Directed by John Carpenter
Produced by Debra Hill and Larry Franco
Director of Photography Dean Cundey
Production Designer Joe Alves
Editor Todd Ramsay
Music by John Carpenter and Alan Howarth
Written by John Carpenter and NIck Castle
Pervasive Atmosphere of Cool Cynicism by Post-Watergate Disillusionment and Cannabis
Starring
St. Louis as Manhattan
Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken
Dick Warlock as Stunt Plissken
Ernest Borgnine as Cabbie
Season Hubley as Girl in Chock Full O’Nuts
Adrienne Barbeau as Maggie
Harry Dean Stanton as Brain
Joe Unger as the Mysterious Taylor
Donald Pleasence as President
Lee Van Cleef as Hauk
Charles Cyphers as Secretary of State
Tom Atkins as Rehme
John Strobel as Cronenberg
Isaac Hayes as the Duke
Frank Doubleday as Romero
Ox Baker as Slag
Nancy Stephens as Stewardess
Buck Flower as Other President
…
“We left our country for our country’s good.”
-attributed to George Barrington, Australian pioneer, 1802
“If you love someone, set them free; if they come home, set them on fire.”
-George Carlin, Brain Droppings (1997)
…
Review by William D. Tucker.
Did you know that in the 1990s, Manhattan was turned into a huge penal colony?
That’s one of the things you learn when you watch Escape From New York.
You see, America became a police state either because people started committing too many crimes and acting all crazy, or-what’s more likely-the government decided to criminalize most anything you could think of: drugs, disloyalty, birth control, abortion, foul language, public assemblies, sex before marriage, non-Christian religion, atheism, sex during marriage, unions, sex after marriage, non-incumbent political parties-
I mean, cigarettes are still legal. That’s for sure. You get to see some throwback smoking-on-camera in this one. I bet Tom Snyder loved this flick. I’m even willing to bet that somewhere inside retro-future Manhattan, Snyder’s still hosting his show. Got to be.
Of course, I’m just speculating about everything other than the cigarettes, because all we’re told is that the crime rate rose 400% in 1988, which sounds to me more like they just radically increased the number of things you could get sent up for, as opposed to a legit breakdown of the social order necessitating some kind of a police intervention. But maybe I’m wrong. I wasn’t there, you know. Yes, I was alive in 1988, technically, but I was living in a different reality than Escape From New York. I think.
Air Force One is hijacked by a radical communist militant who has disguised herself as a stewardess, and this lady crashes the plane into one of the many darkened skyscrapers on Manhattan. The stewardess reads off a manifesto stating that she is crashing the plane into the Manhattan penal colony because she thinks the American government is a racist police state and that the figurehead of that police state-the President, natch-should be consigned to the very hell on earth he has constructed. Fair enough.
Once again, we are reminded of just how easy cuddly ol’ Tricky Dick Nixon got off when we take the long view of history. (To be fair what’s a few sideshow bombings of Cambodia, really, when you get down to it? It’s fine, it’s fine. I’m sure Jesus forgave Nixon all his sins before tossing him into the deepest pit of hell. It’s so fuckin’ fine. I could shit.)
Now, there is one big problem with 86ing the President under these circumstances. Apparently, he was en route to a three-way peace summit with China and Russia to perhaps end an ongoing World War III type of situation happening waaaay in the background of this modestly budgeted-but resourceful and imaginative-film. If the President can’t make his commitment to appear at this summit, then, well, the war might escalate. Maybe China or Russia or both will perceive America as a place where the culture and the government are in total free fall, and try to use that to their advantage. Remember, in politics, perception is everything. If your enemy perceives you as weak, as out-of-control, maybe they’ll pitch a nuke your way. See if you really are packin’ some kind of Raygun Ronnie Reagan orbital defense system. Maybe you’re nothing but a stuffed suit of clothes. Not the best look for Baldy Ol’ Eagleland.
Manhattan, in the movie reality, is a desperate place. The electricity’s been cut off. A wall has been built around the island. All the rivers and canals have been mined. There’s a completely militarized National Police Force that patrols the penal colony with attack helicopters equipped with rockets and machine guns. And this is where all the criminals end up-everybody’s here. No one’s been left out. Murderers. Rapists. Thieves. Counterfeiters. Embezzlers. Dissidents. The wrongly accused. The sick. The mentally ill. People who couldn’t pay their rent. Women who shot their rapists. Anybody who isn’t strictly heterosexual or cis-gendered. Income tax evaders. Income tax protesters. Narco-entrepreneurs. People who’ve been unemployed for too long. East coast intellectual elites. Mild critics of the government. Strident critics of the government. People who used to be in the government prior to the current administration. The loyal opposition. Civil rights activists. War protesters. And they’re all left to fend for themselves, to make the best of a tough situation. As Jaimie Lee Curtis tells us in voice over, “There are no guards. Only the prisoners and the worlds they create.”
The prisoners of Manhattan have figured out ways to kludge steam engines and mini-oil refineries out of the cars and infrastructure left behind from before the lockdown. Rival gangs and tribes have piled up junkers to form little Berlin Walls between the different ad hoc power blocs. They’ve got shivs and baseball bats with nails driven through the heads and garbage can lid shields and Molotov cocktails-oh, yes! The DIY spirit is truly ascendent despite the total lack of government. Maybe it’s because of the lack of government. Hard to figure.
This new Manhattan is a fearsome place, tho’-you won’t catch me going there voluntarily. You’ve got hordes of people living in the sewers and the subways who’ve gone not just feral-but full-on cannibal. They emerge in the dead of night to raid medical supplies, building materials, and meat. People meat. Just don’t eat the brains. You don’t want to fuck with rogue prions, now. Unless you’ve gone full zombie. In that case, eat your fill.
There’s no government, but there is royalty: the Duke of New York played with a sullen, creepy intensity by Isaac Hayes. I’m not sure, but I think the Duke is just one warlord among many in Manhattan. We don’t get any official back story on the Duke, but he has adorned himself with a sort of community theater looking Napoleonic outfit. In my head canon, I imagine him as a guy who came to Manhattan scared out of his mind, and so he holed up in some abandoned apartment where all he had was a biography of Napoleon. This became his self-help regimen: he imagined himself as a great conqueror, and so he found the will to carve out his own piece of hell.
The President survives the plane crash, and is kidnapped by the Duke. A group of national cops goes on a commando mission to get the President back, but they are warned off by the Duke’s Number One Guy: a freaky-deaky dude named Romero, who seems to have fashioned himself into a kind of punk rock Nosferatu. Remember, it’s just the prisoners and the worlds they have created, so maybe that’s a way of saying that each inmate has resorted to living in their heads . . . until their dark dreams have broken loose-no doubt a liberation for some, and a nightmare for others.
Romero definitely seems to be in his element. Here’s some more gratuitous head canon: tho’ the movie predates the advent of widespread live action role playing, maybe in the parallel timeline a kind of analogue of those vampire and werewolf LARP games evolved. Romero could’ve been a LARPer, pre-lockdown, and now he’s living his best life inside the new Manhattan.
Romero tells the super-pigs to fuck off, and shows them a finger sliced off the President’s hand bearing a ring with the Presidential seal. Super-pigs do the backdown. The President’s now in the clutches of the Duke and his people.
The Police Commissioner of Manhattan-a Bob Hauk-decides that taking the island by main force will just end up with a dead President, and so he turns to super-badass motherfucker Snake Plissken-conveniently in pre-processing for transfer to the penal colony on charges of armed bank robbery-to execute a solo penetration mission and rescue the nine-fingered chief executive. Snake isn’t just a violent criminal. Snake’s ex-special forces, a master of killing people, breaking shit, and survival under hellish circumstances. He ran some kind of heavy shit down in Leningrad.
Hauk reads off Snake’s permanent record, and we find out that ‘S.D. Plisskin’ is the dude’s government name. Snake’s the name he’s given himself. Snake also wears an eyepatch. I like to think Snake carved out his own eye, just so he could keep everything two-dimensional, but I’m the only one who thinks that. Hauk dangles a full pardon for all crimes committed on US soil if Snake sneaks into Manhattan and extracts the President. Hauk has Snake by the balls. Snake takes the job.
So much of this movie is about a man on a mission. Snake has his objectives laid out, he even has a much pared-down version of those Q-sequences in the 007 movies, where all his gadgets and weapons are set out before him while Tom Atkins exposits the basic rules of the DIY tribes of the new Manhattan. Snake gets a big watch with a countdown to doomsday clock. He has a walkie-talkie so he can stay in contact with mission control. He gets a submachine gun. I caught some ninja stars on the equipment table on the rewind. Snake’s bringing some serious party favors.
Hauk doesn’t trust Snake, nor should he. So, in his hard-boiled wisdom, he has a doctor inject our hero with a pair of tiny explosive devices that slowly dissolve in the bloodstream until their lethal cores are exposed and cause fatal internal hemorrhaging. What’s interesting about this scene is that it is not clear that Hauk was going to tell Snake the truth. First, he flat out lies to Snake telling him he’s about to get some kind of powerful antibiotic that will protect him from the unsanitary environment of the new Manhattan. But then the doctor goes off program and insists that Hauk tell Snake the truth. This is a moment-maybe one of the few-where somebody actively resists some manifestation of the corrupt American government-Police Commissioner Hauk is the avatar of corruption in this instance-and tries to operate according to a credible ethical code. Yes, the doctor has already violated his hippocratic oath to do no harm-but he owns up to his crime to the degree that he can. I’m always struck by the doctor’s tiny act of resistance. It’s something.
Once Snake finds his way to Manhattan, we get a lot of impressively wide shots where our hero wanders in the middleground of elaborately bombed-out areas of the big bad city while distant figures move furtively in the deep background. One shot even glides past a listless wino intrusively breaking into the foreground of the shot as he stares at the impressive action figure of a man that is Snake as he stalks towards the background to get a look at the burning wreckage of Air Force One.
Another shot stretches out ahead of us with jealous green streetlights-somebody’s hooked up to some rogue juice-as Snake stalks deeper into the metropolitan labyrinth.
And the deeper in we get, the more the new Manhattan seems to become a kind of repository for eclectic bits of cinematic fantasy:
A drag show where the band consists of some bedraggled cowboys who look like they escaped from the legendarily dysfunctional set of Heaven’s Gate; which is the fire, and which the frying pan, eh?
Adrienne Barbeau looking like a seductive enchantress as she descends the stairs into a subterranean antechamber to a bizarre hybrid of library and oil refinery bearing a proper burning torch as though she were in the depths of Frankenstein’s castle.
We even get a Karnov-looking pro-wrastler in the middle of a smoky indoor gladiatorial arena.
Westerns. Gothic horror. Lethal bloodsport. DIY oil rigs in the middle of libraries. There’s something for everybody in the new Manhattan.
(I found myself thinking, “Maybe the American police state has become so repressive, because it has no way of incorporating the rebellious and fanciful side of the collective human psyche. It has to partition it off into a very harsh place where it’ll fester and grow and take its own path. Maybe China and Russia and the White House will come to regret the loss of the authentically human spark and endeavor to play at some proxy wars and start hustling in weapons and big ideological promises and trash bags full of cash-call it Manhattan-stan-in order to claw back what they were once so eager to excise from the body politic. In the end, everybody still wants to be in New York . . .”)
Now, I should remind you-remind myself-that so much is left unsaid in this movie. All the background details are just that-background. The main action is Snake and his mission, but you can well see how you could derive a whole tabletop RPG sourcebook by scanning its ninety-something minutes over and over. You may already be aware that Snake Plisskin was the inspiration for the video game character Solid Snake in those Metal Gear and Metal Gear Solid games. Hideo Kojima-the former creative lead behind everything Metal Gear-has claimed that Escape From New York was a big influence-although I think Kojima appropriated more material from the much-maligned Escape From L.A., if you look into it.
Snake is the perfect video game protagonist: the dude can move, he can fight, he can pitch a blade into a dude’s skull, he knows how to shoot, he can climb, he can jump, and he has just enough stripped down humanity to fill up a few cutscenes if you need some of those. Kojima’s knockoff version is way chattier, and, frankly, way more of a normie. The more I think about it, Solid Snake strikes me as some fucking dad cosplaying as an actual tough guy. Solid Snake seems to like people, and he seems to want people to like him. Snake Plisskin’s fuck dispenser broke down long ago.
And yet . . . Snake does start to get it by the end of his mission. It may not be enough to save the world. It’s barely enough to save himself. But he does start to see the world just a tiny bit beyond his own narrow survival trip.
When given the chance to speak to the President, Snake asks him what he thinks about the fact that lots of people have died as part of the rescue mission. It’s hard to know for sure, but Snake seems to be asking about all the dead, friend and foe alike, since all the people who’ve been shipped to the new Manhattan have basically been forced into a desperate war of all-against-all by a totalitarian regime. Snake isn’t really mad at the people he’s been obliged to kill in order to achieve his mission. He’s mad at the overall perma-fucked reality he finds himself fighting to survive.
And Snake gets an answer.
It’s a shitty answer, but he gets it.
Be happy you get even that.
As with a lot of fantasy settings, the new Manhattan seems like a fun place to go crazy for a few days, but you wouldn’t want to actually live or die there.
Or maybe you would.
Unlike present-day Manhattan, you could probably afford the rent.
That’s for goddamn sure.
