Carpenter's Tools: Escape from L.A.

[Note: This is a stupefyingly belated entry in my John Carpenter retrospective, which I intended to go all the way through his canon but could find scant enthusiasm to continue past In the Mouth of Madness, Carpenter's last triumph before a series of mediocre-to-awful films leading up to his present condition. But I am curious to see if I can find redeeming qualities in his late-period work, and finishing his whole filmography will make writing about The Ward that much easier when the time comes. So, at last, I resume my retrospective, some two unnecessary years in the making, with Escape from L.A.]

By 1996, prospects had so soured for John Carpenter that he was reduced to making the sequel to one of his finest features, Escape from New York. Naturally, after the gradual "Disney terraforming" of New York that started in the '90s, the Big Apple no longer held the same reputation it did at the start of the '80s when one suspected that Carpenter did not even need to build sets to film in the urban decay he portrayed. In the mid-90s, Los Angeles, home of uncontrollable gang crime and pollution, became the place to be for hellish futuristic cities. Demolition Man presented an L.A. consumed in flames before an ultra-liberal thought police took over and bleached the place, and Escape from L.A. presents a Los Angeles separated from the mainland by a massive earthquake, leading to a theocratic takeover that condemns L.A. Island to the mythic realm of Sodom and Gomorrah. Where neo-hippie pacifism babied up the city in Stallone's action vehicle, Carpenter's film is the last reflection of his disgust with modern conservatism and its incorporation of the religious right into its framework. Los Angeles, it seems, can never win.


Where that political slant might have made the film somewhat clever, however, it instead ensures that Escape from L.A. feels not only like a retread of its predecessor but of Carpenter's late-'80s work that took square aim at Reagan, most obviously with They Live. Opening with an expository voiceover by a computerized female voice that never shows up again in the film, Escape from L.A. wastes minutes of time by going over extraneous details in the flat reading, undercutting the clever construction of the earthquake hitting Los Angeles with dull, fictional facts and figures that take away from the power of the visuals, which are the high point of otherwise laughable special effects.

And when the action finally begins and characters on-screen begin speaking, we must endure even more background as Snake Plissken arrives in chains at the transfer center to Los Angeles island, where he is to be banished with all the other undesirables. One of the military commanders, Malloy (Stacy Keach) essentially summarizes the plot of Escape from New York and pads out that exposition with tidbits of Snake's life before and after the events of that film. At last, the actual narrative comes to the fore when Malloy plays a hologram recording of the theocratic president's daughter, Utopia, seduced and brainwashed by a Peruvian terrorist named Cuervo Jones, stealing codes for a weaponized satellite system to use against her father and the corrupt United States. The president (Cliff Robertson) wants Snake to infiltrate Los Angeles, retrieve the black box and kill his daughter for treason. Oh, and to make sure Snake obeys, the president injects him with a lethal virus that will kill him in 10 hours unless he gets some antidote that instantly cures him. God, at least the neck bombs kind of made sense.

Sequels deserve to be weighed on their own terms, but how can I step back and evaluate solely what is on the screen before me when everything so blatantly recalls Escape from New York? Snake has to retrieve a MacGuffin and he is given a narrow timeframe in which to do it. And seriously, why do these people keep giving him only a few hours? At least in the first film it coincided with the ransom countdown given for the captured president; here it's just because, and the virus weakens him as time elapses. Way to ensure mission success, Mr. President. Everyone in the prison colony continues to have that double-take recognition of Snake, including saying "I thought you'd be taller" when they confirm it's him.

The key difference between L.A. and New York, and the chief indication that Carpenter still had some cleverness left in him, is in the contrast of aesthetics. While the effects themselves pale in comparison to the brilliant, moody design of seedy decay in the previous film (which looked like what Travis Bickle must have seen in his nightmares), Carpenter's conception of L.A. viciously tears down the city's own issues. The project stagnated in the early-'90s, but in the wake of the '94 quake and the Rodney King riots, Carpenter's farcical view of L.A. tearing itself apart seismically and socially no longer seemed so far-fetched. Shots of cars tearing around streets essentially performing drive-bys on each other (an impossibility in New York, where Hunter S. Thompson said one could not even park, much less drive) are on-the-nose, as is the gratuitous incorporation of landmarks, which the last film largely minimized with exceptions.

But the real delight is in Carpenter's view of the people of L.A., an assortment of niks (peace, beat and freak), punks, gang members all united by the same delusion that exists even after Hollywood sunk into the sea. One wonders if the moral majority president even had to ship anyone into the city to fill it with those unwanted in an uptight, Christian country. Where Carpenter's vision of New York was a slimy underground of sewer rats-turned-human who slunk around corners like greasy shadows, everyone in L.A. has that terminal openness. Snake always descended in New York; here everything is above ground, save for a brief spell in a sewer. At one point, Snake gets captured by organ harvesters controlled by a sort-of plastic surgeon version of Josef Mengele, played by Bruce Campbell (who hilariously has done fake surgery to make his own chin even larger). The cult the man operates is all fish lips and silicone breasts, and in some cases you have to squint to make sure it's just movie makeup on these people.

Sadly, these fleeting moments of wit pass by too quickly, leaving the audience with a series of disconnected, poorly executed action sequences that fail to elicit any unified mood. Carpenter was one of the preeminent atmospheric directors of his day, capable of maintaining a sense of dread from the start of Assault on Precinct 13 pretty much through the end of The Thing. Each sequence just happens, usually without justification and invariably involving stunts so ridiculous one can only react to Carpenter's retrospective view that the script was "too campy" with a "Ya think?"

A CGI sequence of Snake's submersible careening around the "San Fernando Sea" lacks the genuinely fun camp of Snake's glide into New York and instead drags on far too long with lackluster effects. A chase sequence involving Plissken speeding after Cuervo's motorcade on a motorcycle lacks energy and is incoherent despite Carpenter's trademark use of longer, steadier takes. A climactic moment places Snake before a screaming mob in a modern day coliseum, where he can ensure his survival not by fighting but...scoring a basketball trick from the other end of the court. I haven't even mentioned the hang-gliding scene. I will, however, talk about the surfing. If Carpenter's goal with his script was to play up all the various inanities of Los Angeles, he might have succeeded, but when he executes sequences like Snake Plissken surfing fast enough to keep up with a speeding car, he overplays his hand and becomes guilty of the excess and stupidity he portrays in his Hollywood stereotypes.

Some moments amused me. Seeing Snake tied up in the background struggling to get free as Cuervo patches in a video feed to the president to taunt him is hilarious, and some of the lines are so stilted that they actually work as comedy instead of weighing down the narrative. When the president offers his ultimatum to Snake, he tells the anti-hero that his freedom is on the line. Russell, jaw clenched around a piece of scenery, growls "That died in America a long time ago!" Carpenter at least had the good sense to make excellent use of Steve Buscemi, who plays the waterlogged remnant of Hollywood's old soul: a huckster who sells post-apocalyptic "star maps," orchestrates captures and always manages to slime his way out of trouble like any good agent, Eddie lets Buscemi run that big-talkin' motormouth of his, even saving him from death a few times just so he can stick around a bit longer.

Every so often, we even get a glimpse of Carpenter's old sense of workman detail. He lights and blocks Russell in an early scene so his shadow breaks along both adjoining walls instead of just one, and when physical objects such as wrecked cars and grimy canvas tents appear for Carpenter to work around, the director flirts with his old atmospheric tone and keen eye for mise-en-scéne.

But it's all for naught. Characters repeatedly use the line "The more things change, the more they stay the same," but the same is true for Escape from L.A. itself. It plays around with the change in setting but ultimately hedges so closely to the original plot that the differences amount to nothing more than tattered, dusty window dressing. Russell purportedly fought hard to get this sequel made, having loved the character and rightly assumed fans would love to see more of Snake, and he is by far the saving grace of the film. Saddled with some of the thickest writing the already-blunt Carpenter/Hill team ever wrote, Russell still has a ball. His series of hisses, grunts and death stares make for nonstop hilarity. Too bad its the only intentional comedy that works. As gung-ho as his dear friend might have been for the project, Carpenter's weariness and bitter attitude toward L.A. and Hollywood roll off him in every frame. But his bark lacks follow-up bite, and Escape from L.A. ultimately feels like a wounded kid sulking off to lick his wounds and curse his tormenting bully under his breath rather than confront him head-on. By the time Snake gets an all-too-familiar last laugh and delivers an absurd final message directly to the audience, one can only marvel at how badly Tinseltown whipped a director who wanted nothing more than to offer solidly crafted material for the studios who spurned him. What a shame.

Brian De Palma: Obsession

At the time of its release, Obsession was by some degree the most refined of Brian De Palma's films, an ironic twist given how it is perhaps the most compromised of his pictures to that point. Rewritten to avoid certain controversies, and then slashed to the bone per the wishes of legendary score composer Bernard Herrmann, Obsession differs so thoroughly from the vision of its writer, Paul Schrader, that he disowned it during production. The cuts, however, make for a streamlined production, perhaps too truncated but nevertheless taut, and it's no wonder that the film proved the director's first noteworthy hit.

Patterned after Hitchcock's Vertigo, Obsession's moments of De Palmian trickery are few and far between. Instead, he captures the high melodrama of a past age and, more importantly, never treats it as anything less than silly. He does not look down upon the style, mind you, but he sidesteps the critical mistake of attempting to play the absurdity in the serious manner of 1970s cinema. Instead, he plays the film just straight enough to embrace the melodrama, and more than any other De Palma film to this point, Obsession keeps the audience wanting to watch the story rather than jump through his aesthetic hoops.

Opening with a lavish party for real estate developer Robert Courtland (Cliff Robertson) and his wife Elizabeth (Geneviève Bujold), Obsession communicates the heavy trimming upon its script immediately as it jumps along rapidly through establishing character moments and a sudden, random abduction of Elizabeth and daughter Amy by unknown assailants. They leave a note demanding $500,000, enough money to bankrupt Courtland, but police encourage him to place shredded paper in a suitcase along with a tracking device instead of the money. When the kidnappers discover the ruse, they enter into a car chase with the police that ends in a horrific crash that kills Elizabeth and Amy.

As you can guess, Robert is devastated, and the Vertigo influence enters the film when Courtland's business partner, Robert LaSalle (John Lithgow), encourages him to take a trip to Florence, Italy. Consumed by sorrow and unable to think of anything but his dead wife and child, Courtland agrees, without question for the sole reason that he met Elizabeth in Florence years ago. When he arrives and enters the church where they met, Courtland finds, to his shock, a woman restoring the paintings there who looks just like his wife. Sandra (also Bujold) hesitantly warms to the man's instant and passionate fixation upon her, but soon she enters into a relationship with the man and even acquiesces to his attempts to turn her into his wife.

At this point I found myself for the first time agreeing with De Palma's detractors that he appeared only to be recreating his influences, not working with them. Though it may be the director's tightest work yet, Obsession openly displays Herrmann's creative wishes, and one has to think that he had a hand in paring the film down until it played more like a Vertigo retread.

And yet, De Palma undermines the brevity of his shortened film, and in the process he subverts Hitchcock by introducing a complex romanticism into the Vertigo story. To better understand the split between the moments of outright plagiarism and the artistically fulfilling offshoot of his own vision, look at the contrast between the basilica of San Miniato in Florence and the replica memorial Courtland erects as the gravestone for his wife and child. One is a copy of the other, of course, but it reconfigures the meaning of the original into terms that are emotionally resonant for this character. A visual metaphor for De Palma's entire approach to the film, this juxtaposition lays the framework for a much darker yet more genuine exploration of Hitchcock's themes even with the most insidious implications of the plot left on the cutting room floor.

Where Hitch alerted us with an entire act left that Judy was Madeleine, De Palma holds off the revelation until nearly the end, by which point things move too swiftly for us to consider Courtland's psychological state. But by that point, we do not have to, because the director has used the preceding time to make a film not about the armchair psychiatry Hitch detested yet put on the screen so often but the emotion. Hitchcock had to suck us into his world with his tricks to torture us, but De Palma does not project Courtland's agony upon us but merely at us, asking to consider the horrible pain of a man left with nothing.

Compounding this despair is the truth of Sandra's identity, not Elizabeth as we might have guessed but his daughter, Amy. What layers of incestuous subplot existed in Schrader's script are left more to a dark corner of the mind, but the slight change in role proves the most ingenious alteration between the two works. The subject of Vertigo was obsession as much as it is in this one, but De Palma shows us how we all use grief to cover up truths that could cure us of our fixations. LaSalle, who organized the kidnapping to bankrupt his partner and assume total control, found Amy alive and raised her to hate her father, brainwashing her with the memory that he did not pay the ransom money and thus did not care enough for her or her mother to part with his money. Courtland, meanwhile, is so consumed by remorse that he does not ever consider that the woman he courts may look like his wife because she shares her genes. Both of them are blind to the irony of their lives: Amy/Sandra collaborates with LaSalle out of hatred for her father by entering into an Elektra complex with him, while LaSalle did effectively kill his partner's interest in the company though he did not bankrupt the man.

The spirals of the main characters, eventually looping into an extended déjà vu that reconfigures events around the truth, crescendos emotionally, demonstrating how we do not fully understand how much we love something until we've lost it. When Sandra fakes her kidnapping so LaSalle can have a second chance at ruining his partner and she can see whether her father actually brings cash this time, the mounting tension of Courtland's frenzy demonstrates that he's learned his lesson. He secures the money, only for LaSalle to swap out the suitcase for a fake, and he performs the same money drop. When he finally learns of his partner's deception, Courtland kills LaSalle and takes the money straight to the airport, where he hopes to kill Sandra for her role in cheating him. However, he breaks open the suitcase in front of her before he can shoot her, and Sandra/Amy can now see that her father did get the money after all and shouts "Daddy!" with glee. One might expect De Palma to have this ending, in which a child and parent are reunited through money, to be cynical, but there is no moment in the film as flamboyantly melodramatic nor as emotionally genuine as his nearly endless, whimsical circle around the hugging father and daughter.

The opening credits of Obsession contain the most overt indication that De Palma is directing. He intersperses a shot slowly tracking toward a building where the party is being held with slides containing pictures charting Elizabeth and Robert's relationship. Once the credits end and De Palma at last moves inside the mansion, we see that the characters are watching the slide show, which abruptly ends with the card, "And they lived happily ever after." He starts the film at an ending of sorts, and one that steels the viewer for the inevitable heartbreak. Elsewhere, however, De Palma is elegant, his tracking shots, pans and tilts graceful as they pore over numerous shots of art and of the heavenly haze around the characters (provided by Vilmos Zsigmond). For the first time, the romanticism that can be plainly seen in works such as Carlito's Way peek from behind De Palma's bag of tricks, and his technique is used toward a purpose, a purpose greatly aided by Herrmann, who may have hindered the director and writers' visions but contributed one of his finest and most context-appropriate scores as repayment. Hell, De Palma even gets one of his few unimpeachable performances out of an actor, in this case Lithgow, whom we can see here starting to perfect what eventually became his stock and trade: weak-bodied but able-minded schemers and villains. In a film built on dramatic and tragic irony, the greatest twist of Obsession may be that it is at once the most indebted to the work of someone else even as it makes the greatest case yet for De Palma as his own artist, someone who can think beyond his list of references to break them down and reconstruct them into something that can stand proudly alongside the works he plunders, even the masterpieces.