escape from new york
I like interpreting John Carpenter’s Escape From New York as a barely-disguised metaphor about the physical, practical difficulty of getting out of New York.1 The movie doesn’t use metaphor at all, really: the labyrinthine buildings and sense of airless entrapment function as symbols for New York’s labyrinthine buildings and sense of airless entrapment. The movie’s basic concept (“what if Manhattan were a prison”) is a dramatic image and something of a tasteless one, especially when New York has plenty of prisons, most notably Rikers but less famous ones as well. One winter when I lived in Brooklyn, I attended a protest outside a local state prison because the heat had been out for weeks and it was dangerously cold inside the walls. Family members and activists gathered outside at the foot of the building, chanting, while high up above our heads the prisoners banged on windows covered by icy metal lattices. The lattices were there to keep the inmates from escaping the labyrinth, and from enjoying too much light and too much air.
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