Classic Movie Review : Escape from New York (1981)
I never liked children movies. Even when I was a kid, they contrived and forcefully didactic and safe to me. There was no danger to them. You always knew everything would be fine by the end and that's some fucking bullshit. What I do like are manchild fantasies that have no bearing on reality whatsoever, like John Carpenter's Escape from New York where Kurt Russell wanders around the big apple and kicks everybody’s asses. So, I watched it for the twelvth or thirteenth time at 41 years old because I could and it’s still awesome.
Escape from New York tells the story of Snake Plissken (a Kurt Russell in his fucking prime), a notorious war hero turned criminal, who’s condemned to life on the prison island of Manhattan, UNLESS he agrees to rescue the U.S president (Donald Pleasence) who crashed over there aboard Air Force One on his way to stop WWIII. Nothing less. So Snake has to save himself from a brutal, lawless, post-apocalyptic New York, but he also has to save the world. But Snake Plissen is a pawn to no man.
Prehistorical Empowerment
This is a simple movie: Snake Plissken is tricked into a dangerous mission, he begrudingly accepts, runs into a moderate amount of trouble and makes it work. The beauty of Escape from New York lies in the style and self-confidence Plissken gets shit done. He's not as much a character as he is a set of values and behavior. He has little backstory, about zero desire except perhaps to survive (which is debatable) and nothing precise to look forward to. But Snake loves to get shit done and he does it well even in hostile conditions.
He's a ridiculously unhealthy male ideal operating in circumstances that are so weird and foreign to any film viewer that you never feel guilty about not being even 1% as badass as he is. But Snake radiates an aura of fearlessness that's oddly contagious, he makes you feel like it's no use being scared of anything since the deck is stacked against you and you won’t survive the ride anyway. I guess this is what women feel when they see Taylor Swift wrecking dudes on social media. I so get the appeal.
A lot of dudes are rolling their eyes when women or people of color discuss cultural representation, but it's because we've had ours for so fucking long that it's hard to understand it's even a thing. It's comforting and somewhat heartwarming to watch someone fend off whoever is threatening his sense of self, because it alludes that someday you might have figure it all out. Of course, it has nothing to do with the movie, but it is what characters like Snake Plissken elicits. He's a disposable invocation for courage.
The Meaning of Patriotism
But Escape from New York is not just any dumb, disposable action movie. It would've been forgotten if it were. This is an interesting movie because it explores two opposed visions of patriotism that very much still tear through the fabric of society today: the one where you serve your government and the one where you do what you feel is best for your country. Snake Plissken is neither democrat not republican and neither is Donald Pleasence's president. They embody the individual and the establishment respectively.
Every character (or group of characters) in Escape from New York stands for something else, but Russell and Pleasence are the two crucial ones. The individual being forced to serve the government whether he agrees with it or not only to have his needs to fall on deaf ears whenever the job is done. Escape from New York separates politics (and especially politicians) from whatever is going on in the real work with such bluntness, it makes politicians look like children playing a dangerous game with our future.
That's why this movie still resonates so hard today. That's also why its ending is so uncomfortable and downcast. It's meant to echo the helplessness of the everyman in regards to geopolitics even if normal people clearly are the blood, guts and soul of modern society. After all, we're the ones who go to war and whatnot. I believe it’s why people keep going back to it too. Snake Plissken feels like the embodiment of brooding frustrations that have no output whatsoever except in crazy science fiction films.
*
Escape from New York is a classic. It has earned it even if it's not the most ambitious nor the most profound movie ever made. It knows exactly what it is and what it wants to say and it was very much a weirdo in the cultural landscape of the early eighties. John Carpenter has always been an original and an innovator in his own way and the mix of cocaine-addled eighties action and seventies soulfulness in Escape from New York is a testament to that. This movie aged like fine wine and I hope it keeps doing so.
