summery idyll. One evening, hidden in the shadows of the crepuscular light, Franck observes two men swimming: his crush, Michel – with whom he’s shared only the briefest of exchanges – and Michel’s lover. He continues watching even as the lover’s squeals of delight curdle into screams of terror. Soon, the lover is dead, drowned. The next day, Franck and Michel both return to the lake. Franck is rightfully frightened, but he maintains his routine of swimming, socialising and cruising, even though each interaction with the magnetic Michel is now laden with the possibility of death. 

Welcome to the emotionally complex world of Stranger by the Lake, the 2013 French film written and directed by Alain Guiraudie that makes strangers of everyone, including the most bewildering stranger of all: the stranger each of us harbours within ourselves.

In Eroticism – his treatise on the link between negation and the erotic – Georges Bataille asks, ‘What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners? – a violation bordering on death, bordering on murder?’ Stranger takes Bataille’s heterocentric ideas and dramatises them within the landscape of the gay cruising site. The relationship between sex and murder is made literal. What emerges is the film’s central dramatic question: why doesn’t Franck say or do something about what he has witnessed? He’s given ample opportunity when a detective shows up and starts asking questions. The detective is the voice of the outside world, the world of decency. Why aren’t they all more concerned, he wants to know. ‘One of your own was murdered, and you don’t care?’ he says. ‘Show some concern, if only for yourself…do something, or you may be next.’ 

I consider Stranger to be one of our finest texts about cruising. I first saw it some years ago, before I began exploring cruising culture. I knew that cruising existed, but I’d equated it with a certain type of gay lifestyle, one that I considered myself fortunate to be free from. This, of course, was snobbish, internalised homophobia, and it was only a matter of time before I ventured forth. Once I did, any lingering resistance I felt towards being ‘that type of gay’ – perverse, degraded, sex mad – was quickly dismantled. Stranger was, in many ways, my introduction to a new world. 

It’s a world that has persisted for centuries, if not forever; historians suggest that cruising grounds emerged in London in the 1600s, when the city built its first public toilets, inadvertently providing men with a neutral space to meet for sex (some things never change). Much of our historical ‘evidence’ of cruising comes from records of arrests and convictions, including the case of the Vere Street Coterie in London in 1810, which resulted in the hanging of two of the eight men who were charged with attempted sodomy. Cruising has its roots in necessity; the criminalisation and stigmatisation of same-sex attraction forced us to be creative when it came to queer intimacy. 

Systems of coded gestures and signals – such as coloured handkerchiefs – were developed as cruising became more widespread. The practice took on its own languages and customs, placing it in the realm of culture. Of course, how we cruise has changed as the mainstream treatment of queer people has changed. But with each new generation, the lineage endures. Cruising shows no signs of disappearing. Maybe that’s because we continue to be trapped inside a social structure that assumes heterosexuality as the default mode. But I like to think that even if this were to change, we would still cruise. It’s not just an outcome of necessity, it speaks to who we are – feral, mischievous shapeshifters lurking on the fringes, horny for what lies beyond. 

I’VE MENTIONED THE tension at the core of Stranger. That is, the question of the protagonist – who he is, why he goes along with Michel (considering the threat Michel poses). The film meets the demands of narrative by positing its own theories: that Franck is lonely, and his need for affection overrides his fear of being Michel’s next victim. But to accept this explanation at face value is to diminish the film’s power by ignoring its central conceit.

Stranger succeeds in showing that, for all its banalities, to cruise is to step into the unknown. We enter cruising spaces not knowing who or what is waiting. It could be anyone. It could even be the worst of us: a killer. But the film isn’t a whodunnit. It achieves something infinitely more interesting by complicating the danger. We watch from the edge of our seats not because anyone could be the murderer, but because Franck knows who it is and yet he stays. We watch, horrified and captivated, asking ourselves why; what part of Franck is insisting that he stay?

My own cruising experiences form a kaleidoscope of memory: approaching the wooded area of the park by night, warm with anticipation, noticing the shadows shifting under the trees; the sly way I’m inexorably pulled in by a glance over a shoulder, the brush of passing fingers, a hushed greeting; making the choice to surrender… I was recently cycling home from a friend’s place at twilight when I stopped to relieve myself in the bushes in an isolated stretch of parkland. I knew I was alone, and yet I still felt the thrill that comes with cruising, the potent glimmer that heralds the encroach of something bigger than any individual self.

To cruise is to step into the unknown; the cruiser is subjugated by this uncertainty. It can feel wild, absolute and a little frightening. What hands may reach for you, to what forces may you be obliged to answer? It’s dangerous. Just ask Franck: here, in the haze of ambiguity, is where the stranger dwells, the stranger that prowls both outside and within. But cinema is an elevation of real life. I know from experience that the threat, though legitimate, isn’t physical peril. It’s the psychic danger that arises when we encounter the Other.  

THE TRUTH IS, we no longer need to cruise. If it’s sex you want, you have the internet now. You can save yourself the trouble of patrolling the lake by downloading an app or opening a website. The age-old mechanisms have been co-opted by the machine: log on, find bodies in endless repetition and get to work scrolling, flicking or scanning. Bodies dismembered, flattened, sequenced – the male form objectified for ease of presentation and access.

On an app, you typically know what you’re getting yourself into; the machine narrows the gap between the known and unknown. It does this by creating rigid lines and forcing us inside them. Behind this framework is an insidious insistence that erotic desire can be shuttled around from person to person in a neat little capsule – that it all comes down to stats and data. The ubiquity of ‘into?’, the persistent question we bat around in our search for compatibility, suggests that this ethos has taken root. The aim of the machine is to eliminate doubt, to destroy mystery. It’s predicated on the reduction of the risk inherent in true encounter. It wants to destroy the stranger.

In his book The Agony of Eros, philosopher Byung-Chul Han considers the erosion of the Other to be the outcome of a culture obsessed with positivism and comparison:

The ability to experience the Other in terms of his or her otherness is being lost. By means of social media, we seek to bring the Other as near as possible, to close any distance between ourselves and him or her, to create proximity. But this does not mean that we have more of the Other; instead we are making the Other disappear. 

What’s at stake, he says, is eroticism. Like Bataille, Han considers the tenets of the erotic to be risk, madness, excess, transgression, submission. These qualities constitute the ability to accept the negativity of death. Only then, through the abandonment of one’s self, can we actualise the vitality that is found when we, quite literally, embrace the stranger. 

But Han examines the loss of the Other without accounting for the places where the Other thrives. There is no mention of cruising in his book. Of course, this is not surprising. But if he cared to look, he would discover that in some cultures the Other is alive and well – not just tolerated but central to how these groups are organising themselves.

The question remains: why does Franck succumb to Bataille’s violation? Is it because his desire is so wounding that it defies moral programming, or is his lustful pursuit a sublime surrender to the erotic extravagance that Michel represents? It’s both, I think; Franck is the victim and the triumph of the deranging nature of desire. It can be difficult to watch him because we identify ourselves in his predicament: the threat of negation breeds derangement. If murder is surrender, then death is not just the risk we take. It’s the act necessary to stay alive.

The film ends on an appropriately ambiguous image. After being pursued through the cruising ground by a merciless Michel, a terrified Franck stops and listens. Has he lost him? Night is falling; the only sounds are of birdsong and a soft breeze through the murky forest. Even now, right on the very edge of oblivion, Franck doesn’t retreat. ‘Michel!’ he yells. Again, he listens, with his back to us. He turns slowly as he searches for his companion. When he finally faces us, it’s too dark to read his expression. This is where we leave him. 

_{^{Image credit: Ayla Meinberg via Unsplash}}