The bleak futur­ism of John Carpenter’s Escape from New York

In the mid-1970s, when John Car­pen­ter wrote Escape from New York in response to the Water­gate scan­dal, 1997 was a dis­tant – but not too dis­tant – future onto which could be pro­ject­ed all man­ner of con­tem­po­rary con­cerns. After the suc­cess of Hal­loween in 1978, Car­pen­ter was able to secure a suf­fi­cient bud­get (a still mod­est $6 mil­lion) to realise his urban dystopia, and it was released in 1981, when 1997 was still not a real, tan­gi­ble time so much as an imag­i­na­tive pre-mil­len­ni­al are­na for the pro­jec­tion of the (then) not quite now.

Also mov­ing every­thing for­wards is the dri­ving, puls­ing synth score – Carpenter’s own, in asso­ci­a­tion with Alan Howarth – that plays over the stark white-on-black open­ing cred­its points. 1997 is the year in which the film’s events are set, but far from being a bright, pro­gres­sive future, it is a hyper­bol­ic dete­ri­o­ra­tion of 1981’s here and now, in an Amer­i­ca so rid­dled with crime and cor­rup­tion that the whole of Man­hat­tan Island has been con­vert­ed into a ​“max­i­mum secu­ri­ty prison for the entire coun­ty”, its inmates, once exiled there, able to live by their own rules just so long as they nev­er leave. No one escapes.

Right from the start we can tell that Snake Plissken (Kurt Rus­sell) is an out­law, whether from his inso­lent swag­ger, or from the pirate’s patch that he sports over his left eye, or from the met­al cuffs bind­ing his wrists and and the armed escort at his side. Snake is head­ed to Man­hat­tan Island for rob­bing the Fed­er­al Reserve Depos­i­to­ry, but in his fall from one-time dec­o­rat­ed Spe­cial Forces war hero to com­mon crim­i­nal, he also embod­ies a broad­er degen­er­a­tion in the Amer­i­can val­ues around him, as the free coun­try for which he once fought has trans­formed into a fas­cist police state agains which he rebels.

On the eve of a poten­tial­ly world-sav­ing sum­mit, Air Force One is hijacked and the Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States (Don­ald Pleas­ance) is sent crash­ing into the cen­tre of the prison com­plex. Snake is half-recruit­ed, half-tricked by Com­mis­sion­er Bob Hauk (Lee Van Cleef) into an against-the-clock res­cue mis­sion, with a full par­don the reward for suc­cess, and death the pun­ish­ment for failure.

From the moment we watch ter­ror­ists delib­er­ate­ly crash a plane into the New York sky­line, a dif­fer­ent kind of future, a lit­tle beyond 1997, is being envis­aged here. For when, on 11 Sept, 2001, com­men­ta­tors kept repeat­ing the mantra-like obser­va­tion that the destruc­tion of the Twin Tow­ers was ​‘just like a movie’, they prob­a­bly had in mind some­thing like Escape from New York, with its sub­jec­tion of America’s finan­cial hub and social melt­ing pot to a defa­mil­iaris­ing dis­as­ter scenario.

Of course, the film itself was surf­ing a dif­fer­ent kind of zeit­geist: for as Snake car­ries out his des­per­ate one-day odyssey through urban gangs of freaks, maraud­ers, can­ni­bals and semi-civilised hold­outs (includ­ing Ernest Borgnine’s Cab­bie, Har­ry Dean Stanton’s Harold ​“Brain” Hell­man and Adri­enne Barbeau’s Mag­gie), Car­pen­ter taps right into the sort of bleak futur­ism that also pre­vailed in Wal­ter Hill’s The War­riors and George Miller’s Mad Max and Mad Max 2, where the future is a night­mare of deplet­ed resources, regres­sive devo­lu­tion and reign­ing chaos. Car­pen­ter flags his oth­er cin­e­mat­ic influ­ences by nam­ing one char­ac­ter Romero (Frank Dou­ble­day) and anoth­er Cro­nen­berg (John Strobel).

New York is now ruled over by The Duke (Isaac Shaft Hayes), a man whose sav­agery, cal­lous dis­re­gard for the lives of oth­ers and pimp­ish flair for cos­tumery have enabled him to rise to the very top of the lit­ter (and to bring blax­ploita­tion into the film’s already heady genre mix of SF action). Yet, for all the super­fi­cial dif­fer­ences (of race and class) between the Duke and the Pres­i­dent, the sim­i­lar­i­ties are just as strik­ing, with POTUS utter­ly uncon­cerned by the con­sid­er­able col­lat­er­al dam­age wrought to return him to power.

The MacGuf­fin here is a cas­sette tape (a for­mat that would bare­ly out­last the ​’80s) which the Pres­i­dent is car­ry­ing in his brief­case, with a record­ed speech on nuclear fis­sion that might just help bring peace (and lim­it­less ener­gy) to a world at war. Yet would-be sav­iour Snake rep­re­sents a dif­fer­ent, old­er set of val­ues, famil­iar from any west­ern. ​“I don’t give a fuck about your war, or your Pres­i­dent,” he declares near the start. For Snake, a rugged indi­vid­u­al­ist par excel­lence, is out for him­self and cer­tain­ly does not believe in the cor­rupt­ed sys­tem that has built up around him.

His final ges­ture in the film, as he turns his back on the cyn­i­cal mer­ry-go-round of glob­al pol­i­tics, rep­re­sents this anar­chic ethos writ large. Yet it also, upon reflec­tion, involves a deep-seat­ed sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty for the sort of val­ues main­tained by Cab­bie, an age­ing, rather inno­cent char­ac­ter (and a nos­tal­gist him­self) whose old show­tunes the world might per­haps do bet­ter to keep singing.

Escape from New York is released by Stu­dio­Canal in a brand new 4K restora­tion on EST, DVD, BD and 4K UHD on 26 November.