by Only few filmmakers have received as little praise for their movies as John Carpenter, given how ingenious they are in their own regard. Paul Schrader comes to mind, though Schrader has been fortunate enough to collaborate with Martin Scorsese and thus was accepted to a chosen circle of those that made the classics, whereas John Carpenter has been rebuffed by the gatekeeper. Whoever that gatekeeper is doubtlessly failed not acknowledge the qualities that made Carpenter’s films more than just mainstream material to enjoy and forget. There’s a prevalent and unique quality in how he approaches filmmaking. The Fog has this quality, just like Christine and even Memoirs of an Invisible Man, starring Chevy Chase in arguably his best performance.
Even though John Carpenter made great films in his personal style, down to composing the score by himself regularly, there’s only one of his films that withstood the tests of time and pop cultural fandom: Escape from New York. The film’s premise was as ludicrous as it was ingenious, but it was Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken that left a mark on pop culture deep enough to stay for decades, maybe even for good. Little is known about Snake, and that exactly is his asset. When we watch him fighting his way through a New York City turned into the biggest prison the world has ever seen and filled right up to the brim with all kinds of thugs and cutthroats, we have no clue what Snake is going to do next. But we suspect it’s going to be awesome.
Frankly, Escape from L.A. is not as much as sequel as it is a remake of the original film. Shifting the setting from New York City to Los Angeles is a sign of the times when gentrification tamed New York and at the same time race riots threatened to tear Los Angeles apart. A sailplane turns into a submarine, the president is suddenly the President’s daughter, but in general, the two plots are very interchangeable. But plot is nothing more than a means to an end. What really distinguishes these two films is how Carpenter integrated social criticism. The downfall of “western civilization” that is only hinted in the first film becomes evident in the second. Societies fail, democracy fails, capitalism, humanity. What we see is hardly more than a melting pot that was overheated until it burst. Snake Plissken is a gunslinger initially, almost a 20th century western stock character that rides into town, empties his six-shooter, then rides out of town again, maybe with a couple of dollars in his pockets. Only before the credits roll we learn who he really is – and what John Carpenter thinks of a narcissistic society that is obsessed with soulless technology, rapacious and directionless. Here, Escape from L .A. wonderfully foreshadows issues that only turned into conflicts some twenty years later.
I’m going to Hollywood…
Snake Plissken
All of this is entertaining and exciting, and social commentary in a mainstream action film from the 90’s is certainly hard to come by. But other than its predecessor, Escape from L.A. simply pushes things too far to enjoy. When Snake is compelled to win an unfair game of basketball at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum instead of a boxing fight spiced with nasty weapons such as a baseball bat with nine-inch nails drive through the barrel, and wins on the sounding horn by a moonshot that looks simply too effortless to be enjoyed, Plissken becomes too large for life rather than larger than life. The same applies to a Snake using a glider and a machine gun to fight the opposition. It is too cool, too absurd to be interesting. After all, the tight-lipped gunslinger’s appeal lay in the fact that we didn’t know him but loved his down-to-earth approach to finishing the bad guys off. Exactly what Snake Plissken did in New York and failed to do in L.A.
In the end, it’s not so much the question which of the two sides of the coin is better or more skillfully made. It’s why one is a classic while the other one is forgotten and sometimes even referred to as trash. Both films have the same ingredients, and given all the cultural undertones and implications, Escape from L.A. definitely had what it takes to make a classic. It’s solely this overdose of everything that didn’t really make it bad, only worse than Escape from New York. Snake is still an extremely influential character, not only in film and video game history but beyond, and it’s a pleasure listening to him talking trash and giving everyone lip and watching him smoke cigarettes and depose of scumbags that have no value to him. But when the credits roll and you try to determine whether or not Snake was right depressing that button on the little, digital doomsday device, you might be wishing that John Carpenter did a little less instead of taking Escape from New York for a ride until the wheels came off fifteen years later.
