Heard You Were Dead

This is a feature excerpt from Unwinnable Monthly #188. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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Power and authority push downward. From on high, it flows down, as piss in a drain. In the year 1988, Manhattan Island was entirely walled off from the rest of the United States of America and turned into a maximum-security prison. There is just one rule, once you go in, you don’t come out. That is, until one night in 1997 when a plane on its way to Hartford crashed landed in the city. There was one survivor, the President of the United States.

John Carpenter’s Escape from New York is terrifying distillation of the effects of power and authoritarianism. At its core, it is a story about how the most capable man (Snake Plissken) is sent to rescue the nominally most powerful man in the world (President Harker). Nominally is perhaps the most important word there. Being the President of the United States holds no power inside the prison city, and maybe not even in the rest of the world.

Scene to scene, the movie pivots around a central question “who has who over a barrel.” When we first meet Plissken he’s in the custody of United States Police Force on his way to be dropped off in. When the USPF goes to try to rescue the President they’re told that despite their walls, their mines, their helicopters, and their guns, they must leave or the President will be killed.  Soon after, Police Commissioner Hauk offers Snake a deal, get the President and his cassette tape out and be pardoned. Except there’s the extra motivation that Snake is implanted with an explosive that will only be deactivated on successful completion of his mission.

Within minutes the movie shows us that those holding power, however temporarily, use it to assert a kind of authority.

Except even the President is subject to this power structure. Hauk is clear with Snake that the country is at war and the President is crucial to a plan to end it, if and only if Snake gets him out in 24 hours. What happens then? Will the President be abandoned? Will the USPF roll in with shock and awe despite knowing that the President will likely die? Either way, the President is at least somewhat expendable after those 24 hours. Power pushes down on those beneath it. There’s still a war to be won.

When Snake enters the city, he’s largely left to skulk around as he sees fit. He fights and kills when he needs to, it’s not gratuitous. There’s no joy in it. Snake is the agent of state power but he is not a part of it. He left that life after Leningrad when the state threw him to the wolves. The average denizens of New York aren’t the Soviets, however. They’re just people.

We see this agentic quality again with Brain. Brain has carved out a kind of power because he is the sole supplier of gasoline. But Brain’s status is tenuous. Everything in New York worth owning falls under the Duke, A-Number-1. This includes Brain. When Brain wants access to the President, he says it’s in the name of the Duke. When Brain wants to go inside a train car he invokes the name of the Duke. Brain knows he is not his own man; he’s a kept tool who will remain kept so long as he is useful and The Duke does not let him forget this.

Slag too is an agent of this hierarchical power. The Duke says he is to kill Snake of the enjoyment of the masses. The government sent this best to take back the President and now the Duke sends his mightiest to kill Snake for the enjoyment of the masses. The Duke could have just shot the wounded Snake. He could have thrown him from a skyscraper. He could have killed him any number of ways but power pushes down. He sent someone else to do it.

The Duke is also quick to remind Harker that while one of them is a prisoner and one of them is the President, the Duke is A-Number-1 in New York. President Harker dances when the Duke tells him to. He speaks when he tells him too. The Duke needs the President for his plans and yet he has no problem using him as target practice. Maybe he’s just that good of a shot. Or maybe it doesn’t matter to him too much because power pushes down and crushes everything beneath it. When you’re A-Number-1 within the walls, maybe leaving isn’t that important.

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David Shimomura is the editor in chief of Unwinnable. Follow him on Instagram and Bluesky.