CONTAINS MULTIPLE SPOILERS
John Carpenter’s Escape from L.A. opens, just as its predecessor Escape from New York, with a detailed description of how “crime and immorality” have ravaged the city and the great earthquake of 2000 separated Los Angeles from the rest of the country. The President of the United States (Cliff Robertson), an extreme holy roller, would probably describe it as an act of God, as it made L.A. the perfect place to send all of the people he sees as undesirables. Or more specifically, “prostitutes, atheists, and runaways” (it gave me the chills to see a hallway full of children about to be deported and not think about the countless news stories regarding kids separated from their parents with no hope of being reunited). If you don’t want to end up in L.A., the alternative is to repent your sins to a minister and get the electric chair. These sins could include smoking, drinking, drugs, guns, foul language, red meat, or women (unless married. A misogynist president…who would have guessed?). We also learn that the U.S. constitution has been amended to give the president a “lifetime term” and that the capital has been moved to the president’s hometown of Lynchburg, Virginia (just hearing the word “lynch” strikes a nerve). Since L.A. is considered “unfit” for the new moral United States, a Great Wall has even been constructed so once a person is deported, they can never return. It bears noting that Escape from L.A. was released in 1996 but takes place in 2013. Any of this sounding eerily familiar yet?
The first glimpse we get of our anti-hero, Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), is a silhouette framed to make it look as if he’s towering over a group of people waiting to be deported. The shot deceptively suggests Plissken will be their savior, though not in the way we might expect. Just like in the first Escape, Plissken is pulled out of prison by the government to complete a time sensitive mission, this one involving the retrieval of a black box holding a device that can cause power to shut down anywhere in the world. The president’s daughter, ironically named Utopia (A.J. Langer), has stolen the box and taken it to L.A. where it’s fallen into the hands of gang leader Cuervo Jones (George Corraface), who’s a dead ringer for Che Guevara. Like before, Plissken is injected with a virus that will kill him if he doesn’t complete the mission by the designated time frame (the symptoms of the virus include a cough, fever, headache, and gets downplayed by the president like it’s no big deal).
Aside from the difference in missions, viewers will observe that Escape from L.A. is the exact same structurally as the previous movie and will continue to follow suit for the most part. But this is not simply Carpenter trying to remake the same movie with a bigger budget and updated politics (though the latter does play a crucial role in the effectiveness of the picture). Instead, he used this sequel as an opportunity to satirize big budget movies and the state of Hollywood itself. Sequels by their very nature go bigger, and Carpenter took his largest budget to date ($50 million) and filled the screen with some of the most intentionally campy CGI yet to be seen. Even though this was still relatively early in the days of digital effects, movies like the same summer’s Independence Day showed that the capability was there to make them look smooth and sleek. Carpenter seemed to be saying he was not thrilled with the new direction of blockbuster movies, which is most evident once Plissken begins his journey to L.A. in a submarine and is almost gobbled up by a digital shark as he dodges the sunken Universal Studios sign. In other words, the magic of movies is fading away and technology is making them look too fake. If aliens can blow up the White House than why not have Plissken go surfing with Peter Fonda? To go a step further, think back to how gritty New York looked in the earlier movie and how overly glossy Los Angeles is here…Carpenter is hammering home not only the differences in where his movies are set, but how much time has changed for him as a filmmaker.
Once Plissken gets to L.A., it doesn’t take long to realize that most of the people sent there are Latino or Asian. The movie is unflinching in showing how these two groups are stereotyped in American movies as gangbangers and thugs, wisely never taking it over the top. The first woman (Valeria Golino) Plissken encounters was deported for being Muslim and exclaims, “the other side of the wall…that’s the prison.” At least in L.A., they have choices, even if a violent death awaits around every corner. Shortly after meeting, they’re kidnapped and taken to the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills (Bruce Campbell, because fuck yeah!), an expert in conducting “surgical failures” and collecting fresh body parts for his botched experiments. The sequence is spectacularly bizarre and darkly hilarious, commenting on Beverly Hills’s obsession with how one plastic surgery is never enough (echoes of Brazil come to mind). The only other woman Plissken meets, named Hershe (the great Pam Grier), happens to be black and transgender (she and Plissken are old partners). The character could have been played for cheap laughs and gets close when Plissken reaches under her skirt to see if she’s still, ahem, equipped, but the moment to me added an unexpected level of homoeroticism. I say this because up until now (and this includes both movies), we’ve never known Plissken to show any interest in anyone but himself, sexually or otherwise, and he seems so betrayed by how his relationship ended with Hershe that maybe there was something unspoken between them.
Despite the more polished nature of Escape from L.A., Carpenter still fully embraces his western roots. Plissken’s outfit this time dresses him fully in black, complete with a duster jacket and a gun on each hip. The score often feels like it was taken right out of a Howard Hawks movie, specifically during a sequence where Plissken does a fake-out draw against a group of banditos. Even L.A. has the colorless, dry look we would associate with the genre, best seen in the incredible high angle shot of our anti-hero walking into the remains of the city for the first time and continuing as it tracks him through the streets. Just as in New York, everyone recognizes Plissken (“he used to be a gunfighter”) and wants him on their side, though all that matters to him is beating the countdown clock so he doesn’t die (I would imagine Plissken would rather get gunned down than taken out by a virus created by bureaucrats). The western anti-hero often had a semi untrustworthy adversary, so Plissken gets saddled with Map to the Stars Eddie (Steve Buscemi, because who else?), the kind of slimy two-face ready to serve whoever happens to have the upper hand. Neither Cuervo nor Plissken ever fully trusts him, and it’s fitting that Eddie is the one who kills Cuervo since he’s the antithesis of everything Plissken represents (or doesn’t).
Carpenter has always been ahead of the game when it comes to predicting politics, and it’s no stretch to proclaim that Escape from L.A. is the most accurate assessment of the future he has yet to achieve. If what we learn about the president during the opening of the picture isn’t enough to convince you, look no further than his behavior as the conclusion approaches. First, we see him hiding under a table and not long after, he yells in a panic that it’s time to “go to my quarters! Got to pray!” Upon hearing that, his right-hand man (Stacy Keach) advises, “Go with him. Make sure he doesn’t do anything crazy.” This same president that felt it was okay to control how other people live and deport those who don’t share his mode of thinking is shown pathetically clutching a Bible not long before he orders the execution of his own daughter. Giving himself a lifetime term as president has made him believe he’s godlike, though the truth of his power is revealed once Plissken pulls his ultimate act of rebellion at the picture’s end.
Escape from L.A. climaxes with Plissken’s return from his mission, black box and Utopia in tow (though he was told to leave her behind). Instead of giving the president the real black box, which is going to be used to shut down “the enemy” of Mexico and Cuba, Plissken pulls a switcheroo and keeps the box for himself, enters “the world code” (which is 666), and prepares to push a button that will “set us back 500 years.” The American way of life and the country’s history will be completely erased (though the president shows no concern for how it will affect the rest of the world). Carpenter provides a sly visual as to why this won’t be such a bad thing when Plissken picks up a pack of American Spirit cigarettes and we see that the box art no longer shows a Native American, but the colors of the flag. Once the earth’s power has been shut down, Plissken finally gets a smoke, and as he’s about to blow out the match, he takes a moment to look directly at us, the offenders, the ones who have made the United States into what it is today. In other words, it’s our fault the reset button needed to be pushed, and even if we might be tempted to say Plissken is as corrupt as we are, lest not forget he’s a war hero who served his country and has seen its hypocrisy first hand. In addition to that, he’s never dishonest about who he is or what his intentions are, even if they are self-serving. He’s the ideal American anti-hero…white, male, and apolitical, as he knows the system sucks regardless of who’s in charged. So why should anyone be? The final line in the movie, said by Plissken, once the screen has faded to black is “Welcome to the human race,” and after what we’ve just experienced it becomes clear the statement has a double meaning. Oh, how I wish Carpenter had been able to make Escape from Earth, though in a way it’s fitting the adventures of Snake Plissken ended here.
Escape from L.A. was John Carpenter’s giant middle finger to big budget filmmaking, for after this he would only direct three more (modestly priced) features. It was clear from Memoirs of an Invisible Man that he was perfectly capable of using visual effects…the ones in the movie are still quite remarkable today. But given the terrible experience Carpenter had making Invisible Man (it’s the only movie in his filmography post Halloween without his name over the title), it’s as if he knew the business was shifting in a way that did not support how he made movies. As I mentioned earlier, I think the intentionally cheesy CGI of Escape from L.A. (and later, Ghosts of Mars) proves that. And while I do enjoy his latter projects, for me Escape from L.A. is the last truly great John Carpenter movie: funny, exciting, mercilessly satirical, and fiercely political. When it was released, as was the case with many Carpenter movies, it was a box office disappointment. And like those other movies that slipped through the cracks when they were released, Escape from L.A. has patiently awaited its rediscovery. As Carpenter himself put it in 2015: “People didn’t want to see Escape that time, but they really didn’t want to see The Thing. You just wait. You’ve got to give me a little while. People will say, you know, what was wrong with me?” I am thrilled to say I am one of those people.
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