John Carpenter’s 1981 lunacy-fest, Escape From New York, is the perfect encapsulation of the narrative and visual language constant throughout his entire directorial career. Serving the role of a moviegoer’s Rosetta Stone, this film is by no means Carpenter’s best work, but rather a key to understanding what’s at the beating heart of any one of his vastly disparate films.
Location is of vital importance in a Carpenter film. There are a couple of reasons why, the simplest being that a fixed location is a great tool for creating fear and claustrophobia, which lend themselves to the at-least-horror-adjacent films that he is known for making. I believe that the second reason for Carpenter’s love of a canned setting is even more useful for understanding his auteurial philosophy: John Carpenter is enamored with westerns. “There was something about that movie (Rio Bravo, 1959) that was like home and I can’t really explain it.” (Nashawaty, p. 76) Ever since his first exposure to the genre’s greats in his childhood, the very art of cinema and the western became interlinked in his mind, and while his films tend to have a decidedly more modern setting, it’s all just camouflage for cowboys, Indians, and frontier communities. It is the idea of ‘the community’ that Carpenter harnesses in Hawksian fashion; through his lens, communities are powerful narrative devices, clearly delineating insiders and outsiders. This makes it much easier to establish conflict, as there is already a degree of tension implicit in the setting.
Escape From New York is an interesting case of Carpenter subverting his familiar ‘community structure’ without truly abandoning it. Much of the scaffolding is unchanged in the sense that the film centers around an intrusion into an isolated community, except this time the roles are reversed. We are used to the antagonists of his films—whether that be a masked killer, a horde of ghostly pirates, or “Bomb Number 20,”—being the ones that intrude into the insulated world of our protagonists, but this time around, the roles are complicated beyond being simply reversed. We see this reversal in the mission of our hero, Kurt Russell’s “Snake Plissken.” He must infiltrate the prison colony that is Manhattan (which is this film’s central community space), rescue the president, and then exfiltrate or else lose his life to the two explosive implants buried in his neck. It’s a strong contender for the most overtly ‘action-movie’ plot in Carpenter’s collection, and the reversal of the outsider status quo is interesting as is, but there’s one more layer. While Snake is literally an outsider, invading the central community, he—as a criminal who at the start of the film was about to begin his sentence on Manhattan island—perhaps remains an insider after all. Or maybe, in keeping with his character, he’s simply an outsider everywhere.
While an isolated community is the common staging ground of John Carpenter’s work, these movies would lack a great deal of punch if it weren’t for the recurring motif of untrustworthy authority figures. Here we see Carpenter’s politics show their influence on his stories. And, while what some interpret as the pro-celibacy narrative of Halloween, or the prevalence of classically macho and brooding male leads, may lead one to see his films in a conservative light, I think that what’s at play here isn’t right-wing morality politics, but rather lighthearted libertarianism. This philosophy starts and ends with freedom, so it’s easy to see how Carpenter’s ideals can overlap with it. Most fittingly, the narrative structure of a frontier community under siege pays homage to the ultimate libertarian fantasy of the American frontier, while also providing the perfect conditions for the protagonists to stand their ground, grab hold of their bootstraps, and lift themselves out of danger when lazy and corruptible authority figures fail them. To clarify, I don’t think that Carpenter’s and Ronald Reagan’s ideas of libertarianism are at all the same; in the case of these movies the politics exist either as a byproduct of the full-tilt plot, or are needed to orchestrate it (like in the case of Assault on Precinct 13, where the central conflict can only be achieved by writing the municipal police force as shiftless and sluggish.)
Although a carpenter of one sort, John Carpenter by no means crafts his films with the precision and polish of a mortise and tenon. Halloween, which is surprisingly one of his cleanest productions despite its pocket-lint budget, tight schedule, and scrappy crew of volunteers, still showcases a bit of the campiness and low-budget charm that I firmly believe are integral parts of his films. Going off of what we’ve watched in class, while The Fog comes close, it’s Escape From New York that takes the title for the most overt camp. But campiness in this case isn’t meant as a derogatory mark against his films, or a dig at the constrained budget. To me it’s a crucial part of what makes Carpenter’s films great in the first place. When done wrong—which is to say, done without the company of real artistic vision and passion—the cheese-ball dialogue, cliche narrative, and cartoony worldbuilding of Escape From New York would come across as stilted and amateurish. This is the nature of camp; on its own it is neither good nor bad, though it can perhaps result in unavoidable cheesy moments. But when served up alongside a heartfelt production, the result is as charming and far more sincere than the highest-budget blockbuster.
Earlier in this review I referred to John Carpenter as an auteur, but that’s really not the right label for him. Despite the great deal of personal flavor and artistic license present in his films, I think he would agree that, from the grass-roots production of Halloween to the insistence on casting Kurt Russell rather than someone more marketable, it’s the people, not the polish, that make the result worth it.
