ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981), dir. John Carpenter

He's in a New York State of Mines

The year is 1997. Crime has increased 400% in the United States. As a result, New York City has been transformed into a maximum security prison. Bridges and tunnels, which once connected the city to the outside world, have been mined. A fifty-foot high wall has been erected on all sides of the island, and Hudson Bay is routinely patrolled by the United States Security Force. New York City is no longer for tourists. It now exists to house the nation’s most dangerous criminals, those for whom the jailhouse key has been tossed away with impunity. There is no hope for parole from New York. The United States Security Force will not hesitate to kill prisoners who try to escape. The official motto of this future prison is, "You go in, you don’t come out."

Snake Plisskin (Kurt Russell) attempted to rob the U.S. Treasury, and is about to be exiled into this urban hellhole. Plisskin sports an eyepatch, a tattoo from which, we guess, he acquired his surname, and a glottal-based growl that sounds like Clint Eastwood on a really bad day. But Snake is also former Special Forces. He can fly a plane and wield a machine gun. This will come in handy for him, because Air Force One has just crash-landed in New York City, and the President, who escaped in a small orange pod, is now trapped in the labyrinthean prison of his own making. Somebody has to go in and rescue the poor bureaucrat. If Snake can do it, within 24 hours, he gets a full pardon.

Of course, Hauk (Lee Van Cleef), the man in charge, isn’t about to entrust the fate of America to a convicted criminal. He has Snake implanted with two small explosives that will kill him if he doesn’t come back with the President before the one-day deadline expires.

Therein lies the plot of "Escape from New York," John Carpenter’s low-budget, but extremely fun, 1981 action movie. As Carpenter himself admits, the film is basically a western, with some sci-fi stuff tossed in. New York City could easily be a small town called Dry Gulch. Snake is the stranger who walks in on a mission, and soon finds himself in conflict with forces that may not uphold the law, but certainly make the rules. Most of the movie is composed of shots with characters in the foreground, which constantly draw attention to the debris-laden streets and burned-out building interiors behind them. The bare-bones nature of the backgrounds conjure up the feel of old Western sets, which often seemed stripped down to the basics. Keep an eye out for the scraps of paper which periodically blow through the unpeopled streets like tumbleweed. It’s a relatively minor detail, but one of Carpenter’s most effective ones.

Also remniscent of the Western: Bad guys that squint into the camera as if staring into the sun (And despite the fact that most of the movie takes place at night). Hard-as-nails women who are a match for any man. Lest we think that John Carpenter isn’t in on the joke himself, he dresses up many of the inmates in cowboy hats and boots, and even stages a pitched gunfight atop the World Trade Center between Snake, his tentative buddies, and some, well, Indians.

Given the director’s budget constraints, the scope of New York City, prison of the future, is actually quite impressive. As legend tells it, Carpenter couldn’t afford to film large portions of the movie in the real Manhattan. However, while he was trying to figure out what to do, a major fire ripped through St. Louis, devastating entire blocks, but creating a usable wasteland. The cast and crew relocated, and did most of their work at night. St. Louis stands in for New York quite admirably. Some of the architecture, particularly in the library where the character Brain is holed up, reminded me of its northeastern counterpart. It really looks like something beautiful that has been left to slowly decay over many years.

"Escape from New York" was a big hit when it arrived in theaters. This seems somewhat surprising, given that Carpenter first wrote the screenplay shortly after Nixon’s impeachment. It languished many years, until America’s urban centers started becoming more dangerous. Then Reagan took office, and studios felt the country needed a movie where a gun-toting psychopath blows away dangerous street scum. Carpenter enlisted an ex-USC buddy named Nick Castle as co-screenwriter. Castle’s contribution can be seen in the many "New Yawk" in-jokes, such as Ernest Borgnine’s crazy cabbie, and the bizarre all-prisoner revue Snake stumbles upon on Broadway (In another scene, Snake is set upon by cannibals in a diner called "Chock Full ‘o Nuts." I don’t know whether Nick Castle wrote that, or if it’s even New Yawk humor, but it’s evidence that Carpenter’s films are compulsively rewatchable).

Castle’s contributions aside, the final screenplay for "Escape from New York" still features the distrust of authority, and the portrayal of an inept military, which peppered John Carpenter’s original draft. The very first scene of the film, two prisoners are paddling for the wall in a small raft that looks made out of cardboard. A U.S.S.F. helicopter uses a missle to kill them. The dispatching of the attempted escapees is so extreme that it becomes satirical.

And then there is the President (Donald Pleasance, who appeared in Carpenter’s "Halloween"), not exactly a great man whom Snake is trying to save from thousands of rotten apples. While the audience does not get much info on the world situation in 1997, nor what is on the mysterious tape the President was carrying around in his briefcase, the movie tell us this much: The United States, China, and Russia are all at war. The contents of the tape, which must be delivered to a summit meeting between the three countries, have something to do with nuclear fusion.

Is the U.S. at war with both China and Russia? Are we all at war with each other? Does nuclear fusion have something to do with building better atomic bombs? Is this information meant to intimidate the other two countries? The President, in a makeshift satellite address, says that the tape’s contents are meant to convince the entire world to live in peace with one another. But what kind of "peaceful world" can this President be entrusted to create? The kind that features a worldwide police state, not just nationwide?

Snake Plisskin never comes across as a man deserving clemency. By the film’s end, however, he is a man who has spent 24 hours in Hell. He has seen his fellow beings living in dehumanized conditions. Having rescued the President, he only wants the leader of the free world to acknowledge his humanity, and the humanity of everyone who died saving his behind. He wants to be called Plisskin, not "Snake" (Was "Snake" an institutional name, acquired from either the military or jail…?).

With the President remaining mum on the issue, Plisskin’s final act of sabotage can be viewed as a call for anarchy. But "Escape from New York" is, as Carpenter himself described, a western. Plisskin is a futuristic cowboy, and what he really argues for is man’s right to self-respect, and to exist. The tape bit is a small gesture, the most that can be done by a solitary being in a great, cold world. But the same could be said of John Carpenter with this film, and given "Escape from New York’s" enduring popularity, no one can question the lasting ripples any heartfelt effort can leave.