Escape from New York

Many movies have nonsense plots. You know the type: the whole setup really doesn’t make much sense when you look closely at it. Silly things happen along the way. Characters do dumb things. But every now and then, a movie surpasses its own silly underpinnings. A combination of creativity, style, and just plain fun turn it from plain old nonsense to what I like to think of as inspired nonsense. And when I think of one movie that exemplifies what I mean by this, I think of John Carpenter’s Escape from New York.

It’s 1998. Manhattan Island has been turned into a maximum security prison, where prisoners are dropped off and never allowed to leave, but instead form their own bizarre societies on the island. Air Force one, with the president aboard, crashes on the island. Worse, he is carrying a cassette tape with the information that will mean mankind’s salvation on it: the secret of controlled fusion. This all is nonsense on so many levels. The most valuable property on earth turned into a prison? One copy of the secret of fusion? (What? Did the president shoot the scientists and burn their notes?) Everything stored on a cassette tape of someone explaining the theory?

Yet, around this silliness, Carpenter has crafted an entertaining adventure film Kurt Russell stars as Snake Plissken, ex commando turned criminal, whose sentence will be commuted if he can rescue the president within 24 hours. (The secret of controlled fusion is only important if the president can present it while a major world summit is underway.) Plissken seems to be mythic character and in some reminded me of someone out of a Roger Zelazny novel. Everyone he runs into has hear of him and most recognize him (and usually say “I thought you were dead”). He is sent to Manhattan to find the president, and there encounters a host of strange characters and weird mini-societies, all living amidst the eerie stylistic landscape of a mostly abandoned and much damaged New York.

The president is being held captive by the Duke of New York (Isaac Hayes), the chief criminal on the island who drives around in a big Cadillac with chandeliers on its hood. The great character actor Harry Dean Stanton plays “Brain,” a criminal scientist who not only knows how to manufacture gasoline (which he seems to do in the remains of the New York Public Library), but also has mapped the mines on the 69^th Street Bridge. The Duke plans to lead the exiles off of the island using the president (played in marvelously whiney fashion by Donald Pleasance) following Brain’s map. Ernest Borgnine plays Cabbie, a cab driver who befriends Plissken and who always seems to be in the right place at the right time.

I usually don’t like movies where, when you actually think about what’s going on, don’t make sense. But this is one of the exceptions. I don’t know what it is – the semi-mythic character of Plissken, the strangeness and creativity of the situations and societies he finds on the island, the interesting cast of characters (the Duke, Cabbie, Brain, and many others), the wonderful sets and cinematography, Carpenter’s simplistic but hypnotic score – but somehow this movie works. It’s probably all of these things, combining to form the inspired nonsense that I find to be so much fun. It’s rather like a comic book brought to life – bigger than life characters, straightforward, simplistic plot, emotions cranked way up, colorful things going on. In the end, what makes it work is that it’s fun.

The movie was made in 1981. Many years later, Carpenter made a sequel (Escape from LA) which really didn’t work the way the original did, perhaps because this time it wasn’t fresh. A remake is planned, and as much as I like the original, I have to ask why? The fact that this movie worked, when, if you just describe what it’s about, it clearly shouldn’t, seems to me like something that can’t be repeated and will probably be done badly (and worse, heavy handedly). I could be wrong (after all, I was convinced that nothing good could come of remaking a poor TV series like the original Battlestar Galactica). But the odds of the remake of Escape from New York being better than the original (or even worth watching) are low.