Escape From New York: Snake Plissken Doesn’t Care

Escape From New York (1981) Directed by John Carpenter. Written by John Carpenter and Nick Castle. Starring Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasence, Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton, and Adrienne Barbeau.

Here’s are some fun facts that are not remotely fun:

Over the course of about 30 years, starting in the early 1960s, the crime rate in the United States did in fact quadruple, just like the it says in the voiceover at the start of Escape From New York (1981). The U.S. crime rate eventually peaked in 1991 and has been dropping steadily ever since. But it’s not really that simple, because the percentage of reported cases that police actually solve has also been dropping steadily and is currently at its lowest point since 1993; only about 36% of reported violent crimes and about 12% of reported property crimes are ever cleared. At the same time, the U.S. prison population began growing at shocking rates starting in the mid- to late-’70s, but especially accelerating in the mid-‘80s, and only began decreasing around about 2010.

The reasons for these trends and the complicated public perceptions and misconceptions about them are many, varied, and well beyond the scope of this column, which is about a John Carpenter movie, not an Errol Morris documentary. I bring it up because it provides some necessary context to the film. Crime was on everybody’s mind in ’70s America. The post-World War II “Red Scare” era had evolved into a deeply distrustful dissatisfaction with the government, made even worse as the Vietnam War dragged on and on. President Nixon announced the War on Drugs as part of the broader trend of centering crime rates as a political issue—then just a few years later was exposed as a criminal himself; he was then pardoned by the next president. To make some sweeping generalizations: Americans’ trust in their government tanked, and along with it went whatever feelings of safety and stability had survived the ’60s.

All of this was reflected in the movies. By the end of the 1960s, enforcement of the Hays Code had been significantly weakened, and in 1968 it was finally replaced by the MPAA ratings system. That meant, among other things, American filmmakers were finally able to tell stories featuring criminals, antiheros, and various flavors of “bad” characters without the requirement that they be punished by the narrative. So that’s what they did.

Boy, did they ever. This was the decade of Dirty Harry (1971), Deliverance (1972), The Godfather (1972), Badlands (1973), Serpico (1973), Chinatown (1974), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Taxi Driver (1976)—the list goes on and on. Between the counterculture of the ’60s and the blockbuster era that began later in the ’70s, there was a proliferation of gritty, violent crime films that run the gamut from the crassest exploitation schlock to the most revered cinematic art. A lot of these films are built on the foundations laid by noir films and Westerns, with themes that set a lone character in opposition to wealth and power, but they didn’t have to be heroes anymore. They could be Inspector Harry Callahan or Travis Bickle or Michael Corleone.

Into the middle of this Hollywood era of both intense darkness and wild creativity, a USC film school dropout by the name of John Carpenter was launching his career. Following the release of his first feature, 1974’s comedic sci fi Dark Star, Carpenter fully embraced the mood of the era with Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), in which a Los Angeles gang besieges a police station, and Halloween (1978), the film that has been blamed for and/or credited with launching the slasher horror genre. And while 1979’s The Fog, a supernatural horror film, might seem like an odd bridge between those two movies and Escape From New York, it is about ghosts taking revenge an entire town for covering up past crimes.

Carpenter has cited two things as inspiring Escape From New York. The first is the Watergate scandal and the associated collapse of trust in the presidency. The second is the movie that the ’70s crime movie buffs in the audience are already furiously typing about in the comments because I left it off the list above: Michael Winner’s 1975 vigilante film Death Wish, in which a mild-mannered man (played by Charles Bronson) reacts to the murder of his wife and rape of his daughter by going on a vigilante killing spree.

Death Wish is… what it is. Exploitative, icky, and more interesting as an artifact of a specific time period and cultural environment than anything else. It’s also beside the point, because Carpenter wasn’t moved by the film’s story or message or politics. What interested him were the possibilities in the setting: the city as a dangerous concrete jungle, an urban wilderness ruled by the laws of strength and brutality. Carpenter took that glimmer of underdeveloped worldbuilding and thought, hey, what if I make it a little bit sci fi and a little bit weird? That’s how Escape From New York was born.

Carpenter wrote the initial screenplay in the mid-’70s, right after the whole Watergate shitshow went down. He shopped it around, but he was relatively new to the business, with only Dark Star under his belt, and studios felt the idea behind Escape From New York was “too violent, too scary, too weird.”

Things changed significantly after the success of Halloween, which was also violent, scary, and weird, but most importantly made a tremendous amount of money on a very small budget. That put Carpenter on the radar as a guy who could do a lot with very little, which helped him and his Halloween co-writer and producing partner, Debra Hill, sign on to make two movies with AVCO Embassy Pictures. The first movie they made for AVCO was The Fog. The second was supposed to be The Philadelphia Experiment (1984, directed by Stewart Raffill), but Carpenter left that project because, apparently, he hated his own script. He dug out his unproduced script for Escape From New York and pitched that instead. (As for whether he actually said the much mythologized line, “I have this script in my trunk”… well, who knows? That’s how he has told the story in the past.)

By his own account, Carpenter wasn’t happy with his original Escape From New York script either. So he called up his film school friend Nick Castle, whom you probably wouldn’t recognize in his street clothes but will certainly recognize in his famous work clothes, as he’s the man behind the mask in Halloween. (Castle has also directed several films, including 1984’s The Last Starfighter.) They rewrote the film together to make it funnier and weirder, shifting it away from a straightforward action film. AVCO approved a budget of $6 million, which was 20 times more than the $300,000 Carpenter had worked with to make Halloween, and they got to work.

Of course, creating a dystopian future version of New York City is a very different production challenge from having your film school buddy stand menacingly behind bushes in a melted Captain Kirk mask. It helped that, in addition to the budget, the production had some pretty impressive talent on board from the start. That includes production designer Joe Alves, whose work we’ve seen previously in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977); he’s also the man who devised the mechanical sharks in Jaws (1975). Even before that, he was the Disney animator responsible for the scenes of the monster in Forbidden Planet (1956)—a resume item which, Alves says, “blew John’s mind,” as Carpenter has long named Forbidden Planet as one of the films that made him love both movies and sci fi.

Alves was the one who nixed the idea of filming Escape From New York in New York. It would have been too expensive and too difficult because New York was not, in fact, a desolate urban wasteland at the time. Just for comparison, we’ve seen what New York did look like in the early ’80s in The Brother From Another Planet (1984), which was filmed on location in Harlem with essentially no embellishment. It looked run-down and struggling, sure, but also diverse, bustling, and very alive—not at all what the futuristic prison in the movie needed.

Alves’ account of choosing the location is pretty interesting. They went looking for places that had experienced a building boom during the same architectural time period as New York, so the mimicry would be convincing. But they also needed an area that was suffering a period of disuse and abandonment, where it would be easier to close off city blocks and transform them for filming. That’s what they found in and around St. Louis and East St. Louis, which at the time had a lot of severely economically depressed areas with numerous unused buildings and vacant lots—and, notably, local officials happy to invite a Hollywood production in, even if that production wanted to make their city look like a dystopian hellhole.

And it works! The New York City of the film does look and feel like a dystopian hellhole. It’s a wonderfully effective setting, one that has helped define the visual language of urban decay since the film came out. One detail that I love is our first look at the city: the familiar skyline from a distance, but it’s eerily, unnaturally dark, punctuated by only a few low-level lights. The entire movie is quite visually dark (it was filmed almost entirely at night), but it’s that view of the city across the water that firmly establishes that this New York is very different from the one we know and love.

A fun fact that is actually fun this time: Those matte paintings of the lightless New York skyline were done by none other than James Cameron, who at that point was working on various movies in special effects and production. He was a year or two shy of the literal fever dream that would combine with his fondness for Halloween and admiration of Carpenter to give him the idea for The Terminator (1984).

There’s more to sci fi worldbuilding in a film than the location and special effects, however, and Escape From New York takes the very efficient route of telling us the bare minimum and leaving the rest up to the imagination. There is the introduction at the beginning that states the time and place—1997, prison, fifty-foot wall, once you go in you don’t come out—but aside from that most of what we pick up comes through suggestion and implication.

We don’t know what’s going on in what is presumably World War III, only that it involves the Soviet Union and China. We don’t know what happened in Leningrad. We don’t know how or why the U.S. government evolved into a fascist state willing and capable of turning New York City into a prison. (Completely unrelated comment: This is a good time to check your voter registration, Americans.) We never get into the details of the larger stakes surrounding the president, the meeting, the briefcase, the tape that contains something about nuclear fusion, any of that.

(A lot of this is expanded and explained in Mike McQuay’s novelization of the movie, but that is not the same thing as the movie itself offering explanations—especially since a lot of things didn’t originally have backstory, and others Carpenter cut out on purpose.)

The studio initially wanted a tough-guy actor in the lead role; the names most often given as their picks are Chuck Norris and Charles Bronson. But Carpenter lobbied for Kurt Russell, who at the time was mostly known for lighthearted Disney films for both cinema and television. Carpenter and Russell had first met when Carpenter directed Russell in the 1975 TV movie Elvis. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship—and a fruitful series of collaborations. Russell was eager to shed his Disney image and threw himself into the role of Snake Plissken with enthusiasm, determination, and an eyepatch.

Several times over the years, Russell has told the story about how he was walking around the filming location one night in full costume and came upon some locals who were, presumably, up to no good. They took a look at his weapons and demeanor and quickly left without causing trouble—and Russell had to tell Carpenter that he was now convinced the character was going to work.

He was right. The character of Snake Plissken works, and then some, in a memorable way that only a handful of iconic characters ever manage. But it’s not just because he’s got that very early ’80s cool thing going on, with that very John Carpenter synthesizer soundtrack to accompany him. A lot of what was cool in 1981 is not cool anymore. I’ll allow for the synths, but the snake tattoo isn’t cool anymore. (Sorry, it made me laugh.) But the character is still fantastic, because the film is doing some neat storytelling by characterizing the world and the character completely in relation to each other, such that you really can’t separate them.

When Plissken first meets Police Commissioner Hauk (Lee Van Cleef), Hauk first tries to talk to him veteran-to-veteran, then slides back into cop-to-criminal when that fails. That scene has such a strong post-Vietnam tone all over it, establishing that it’s a mistake to assume the former Special Forces soldier would still be attached to any sense of national loyalty, honor, or heroism. When Hauk realizes that won’t work, he goes right back toward the systematic dehumanization of a cop toward a prisoner. It’s such a strong “either you’re with us or you’re not a person at all” message, one that effectively shows us basically everything we need to know about this version of America.

We learn what Plissken is being imprisoned for (armed robbery) but, as far as I can recall, we never learn the same about any of the other prisoners. The guards talk about the prisoner gangs and the “Crazies,” but we never find out why any of them are in the prison. We can make a reasonable guess about Brain (Harry Dean Stanton), on account of his past with Plissken and the late, lamented Fresno Bob, but we don’t know even that much about the Duke (Isaac Hayes), Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine), or Maggie (Adrienne Barbeau), nor the various henchmen and hangers-on, nor the subway-dwelling hordes, nor even those dudes who put heads on pikes. We only know who they are inside the prison, who their current situation has shaped them to be. And, of course, we know that they want out. But wouldn’t any of us want that?

All throughout, the president (Donald Pleasence) is treated by the narrative as inconvenient baggage. He’s the plot football that needs to be brought into the end zone. Sure, the cops and politicians might say things about the fate of the world, but we don’t have any reason to believe them. (Seems to me a bad idea to ever trust cops, but especially when they inject explosives into people’s bodies.) Our engagement in the movie’s plot does not ever rely on caring about what happens to the president and his little cassette tape. That is very clearly framed as something they care about—the politicians, the cops, the prison guards—while the audience is invited to go along on the strange, action-packed ride of what Plissken cares about.

Which is mostly survival, but it’s not only survival. Even though Plissken is wearing the attitude and the eyepatch and the regrettable happy trail tattoo of somebody who doesn’t give a fuck about anybody or anything, it’s not entirely convincing. Right at the end, after he’s gotten out of the prison, Plissken asks the president what he thinks about the fact that people died saving him. The president gives some halfhearted answer about sacrificing for the good of the country. Plissken is unimpressed. He turns down a job offer from Hauk and destroys the tape everybody was so eager to find.

The president has failed a test—one that Plissken always expected him to fail. The president does not see the prisoners as people; to him they are disposable. But the film itself does not endorse this view, which is where it stands apart from a movie like Death Wish, which treats street-level criminals as animals to be exterminated. Carpenter may have been inspired by Death Wish’s urban setting, but he turned it around to—very wryly, with humor and absurdity—draw a massive question mark over the idea that people can be neatly sorted into categories of “deserves to be killed” and “deserves to do the killing.”

All of the characters in Escape From New York are politicians, cops, or criminals. Can anybody even be a hero in this world? We don’t know. Is there anything worth being loyal to? We don’t know. The politicians and cops are selfish assholes; we don’t want them deciding who lives or dies. The criminals are also selfish assholes; we don’t want them to have that power either. Maybe nobody should have that power.

Snake Plissken is a character drawn from the school of revisionist Westerns and ’70s crime films, one who has been used as a template for many later characters in different genres. But the character is also inextricably linked to the science fictional world in which he exists. Snake Plissken is the inevitable result of a fascist carceral state, and that world is always going to produce Snake Plissken. The character defines the setting as much as the setting defines the character, and neither would look quite the same if they were separated—or if the character was written to crave his own power, or seek a place in the world’s systems of power, or subscribe to any ideals society fails to honor. Snake Plissken doesn’t do any of that. He’s presented to us as somebody who has been both the hero and the villain, and wants no part of either label.

Escape From New York doesn’t predict the future. If it did—let’s be honest—it would have dealt with the for-profit American prison industrial complex to go along with the skyrocketing incarceration rates. But it is doing what the best dystopian futuristic sci fi always does, which is exaggerating and extrapolating a social and political possibility based in the time and place of its own origin. To us, now, that looks like alternate history (…more alternate for some people than for others), but that’s basically the same thing, from a different point of view.

One of the most interesting things this movie does, I think, is extrapolate a world where we don’t fit. Us, the moviegoers, the audience. Are there “normal” people in the world of Escape From New York? Probably, but we never see them. Society outside the prison is completely invisible. The lack of details about any prisoners’ crimes means we don’t even have hypothetical victims to identify with. There is no safe place for us to imagine ourselves in this world. There are only the cops and the criminals, and that is a truly uncomfortable future to imagine.

What do you think about Escape From New York? Or the sequel? Or where the movie fits with the so very cheerful and optimistic American cinema of the era?

Next week: Speaking of cheerful and optimistic, let’s go to Antarctica with The Thing, starring Jed the dog, along with some other guys. Watch it on Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Spectrum.