Real Men Love Escape From New York

The Premise

The distant future: 1998. Crime inexplicably increases by 300%, and, as a result, America turns into a de facto police state. When the prisons start to flow, the government turns Manhattan island into one large prison, bordered on all sides by walls, machine gun emplacements, and mines. Within Manhattan, the prisoners are left more or less alone, so long as they don’t attempt to escape.

Ignoring the guilty pleasure we all feel when a film’s portrayal of “the future” is not only unrealistic, but chronologically a few years behind us, the entire idea of Manhattan turning into one huge prison is pretty badass. The idea of an island-wide detention center may seem kind of goofy on paper, but becomes oddly believable once we’re shown the civilizations the criminals create for themselves. In a sense, Escape From New York almost seems like it could be a sequel to The Warriors: once the criminals are truly in charge, THIS is what the world looks like. Given the typical “quest” plot structure presented when Plissken is forced, upon threat of death, to retrieve the kidnapped President of the United States from within the bowels of Manhattan prison, the audience gets the pleasure of seeing many different aspects of postapocalyptic New York as Snake makes his way around the city, meets new people, and gets them killed.

The Theme Song

John Carpenter loved himself some synthesizer music at the height of his career, and no song of his is as corny or enjoyable (patent pending on the word “cornjoyable”) as his theme tune for Escape From New York. It doesn’t sound particularly exciting, dangerous, or desperate, which oddly fits the tone of the film considering how dispassionate Plissken seems to feel about everything and everyone around him. If Robocop’s theme makes you want to punch people in the face and The Rocketeer’s makes you want to be heroic and triumphant, Escape from New York’s makes you want to sit back and look oddly badass while a bunch of idiots kill each other over stupid ideals.

Snake Plissken

Snake Plissken is the most badass anti-hero in the history of badass anti-heroes. Period. I know; when it comes to action movies, we’re all prone to hyperbole or heavy use of irony, but I’m dead serious when I say that Snake Plissken is the single most interesting and badass action film protagonist in film history.  According to his rap sheet, Plissken used to be a war hero who turned on his country after he got tired of all the lies and hypocrisy he fought so needlessly hard to defend. He’s a selfish bastard, but he doesn’t get off on killing people. He’s a tough guy, but he’s nowhere near invincible. He ‘s cocky around people he doesn’t like, but he intentionally loses the arrogant demeanor once the shit hits the fan not particularly cocky once the shit hits the fan. He’s a right bastard, but he still has his own (slightly twisted) sense of right and wrong.

Many, many films since Escape From New York have built their main characters of the Snake Plissken archetype, and Japanese game designer Hideo Kojima essentially stole all the things that made Plissken cool when developing the character of Solid Snake for the Metal Gear series. He’s a morally ambiguous, anti-establishment badass, and it’s really damn hard not to like him.

Not to mention, Kurt Russell fucking rocks that mullet.

Awkward Pre-9/11 Use of the Twin Towers

Eeesh.

The Prison Musical

As I said earlier, one of the best parts of the film is seeing how criminals act when given free reign over the entirety of Manhattan Island. For the purposes of the story, the majority of the criminals are either vicious, insane, evil, or some combination of the three, but when Plissken heads into a broken-down theatre near the beginning of the film, we get to see what the more optimistic criminals do when they aren’t raping and murdering each other.

As there’s no TV or radio within Manhattan Prison, it appears that some of the convicts decided to start their own Vaudeville musical, with a cast made up of entirely men dressed in drag (unsurprising). The song they sing has a giddy, catchy tune, but it also includes some creepy lines like “This is hell/this is fate/but this is your world, and it’s great!” As a scene unto itself, it tells the audience a hell of a lot about the world the film takes place in, and does a pretty good job of introducing…

Ernest Borgnine as Cabbie

If you’re going to spend two hours with an angry, sociopathic badass with an eyepatch, you need a chipper, lovable, friendly guy to work as a  -- and if, in the history of film, there has been a friendlier or more lovable guy than Ernest Borgnine, I’ve never met him.

It’s hard not to immediately like Cabbie: he’s happily bobbing his head to the aforementioned showtune, he admires Snake Plissken with the sort of naïve wonderment of a twelve year old meeting his favorite football player, and he saves Snake’s ass by throwing a Molotov cocktail at some lunatics. And how does Plissken repay him? By sticking a gun in his face and forcing him to follow directions. Snake’s needlessly cruel treatment of Cabbie really makes you feel sorry for the poor guy; no matter what Snake says or does, Cabbie almost always abides with enthusiasm to spare.

Ernest Borgnine kicks ass.

Blonde Chick gets her Shit Wrecked

If there’s one moment in Escape From New York that perfectly encapsulates the character of Snake Plissken, it’s the ending. If there are two moments like that, then the other one involves Snake’s encounter with a blonde chick about a third of the way through the film.

After running into a dilapidated diner for shelter, Snake meets a homeless blonde chick who, after taking one of his cigarettes and delivering some exposition, asks Snake if she can accompany him. Based on her appearance (she’s pretty attractive) and the confidence with which she delivers her lines, the blonde chick seems like she could very well be useful to Snake, and it’s not hard to picture her walking through the rest of the movie alongside him. Unfortunately for her, however, she leans in to kiss Snake and is suddenly surprised to find the floor collapse underneath her as a mob of cannibals grab her legs, dragging her under the floorboards for what I can only assume will be a night of rape and flesh-eating.

This is the moment where the audience learns pretty much everything they need to know about Snake. Faced with seeing the woman he just sort-of-befriended pulled underground by a bunch of maniacs, Snake moves to the floor and tries to grab her, but he only tries for about half a second. He looks down, extends his arm halfway, but then immediately sees that the girl is more or less fucked and doesn’t even hesitate to give up on her.

That’s Snake Plissken all over: mildly heroic if given a reason, but smart enough to look out for himself above all else. While many films have ripped off many aspects of Snake’s character, I’ve never seen this moment replicated in any other films, perhaps since it’s so realistic. Plissken’s choice makes perfect sense: he tries to do the right thing, but if he can’t do it easily, then he won’t. No reason to waste ammunition on the assholes that grabbed her -- he’s got to save himself.  If this scene remains intact in the remake, I’ll be extremely surprised.

Isaac Hayes as the Duke of New York

He’s a crappy actor, he doesn’t know how to properly execute an eye twitch, and he’s not even remotely frightening as a villain, but hey -- it’s Isaac Hayes! Evidently, if you can’t get the dude who played John Shaft to play your main bad guy, replace him with the guy who wrote his theme song.

At literally no point in the film is Isaac Hayes particularly scary or threatening, but it’s impossible not to dig the Duke of New York if only because of how much of a goddamned pimp he is. Apart from having the balls necessary to make himself the ruler of an entire island filled with cutthroats and rapists, the Duke also has his own, army-sized entourage, and a limousine with chandeliers as hood ornaments. Chandeliers, man.

Snake vs Gladiator

Plissken spends the vast majority of Escape From New York running, sneaking, and generally avoiding his enemies. We get the impression that he’s a total badass, but up until the moment he’s forced to square off with a hulking wrestler who looks like a mix between Zangief from Street Fighter II and Soda Popinski from Punch-Out, we haven’t seen him strut his stuff in a balls-out combat scenario.

Snake spends the majority of the fight getting his ass handed to him: Zangief Popinski wails on him with a large baseball bat, and Snake helplessly dodges around the inside of the ring, trying his best to block Zangief’s blows with his own garbage can shield. The DVD commentary for this scene reveals that Kurt Russell was truly getting smacked around during filming: the stuntman who played Zangief refused to listen to advice from either Kurt or director John Carpenter, and never once pulled any of his blows.

All of this dodging and blocking pays off near the end of the fight, once Snake and Zangief are both given spiked clubs. After getting thrown around for a few seconds, Snake gets up from the floor, hits Zangief full-on in the gut, and then fucking slams the spiked club into the back of his head. Even though the scene is shot from very far away and there’s not that much blood (as is Carpenter’s M.O.), the kill is still remarkably brutal. This is probably thanks to the fact that after two straight hours of getting pummeled by a stubborn, uncooperative, mustachioed giant, Kurt Russell relished the opportunity to pay him back with one hell of a forceful blow to the back of his head.

The Mined Bridge Chase

Perhaps the most exciting part in the entire film, the mined bridge chase is also one of the most unconventional scenes in the film. Not only do Snake, Brain (Harry Dean Stanton), Maggie (Adrienne Barbeau), Cabbie, and the President (Donald Pleasance) have to outrun the Duke of New York in a desperate race to the Manhattan border wall, but the bridge they drive on also happens to be mined.  Almost all of the action leading up to this chase revolved around the acquisition of a bridge diagram which marked the location of every single mine on the bridge, and thereby guarantees safe passage…which is what makes the chase so goddamn interesting.

Because while roughly half of the film builds up the bridge diagram as the answer to Plissken and his gang’s prayers, the damn thing doesn’t work. At all. Brain tells Plissken to drive to the left, and a mine explodes right next to them. Brain tells Plissken to drive to the right, and another mine explodes. Brain tells Plissken to quickly drive left then jog right, and a mine blows the goddamn cab in two, killing Cabbie and thus cementing John Carpenter’s legacy as one of the most nihilistic filmmakers around. If that wasn’t enough, less than a minute later Brain tells Snake to walk around the right side of a car instead of the left, and is suddenly – and without any fanfare whatsoever – blown up for his troubles, leading Maggie to stay behind and die by vehicular manslaughter in an attempt to kill the Duke.

I have never before, and probably will never again see a single action scene that so quickly, efficiently, and mercilessly betrays the audience’s expectations and dispatches nearly all of its main characters.

“YOU’RE THE DUKE!”

Up to this point in the film, life has not been good for the President of the United States. First, his plane is shot down and he’s kidnapped by the Duke of New York. Then, he’s tortured by the Duke and forced to repeat the phrase, “You’re the Duke of New York! You’re A-Number-One!” Finally, he’s dressed in a woman’s wig, and broken out of his captor’s base of operations by an asshole who steals his world-saving cassette tape (which contains some information about nukes, or something).

So it’s perhaps more than a little understandable that the President might want to take revenge upon at least one of the assholes who made his day a living hell.

Just as Snake and the President (the only remaining members of their merry little band) get to the Manhattan wall and the President is hoisted up by an electric winch, the Duke of New York catches up and engages in a quick fistfight with Plissken, who throws the Duke’s gun away, elbows him in the ribcage, and makes a run for the winch. He grabs it, but once he’s halfway up the wall, it suddenly stops. As Snake furiously tugs on the winch, the Duke regains his footing, grabs his gun, and –

--Is surprised to find himself torn apart by roughly eight hundred machine gun bullets. After the Duke falls to the ground, dead, we see who did the shooting: none other than Mr. President himself.

“YOU’RE THE DUKE,” he yells, mercilessly spraying the Duke with gunfire. “YOU’RE THE DUKE!” “A-NUMBAH OOOOOOONE!”

All things considered, it’s a pretty cathartic moment. It shows the president to be something of a dick (why stop the winch?), but hey – he decided to man up and take out the Duke, and that’s something.

The Nihilistic Ending

After Snake finally returns the President to the authorities, the Duke is killed, Plissken gives up the World-Saving Nuclear Cassette Tape and gets the explosive charges in his arteries neutralized, it seems like the movie has pretty much shown us everything it’s gonna show. Seemingly, all that remains is a quick wrap-up, and for Plissken to walk into the sunrise like a badass.

Except for the fact that co-writer Nick Castle (who also wrote the drag musical sequence) decided it might be fun to pen the single most nihilistic ending in action film history, anyway.

As the President gets cleaned up for his press conference on live TV, Snake walks over and begins to talk to him. I could summarize, but the dialogue speaks for itself:

PRESIDENT

I, uh... I want to thank you.  Anything you want... you just name it.

SNAKE

Just a moment of your time.

AIDE

Three minutes, sir.

PRESIDENT

Yes?

SNAKE

We did get you out.  A lot of people died in the process.  I just

wondered how you felt about it.

PRESIDENT (distracted, looking at himself in his shaving mirror)

I, uh, want to thank them.  This nation appreciates their sacrifice.

President is uncomfortable with Snake's glare and it

shows.

PRESIDENT

Look, uh, I'm on the air in two in a half minutes…

 
Snake walks away.
 

Moments later, the President goes on the air and presents the World-Saving Cassette Tape (“in the hope that our great nations may learn to live in peace”), only to hear American Bandstand blare out of the speakers at full volume.

We cut to Snake, walking alone in the distance. Having judged the President to be a hypocritical shitbag, he’s decided that neither the President, nor the people who elected him, deserve to be saved. As the sound of Cabbie’s American Bandstand tape is heard in the distance, Snake takes the World-Saving Cassette Tape from his pocket and destroys it, unraveling and ripping apart the information that could have “saved” mankind.

If that isn’t the most badass ending ever conceived, I don’t know what the fuck is.