A HELL OF A TOWN

A review requested by Kent H, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Obviously, 1981's Escape from New York is a transitional film in the career of director John Carpenter: his fifth feature (seventh if we include his television movies) is the one that finds him starting to really play with the resources of the Hollywood studios for the first time, and along with the immediately subsequent The Thing, it finds him somewhere in between the wiry little production of a Halloween and the unattractively clumsy commercialism of Christine. Less obviously, it's also, arguably, the film that first saw Carpenter lose a little of his shine as a bright young genius. Of the preceding six feature-length projects on his resume, all of them were largely different, though some of them (epecially Halloween, Someone's Watching Me! and The Fog) are pulling from the same toolkit. Escape from New York, however, is the first film in his career that feels in some ways redundant. I could easily say - and do so without hesitation - that The Fog is a movie from the director of Halloween that isn't as good, but I wouldn't go so far as to argue that The Fog therefore is a disappointing waste of the Halloween director's time; they're too far apart from each other. Whereas Escape from New York is clearly a film from the director of Assault on Precinct 13 that is not quite as good - the gap there is smaller than the gap between Halloween and The Fog - and does enough of the same things in broadly the same way (especially the Carpenter-penned music, which is virtually a direct lift from the earlier film) that it's really hard not to think of it as a step down.

Not, mind you, a particularly severe step down: if Escape from New York isn't quite in the top tier of Carpenter films, it is quite firmly ensconced near the top of the second tier. Knowing that the director and his co-writer Nick Castle (whose handful of writing credits are well and good, but surely we all know him best as the man behind the mask as Michael in Halloween) were consciously channeling Death Wish makes it clear just how great Escape from New York really is: the Carpenter film takes the 1974 revenge flick's vague notion of the city as a concrete and glass and steel jungle and goes to such infinitely richer places with it that only a madman would think to compare the two.

The film begins a little bit clunkily: onscreen text informs us that by 1988, crime had risen by 400 percent, and then a narrator (an uncredited Jamie Lee Curtis, in her last performance under Carpenter's direction) recites the exact same information, before going on to tell us the rest of the backstory without text. It's a weird little inelegant stumble right at the start, but it's quickly forgotten as we're told that Manhattan is now a walled-off prison camp where all the criminals of the United States get dumped to form their own hideous society of post-apocalyptic lawlessness. Then we skip ahead to 1997, for one brutal night on this hell island. Like most of Carpenter's best films, Escape from New York has a direct, thoroughly stripped-down narrative: the President of the United States (Donald Pleasance) has had his plane hijacked on the eve of a major peace summit, and his escape left him stranded on Manhattan, where he has been taken hostage by the Duke of New York (Isaac Hayes), the most powerful gang leader on the island. The terms of his release: all of New York's criminals must be allowed onto the mainland. The government wanting to avoid this very badly, and wanting to avoid a dead president equally as much, concludes that they need to fight fire with fire: to fight the criminals, they send ex-special forces soldier and current badass bank robber "Snake" Plissken (Kurt Russell) to the island, with an injection that will explode his body from within if he doesn't return with the president in roughly 22 hours. Thus begins a voyage through the ugly corners of Manhattan to meet the curious inhabitants thereof, most importantly Snake's guide Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine), the survivalist Brain (Harry Dean Stanton), and his girlfriend Maggie (Adrienne Barbeau).

Across the spectrum of reactions to this film, no matter how much one adores its world building and sense of rotted style, or finds it unfocused, plotless nonsense - and both responses are equally defensible - one thing that I think can unite all opinions is that Snake, and Russell's performance of him, are the best thing in Escape from New York. We have here a marriage of character, actor, and writer/director of the first order - while I neither think that Snake is the best character in a Carpenter film, nor the best performance Russell gave for the director, it can easily and correctly be argued that we have here the most perfect, iconic movie hero in either man's career. Snake is part of a tradition of morally grey antiheroes working for good from selfish reasons, supporting the Powers That Be right a clear shudder of self-disgust at being involved in glad-handing bureaucracy - we can all rattle off examples of the form, I am sure, but not more than a small handful who surpass Snake's sheer presence and personality. In all of the annals of bitterly nihilistic tough guys, there might not be a moment that is so perfect, in my estimation, as the final-scene line "I'm too tired, maybe later" that Snake responds sourly to a man asking if Snake planned to kill him; the chilliness and indifference and the underlying hopelessness that Russell feeds into that line are astonishing. For the key to Snake isn't that he hates things; it's that he is constantly disappointed in things turning out exactly as badly as he anticipates. It is this that makes him so much more interesting and piercing than just another all-capable hunk of meat in just another action movie.

The film's episodic structure gives the film a vibe that's surprisingly close to The Odyssey (Carpenter and Castle were apparently aiming for a road movie structure, but what is The Odyssey if not the wellspring for all subsequent travelogues in Western narrative art?), and I love it for that, but it would be disingenuous to pretend that it doesn't leave the film facing in no particular direction for much of its running time. And this is simply not the best strength of the director's filmography: starting with Assault on Precinct 13, all of his finest movies, no matter what the genre, have a dreadful intensity of unflagging momentum, and even with its 22-hour ticking clock, Escape from New York very often would rather sit back - for far too long, in the case of the first 20 minutes or so, which move far too methodically for an action movie with a spare narrative hook - and enjoy the elaborate run-down beauty of the locations (Joe Alves served as production designer, but much of the movie is the unadorned foulness of St. Louis, MO and East St. Louis, IL as they existed at that time), shot in exceptionally noir-like shadows by Dean Cundey that fulfill the genre's great use of dark corners in blighted cities as shadowy pools from which the characters emerge, except when they don't, and that clotted blackness provides more of the moral heft of the film than the script would ever dare do explicitly.

And, above all, to let us watch Snake being Snake; the other characters are all colorful exaggerations, especially the Duke, lustfully played by Hayes and granted with the film's clear-cut best design choice - chandeliers on his car! - but, to pick a different literary analogue, they're all the denizens of Wonderland compared to Snake's Alice. We marvel at their ungainly weirdness, but we identify with and respond to his silently nuanced behavior around them, the one great human figure in what amounts to a fantasy otherwise.

My memory of the film is always of the characters, the general aura of the design, and the omnipresent feeling of gloom; I'm always a little bit surprised to recall that this is basically an action film, and this brings me back to that Assault on Precinct 13 comparison. Simply put, I think that Escape from New York spends much more time on its action than the action justifies; it's not as tightly blocked out as it is in that film, where the precise manipulation of limited space and our sense of time passing result in some absolutely tremendous setpieces. There's not a single setpiece in Escape from New York that I remember with any particular clarity for very long after watching it; the combined effort of the last half hour, as the movie starts to pick up a clear sense of momentum, certainly makes an impression, but nothing within that half-hour. The fight between Snake and the Duke's big man mountain Slag (Ox Baker), for example: it's a perfectly solid bit of fighting, with a suitably brutal punchline, but less than a day after watching it, I can't name any particular camera angles or cuts or grace notes of choreography that really "pop" in the scene, like I can for the showpiece fistfight in Carpenter's They Live. And it's been more than a half decade since I saw that film last.

Even with that being the case, that the film is a bit shaky in its action, there's still so much about it that I wouldn't trade for anything, even beyond Russell's one-of-a-kind antihero; this film's vision of a rundown future is absolutely terrific, for one thing, as much a parody of the trends in urban thrillers in the years preceding it as anything else, and coming out the same year as Mad Max 2 and one before Blade Runner, it avoids the incredibly common trap of simply copying one or the other of those movies. Its urban squalor looks impressively like 1981 extrapolated forward with technology used to compensate for that squalor rather than ironically counterpointing it, and if only because it came out so early in the '80s post-apocalypse cycle, Escape from New York manages to be one of the most unique of all the entries in that frequently derivative genre. Having maybe the best protagonist in all of the genre's history simply seals the deal that, imperfect as it can be, this is still something special.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: SOME WICKED THING THIS WAY COMES

Considering how much its visceral, rubbery gore effects, electronic score, the niceties of its lighting and film stock, and especially its position in the center of a maelstrom of controversy about these goddamn violence-driven horror pictures with no characterisations beyond "this guy dies then that guy dies" all mark it out as a quintessential product of the early 1980s, it's going to sound like I'm being deliberately contrary when I say that John Carpenter's The Thing is a gloriously classical piece of filmmaking. But I swear I'm not. And of course, we have now the luxury of more than three decades to reflect on a film that was initially received not only by critics but even the biggest part of horror fandom as pure nihilistic, style-over-substance drivel, and there has been a hard, long fight that has ultimately resulted in the film's canonisation, more or less, as an iconic work of modern horror. If I had tried to claim that The Thing was "classical" or anything like it in 1982, I would have been screamed out of the room, not least because in 1982 I was a baby, and babies talking about films are just about the creepiest.

But classical it is: swooning, romantic classicism. It's no secret that Carpenter has spent most of his career in the shadow of Howard Hawks, cryptically re-making or pointedly reversing that director's Rio Bravo in, like, half of his movies. And with The Thing, he went so far as to explicitly remake the Hawks production of The Thing from Another World of 1951, a film whose authorship is much, much, much too complicated to say something as blunt as "it was directed by Howard Hawks" or the opposite. But at least as much as the spirit of Hawks informs The Thing, with its hotbed of masculine games of dominance and authority, it's a film in thrall to Alfred Hitchcock as well, for The Thing is something close to an absolutely perfect exercise in how to construct a thriller. A thriller, mind you, cloaked in the most thoroughly unnerving body horror that mainstream cinema had ever seen before body horror specialist David Cronenberg decided to mount his own '50s remake a few years later with The Fly.

But it is a thriller where the film's heart lies. Adapted by Bill Lancaster from a novella by John W. Campbell (much more closely than the '51 film, which barely resembles the source material), the scenario is blunt and basic: 12 men are trapped in a remote location with the awareness that some of them are deadly killers, but nobody knows who or how many. Cue the paranoia, which Carpenter elegantly spikes by occasionally punctuating his film with a showstopper sequence of some of the very best practical effects in the more than 100-year history of cinema special effects, which the gives the film an incredibly clever structure by which a steady rise in tension is jacked up at irregular intervals. If most thrillers are like being put in a pot of water being brought to a boil over a low flame, The Thing is a film in which the dial is turned up a few notches every now and then, and left there.

I have no better demonstration of the film's genius than in noting that the very nature of its tension shifts after the first time you've seen it, arguably increasing the film's impact rather than dissipating it, and when a genre film can do that... So the thing that happens - and if you haven't seen The Thing, please do stop reading and go see it. It's maybe the only heavily gory film that I think works so well as a piece of cinema that I'd urge on even the most squeamish and gore-averse with an unsympathetic "it's a masterpiece, you're just going to have to deal with it". Those who aren't squeamish, I surely hope don't need my encouragement.

So the thing that happens, is that the film opens with Norwegians chasing a dog across the Antarctic tundra, firing at it from a helicopter, and it's a marvelously disconcerting opening; eventually they both end up dead, and a nearby American research station ends up with the dog and no sense of what the hell is happening. Carpenter keeps bringing our attention to the dog, with low camera angles favoring its height and frequent cutaways to it simply mulling around, with a little bit more sobriety than typically seen in dogs. The first time you see the movie, the dog is a synecdoche of the first-act mystery: what happened to the Norwegians? What has that dog seen, what has that dog done? The second time, when we know what the dog is up to, it's completely different, but even more tense: what is the "dog" thinking, what is it plotting? Innocuous if slightly disconcerting moments of the dog jumping up on somebody, or following them into an empty room, suddenly become nerve-wracking instances of raw terror: GET IT OFF YOU! STOP TOUCHING THE DOG! If there was nothing better in The Thing than a first act that becomes so greatly deepened in its effect and complexity on second and later viewings, I'd already be prepared to call it a great and timeless thriller. Since The Thing is, instead, a movie where nearly everything is better than everything else, because everything is just that goddamn good, I am obliged instead to call it instead one of the greatest thrillers, on top of being one of the greatest horror movies.

The film sometimes gets shade thrown its way for being too concerned with surfaces, populating its remote station with a group of men no more distinctive than you'd find in any slasher movie of the era, and that's not a complaint that can really be argued against, except to point out that it doesn't matter: the specific men involved don't matter nearly as much as the dynamics between them, and these are precisely and obviously delineated by the uniformly terrific cast, headed up by Carpenter's most reliable actor, Kurt Russell.

I might even argue, in fact that The Thing finds Carpenter for once out-Hawksing Hawks: one of that director's most important recurring themes is his breakdown and analysis of codes of American maleness, and The Thing takes that theme to an extreme end. It is among the best depictions I can name about the group dynamics of men, where the individual psychological details of those men's lives (who has a kid? who is playing two women back at home? who secretly wants to play the violin?) are less important the psychology of the group as a group. And of course, The Thing games this by putting that group dynamic, almost from the beginning in a state of heightened tension and awareness, which gives way at a certain point to outright paranoia and violent mistrust. Carpenter and Lancaster depict the backbiting, misjudgment, and rank-pulling that comes out of such a situation with supreme clarity and force.

That being said, this is still mostly an exercise in pants-shitting terror, and it's a pretty good one. Its depictions of bodies splitting apart, and bodies betraying their owners, and being forced into constant, weary awareness with death lying a split second way if you don't pay enough attention are horror of the best, purest sort: this is a movie whose depiction of the deadly, destructive, and unknown invading the safe, secure, and routine (which is my basic concept of where the borders marked "horror" reside) could not be better, owing mostly to the Lovecraftian extreme of its design of the shape-shifting, body-snatching alien force picking off the men one by one. And owing to its depiction of that force less as a monster to be fought than as a disease exploding through barely-understood vectors and perpetrating foul violence on the carrier. Indeed, with its all-male cast (the entire list of women in the film includes a female-voiced computer program snottily dismissed as a "bitch", someone seen in a videotaped game show, and a drawing of a '40s-style pin-up girl), and its depiction of something inescapable and fatal being passed between them, with the in-group tension that creates, The Thing would be an absolutely irresistible metaphor for the early years of the AIDS crisis, except it was came out too early for that to be anything but a remarkable historical coincidence.

That doesn't necessarily make it "scary" (that has never been my response to it, anyway), but it's one of the highest peaks the genre has ever reached. This is what happens when you give a genius the right mixture of budget and freedom to explore, though I am sure that Universal, who took a bath on the film in 1982, wouldn't necessarily agree with me. What it is, though, is sublimely tense: doling out info just enough that we can see the shape of the next 10 or 15 minutes, but not the details, and letting us sit and wait in agony while the not-quite-predictable shock moment happens - there's a blood-testing scene that's paced with deliberately glacial emphasis, clicking from one close-up to the next with a jagged rhythm (Todd Ramsay's editing is pretty terrific throughout but it especially makes this scene), until you can barely stand it, and then it blows up when we're looking the other way. It's simply one of the great sequences in any thriller made since 1980.

And then we have Ennio Morricone's score, a very uncharacteristic piece of thumping, bass-heavy menace. It feels like one of Carpenter's own compositions in a lot of ways, and it adds to the film a tense, driving heartbeat that becomes terribly agitating as it moves on. And also - I'm cramming stuff in at this point, because with movies like The Thing, you don't run out of things to say, just space to say it in - there's Dean Cundey's brilliant Panavision cinematography, with its uncanny color-tinged lighting (Russell is introduced with a sickly green cast over half his face), its fearless use of negative space, and moments that capture the bleak blankness of the tundra as well as anything in cinema's greatest movie about how snow looks, Fargo. Like this beauty, our first establishing shot of the research station in the whole film, and one that as much as says "oh, and in case you were wondering, this film shall be about the raw hell of isolation and being trapped with your fate".

There's a tendency even among the film's boosters to dismiss The Thing as "just a really great horror/thriller". Which it is. Also, Singin' in the Rain is just a really great musical romcom. Perfection is perfection, wherever you find it. And The Thing? Oh my yes, it's perfect.

Body Count: 11, plus a Norwegian already dead when we see him, plus the corpse of a Thing, plus three dogs (onscreen) and several more (offscreen), plus the dog form of a Thing, which doesn't count, but it's the bloodiest moment in the film and it would feel wrong not to mention it. Also a number of individual Things that would be hard to quantify. And the survivors aren't looking in too good of a shape as things end...

TL;DR Body Count: All of them.

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