Los Angeles 2013

Los Angeles 2013 ( Escape from L.A. ) is an American film carried out by John Carpenter, left in 1996.

Synopsis

After a Earthquake took place in 2000, the town of Los Angeles is found detached of the American continent. In 2013, it became an island where the government, very puritan, exiles all the outlaws of the company. Snake Plissken is sent there in order to bar the road with the Master of the places, the anarchistic Cuervo Jones, which threatens to neutralize all the energy sources of planet by taking the control of a network of satellite military emitting electromagnetic impulses.

Data sheet

Distribution

Around film

  • When Snake plays tennis shoe then tries to flee, the black man bald person with sunglasses and a firearm is actually Isaac Hayes (Caméo not credited), which played the Duke of New York at the time of New York 1997 .
  • the orphan to which Snake makes a wink when he is escorted in the cloakroom is interpreted by Wyatt, the son of Kurt Russell.
  • In English, the nickname of Eddie, “map to the stars” , indicates the charts sold to the tourists and indicating the places of residence of the celebrities.

Rewards

Comment

Culture of the image

The film is dominated by the culture of the image. It is not a chance besides if the film is held with Hollywood, the capital of the image.

That starts with the escape of Utopia, the girl of the president, filmed like a Sitcom or a Soap operated. Then, Snake Plisken is imprisoned under the eye of the many cameras of the televised chain of the police force. In New York 1997 , Snake Plisken was intended to say permanently “I thought that you had died” (“thought you were dead”) , the Comique of repetition becomes here “I saw you on TV, you appeared larger” (“thought you were to tiller”) .

The first stage of the tour of Plisken is a parody of private clinic of cosmetic surgery, of surgery of the image. And when that it is captured, Cuervo Jones challenges the president of the United States via television.

The conclusion does not escape this logic: the president of the United States moves with his mobile control and its team is able to assemble a estrade so that it makes in full nature a statement retransmise in the whole world, and Plisken traps the police force with an image (a Hologramme). Besides one notes that the case of control of the Sword of Damocles resembles to mistake there with a remote control of television, therefore to some extent Snake Plisken extinguishes the TV. The command code is 666, the Nombre of the animal, symbol of the Apocalypse, and was chosen by the President of the United States who is integrist protesting; that reveals that for the President, the extinction of television is the apocalypse. The last sentence of Plisken, “Welcome in the world of human”, can then be included/understood with double direction:

  • the TV will die out, and the inhabitants of the fictitious universe will live in the “real” world and either by procuration in a virtual world;
  • the film will finish, and the spectator will leave the fictitious universe and will return in the real-world.
This second reading is supported by the final Regard camera: Is Plisken addressed to a character of film or to the spectator? In addition, according to Alfred Hitchcock, a glance camera surprises the spectator as one would surprise somebody looking by the keyhole; it causes to make “leave” the spectator of the universe fiction. Lastly, Plisken being one-eyed, its glance can be regarded as a metaphor of the single eye of the camera, it “spectator-is filmed”.

A anti-Hollywood film?

The film has many “awkwardnesses”: its scenario is copied on that of New York 1997 , but is much less captivating. John Carpenter being a Master of the Suspense , one can suppose that awkwardnesses are in fact intentionally and that the film “was voluntarily sabotaged”. Is it about a proclamation for the independent cinema, him which have many problem to produce its films until a large studio it left the lapse of memory to turn a “continuation of”?

Among the scenes which seem missed, let us note

  • the voyage out of submarine, whose synthesized images are very in lower part of what one could already make at the time; one can wonder whether Carpenter voluntarily did not require of Buena Vista Visual Effects - a Disney division (see further) - to make artificially smoothed images;
  • the “match of basketball”: in New York 1997 , one was entitled to a palpitating duel, and Carpenter arouses us here by showing us the end of a combat, and instead of that, one sees a man weakened to try to mark baskets…

Carpenter regulates its account in Hollywood in manner symbolic system in several scenes:

  • in the voyage out of submarine, it passes beside the building of the studio Universal, immersed (Carpenter “runs” the studio symbolically);
  • when it flies away in Deltaplane, it flies over the hill on fire with the letters of the Hollywood Sign reversed;
  • the last scene shows the destruction of Disneyland; indeed, before landing on “the merry kingdom at the seaside” (The Happy Kingdom by the Sea) , one has the following dialog:
    • “Plisken - It is not? …
    • Hershe - If, but they went bankrupt because of their operation in Paris”
(reference to Disneyland Paris).

And if the film comprises many homages to the cinema, it is mainly with films not produced by Hollywood, like films of Ennio Morricone (the duel), or many Hollywood films themselves parodic like the Rocky Horror Picture Show (scene of the private clinic)… And when it quotes a nonparodic Hollywood film, it is to turn it in derision (Point Station-wagon) .

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