Matt Bell, esteemed academic here at ASU and dear friend of the center, shared his thoughts on the future presented in John Carpenter’s Escape from New York . Read his speech below!
Escape from New York begins by laying out an unlikely three-part scenario: by 1997,
the island of Manhattan has been turned into a vast maximum-security prison where the prisoners are left to govern themselves; an unscrupulous president is taken prisoner inside this walled “jungle” after Air Force One is hijacked and deliberately crashed; the only way anyone can think of to save the president is to send in a former Special Forces commando turned federal prisoner Snake Plissken, whose loyalty is bought by injecting bombs into his bloodstream that are set to go off in 24 hours if we doesn’t complete his mission.
Could any of this happen in any plausible future? Absolutely not. Is it a perfect scenari
for a 1981 science fiction movie? Absolutely yes.
Escape from New York was at the time director John Carpenter’s most expensive movie to date, costing $6 million dollars to make. It was more money than Carpenter had ever been given by a studio and yet not nearly enough cash. As a result, the final film has an effect I often find in seventies and eighties sci-fi and fantasy, namely that you can almost imagine being able to make the movie yourself, if you could only gather the right friends and a borrowed video camera. It’s not something you feel when watching a modern 200-million dollar-plus blockbuster! But here, as in so much early sci-fi, there’s something ever-so-slightly cosplay-ish that I think begins in the budget but emerges through the ways the filmmakers found to solve the money problem, as well as how much creative control Carpenter gave to his cast and crew. By virtue of its limitations, the film invites you in as co-creator, co-visionary. You’re going to have to fill in some of the blanks yourself.
A lot of the movie’s pleasure stems from Kurt Russell’s incredibly earnest portrayal of
the brilliantly named Snake Plissken. Russell was fresh off a spate of Disney movies
and trying to reboot himself as an action star; he said his character was “a mercenary”
with Clint Eastwood’s voice whose “style of fighting is a combination of Bruce Lee, The
Exterminator, and Darth Vader,” which sounds like a character a 12-year-old boy would
design, an amalgation of recent badasses with an eyepatch, which was also Russell’s
idea. If art is about making choices, Kurt Russell certainly made some here, and the
movie wouldn’t be nearly as good without them.
For $6 million dollars, it turns out they won’t let you destroy actual Manhattan to film a
movie in the ruins; in the pre-CGI world of 1980, this means you have to find some
already ruined cityscape to serve as a stand-in. Escape from New York’s devastated
streets are mostly East St. Louis, which had experienced a devastating fire four years
earlier but hadn’t yet been rebuilt; Carpenter even got the city to shut off the local
electricity every night during filming. The filmmakers also bought a bridge—an entire
bridge!—from the city for $1, so that the city wouldn’t have to be liable for anything that
went wrong during a car chase sequence, then sold it back to the city for another dollar
afterward. It’s an insane but ingenious solution, one it’s hard to imagine any city
government agreeing to today.
Another thing you can’t afford in 1980 on this budget is any CGI. You’ll see some
wireframe shots in the movie that look computer-generated, but they’re actually the NYC model built for the movie wrapped in reflective tape and filmed under black light. Again, this is the kind of movie magic you can make at home. When I see these “graphics,” I feel a kind of nostalgia, but not for anything that was ever real.
I was only a year old when Escape from New York released, so missed it in the
theaters; I really only became aware of its existence while browsing video rental stores
in the mid-nineties, around the time the sequel, Escape from L.A. came out. I don’t think I saw either movie back then, but I’ve always remembered their evocative posters: whether the movies were any good or not, I knew they contained a world I was
interested in exploring. I wasn’t the only one who felt this way, and I’d argue the movie’s
legacy is primarily in the arguably better science fiction it inspired. The writer Willam
Gibson credits a throwaway line in the opening scenes with helping him understand how to create worlds through implication instead of exposition: the recent Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty game opens with a presidential escape pod landing in a dangerous part of a futuristic city, as Escape from New York does, and then tasks the player with the president’s rescue. Most famously, Hideo Kojima based his character design for his Metal Gear games on Russell’s character, naming him Snake, giving him an eyepatch, and in later games having him appear under the alias “Pliskin.”
Escape from New York might be a rare case of the parts being greater than the whole; it probably isn’t the best science fiction movie of all time, and it didn’t predict our future
very well, but it did help create the future of science fiction. Maybe you’ll find something
in it tonight that makes you want to create too. Or maybe you’ll just smile and buckle in
for the ride the second you hear its perfect premise spoken aloud: “Snake, you go in,
find the President, bring him out in 24 hours, and you’re a free man.”
What could go wrong?
This film was introduced by Matt Bell! Matt is a Professor of English and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, Orion, and many other publications. Visit his website for more details!