Nearly 40 years after it was first released, John Carpenter’s Escape From New York (1981) is no longer a warning of a coming dystopian future. Instead, it’s a vision of a bombed-out dystopian past that has become our present.
But while Escape is off in some details, its overall vision is disquietingly on point. Anticipating 9/11, the story is built around a plane crash in New York that precipitates a global crisis. The terrorists who down Air Force One in Escape are domestic radicals rather than Al-Qaeda operatives, but their message is not so different. Like their future real-world counterparts, they target New York because it’s a symbol of American power and American exploitation. Their goal is to trap the President in his own prison, just as the 9/11 attackers trapped a different president in his own global war.
New York was not cordoned off to protect good people, or preserve the peace. It was cordoned off to create a nightmare hellscape, the better to indulge in those piquant emotions of hatred, anger, fear, and loathing. Back in 1981, when Reagan was suggesting we make America great again, Carpenter knew that walls aren’t intended to keep us safe. They’re meant to create and define an enemy: immigrants, Black people, immoral urbanites, liberals, journalists. Prisons in Escape don’t contain or limit violence. They justify it, glorify it, and make it proliferate. Snake Plissken got out of New York. But the rest of us are still in his bleak prison, which we call the land of the free. v
Directed by John Carpenter. 99 min. Fri 7/5-Thu 7/11. Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport, 773-871-6604, musicboxtheatre.com, $11.
