the groundhog day project

Escape from New York didn't teach me anything about "white flight", of course . Its premise builds on the concept but the plot doesn't really play with it. Notably in how we never see what life is like for those outside the prison. In 1968, the Kerner Report warned, "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal" and "cities will have Negro majorities by 1985 and the suburbs ringing them will remain largely all white unless there are major changes in Negro fertility rates, in migration settlement patterns or public policy" and argued, "The alternative is not blind repression or capitulation to lawlessness. It is the realization of common opportunities for all within a single society." This entry will not all be so dense and full of historical quotes, but it will, as feels inevitable when spending time with Escape from New York , be political. I mean, of course someone like The Duke would rise up ...

Once Escape from New York 's plot actually gets moving, there isn't that much that actually happens. Snake (Kurt Russell) meets Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine), Cabbie takes Snake to Brain (Harry Dean Stanton). Duke (Isaac Hayes) shows up. Snake, Cabbie, Brain, and Maggie (Adrienne Barbeau) flee, get to Duke's and find the president (Donald Pleasance) but Snake is captured and forced to fight Slag (Ox Baker). They all make a run for Snake's glider on top of the World Trade Center, then head for the Queensboro Bridge to get off the island. People die, Snake and the president get away. The end. Basically. There isn't much to say about the plot as it is. There's room for strange interpretations of meaning, but with John Carpenter behind the film, it feels like it would be me inventing meaning where he put none. As far as implicit meaning, Escape from New York feels like a response to gang violence in New York in the 1970s, an outlandish extension of the reality, people ...

A bit of a cheat, here. Technically, Escape from New York is not a fixture of my childhood the way (most of) these movies have been in this deconstruction. That is, it is not a film that I watched a lot when I was particularly young. I don't think I even saw it when it was new. I did see it on tv or cable or video when I was still quite young, but it really only became a fixture, in terms of repetition, when I was a teen. Still, it makes the list. And the reason is simple: parts of this film stuck with me. I'm saying this as the movie begins, and it has been several years probably since I last watched this thing, so I'm not 100% sure this is even the movie I'm remembering remembering. Some ugly, mutant-looking guy attacked Snake--that was a scene that stuck with me. Like, for years, I remembered one particular detail of the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland before I went on it again and fixed the rest of it in my memory; it was the wood door bending, and I had nig...