AndrewBloom
CONTAINS SPOILERS7/10 8 years ago
Some of my favorite films mix the high and the low. They balance a sense of fun or wild inventiveness with a commitment to emotional truth in their characters or thematic heft. It's a difficult thing to pull off, because making a work wild and then serious, or funny and then maudlin, can be asking for a tonal clash. But do it right, and you can surprise your audience, catch them off guard, and make those moments all the more meaningful by the contrast.
On its surface, *The Warriors* seems very much like the low, without a hint of gravitas or poignancy in sight. And if that's all it were, it would be quite alright. The film has a hell of a premise, with Swan and his fellow toughs trying to make it back to Coney Island from Van Cortlandt park with a target on their backs. The film feels like a modern riff on *The Odyssey* by way of the grindhouse. There's monsters to defeat, travelers lost along the way, and even sirens that suck in the unsuspecting.
Those sirens are one of the film's most unpalatable qualities, and part of what makes it feel so low. Femme fatale Mercy is introduced when a peaceful detente between The Warriors and The Orphans goes awry at her insistence that laying down arms is an act of cowardice. The film's protagonist responds to this by tearing off her panties and turning them into a molotov cocktail, and neither this nor the fact that she's manhandled for the bulk of the film keeps her from following Swan and The Warriors around like a lost puppy. The other women in the film are little more than traps, whether it be the undercover cop who gets Ajax after he sexually assaults her in what seems like a sting, or the all-female gang called "The Lizzies," who lure a few of The Warriors into their hideout, ply them with physical affection, and then try to kill them. Even the DJ, one of the more memorable flourishes of the film, is just a nigh-disembodied pair of lips. It's not a film with a particularly nuanced or enlightened view of the distaff citizens of the city.
At the same time, *The Warriors* makes the most of its setting and cinematography, which leans toward the thrill of urban combat. The version of New York City the film depicts presages the one shown in Alan Moore's *Watchmen* -- simultaneously dripping with grime and grunge in every corner, and yet made lurid with so many scenes bathed in neon lights, until the whole town feels like a grungy rundown carnival funhouse. The director uses the camera to emphasize how our heroes are lost within this twisted wonderland of a city, making them small, showing them dwarfed by other visual elements of the film, whether it be a spray-painted bus full of rival toughs running them down, the city itself stretching out into the distance, or throngs of the most powerful gang in the city dominating the frame at the end of the film. There's an aesthetic sensibility to *The Warriors* that not only makes it visually distinctive, but helps tell the story.
The film feels very much as though it's from the perspective of teeangers. It features very macho guys in matching outfits getting into fights and meeting dangerous women. It's a world that feels like what a thirteen-year-old would imagine their adolescence to be like. There's roving gangs of color-coordinated troublemakers a la *A Clockwork Orange*, but rather than exploring the ideas of violence and rehabilitation, *The Warriors* seems to give into the pure thrill of the chase. The comic book transitions reinforce this idea, that this is a juvenile adventure, not necessarily in a bad way, but in a way that reflects the outsized, funhouses mirror way that a teenager sees the world.
But then, in three scenes near the end of the film, it grows up just a bit, and almost hits a deconstruction of itself in the third act.
It starts with the scene between Swan and Mercy underground. Again, the gender politics of *The Warriors* are, charitably, of their time and meant for a very specific audience. And yet, when Swan slut-shames Mercy and handles her roughly, and asks her why she acts this way, Mercy offers an interesting, almost profound response. She tells Swan that she sees where the straight life, where behaving leaves her -- living in roach-infested conditions with more mouths than one woman can feed. She tells him she's living for now. The future doesn't hold much for her, either something that looks appealing or reliable, and so in the interim she lives in the moment, wrings whatever bit of happiness and feeling she can while she has the chance because what looms on the horizon has nothing for her. It's an unexpectedly empathetic view of a character who otherwise feels like little more than a pop for Swan, with certain nigh-offensive qualities.
Later, in the film's best scene, Mercy, Swan, and what's left of The Warriors after combat with The Punks in Union Square make it onto their train and start heading home. Somewhere along the way, a pair of young couples gets on the same car and sits across from our heroes. Initially, the prom-goers are laughing, completely oblivious to the haywire excitement going on among the gangs in the city. There's a moment where the two groups look each other over. The prom-goers see the dirt and bruises on Mercy and Swan. Mercy and Swan see the crisp white tuxedos and beautiful dresses. There's a striking contrast, a potent moment of "there but for the grace of God."
And without saying a word, the film makes a powerful statement about class. The prom-goers are from a different world. They can afford to be laughing on a night like tonight, to exist so far apart from it than when they see their grimy mirror images, it's disquieting and uncomfortable to them, an incursion into their perfect world that forces them to have to contemplate the way the other half lives. It may not make them ashamed, but it makes them afraid. And for their part, Mercy and Swan see the life they can never have, the carefree manner they'll never be able to fully take on with the circumstances they're born into.
So much of *The Warriors* feels like one big game. Sure, people are arrested; people are injured; people even die. But the five-minutes-into-the-future setting and comic book tone give it a weightless, almost otherworldly quality that mutes the impact of these events. And yet that moment on the train pulls it all into focus. Suddenly, The Warriors' adventures don't feel like fun and games; they feel like a death trap that these scores of disaffected youth are caught up in because they have no better possibilities, nothing to hope for or give their lives meaning besides their little factions and the pieces of territory they can "command." It makes the loss of the man poised to unite them, poised to change the status quo of factional groups eating each other, poised to move the needles from the environment where the film's villain who admits he just likes causing trouble thrives, immediately more meaningful.
It hits home in the final act of the film where The Warriors make it back to Coney Island. Swan looks out at the run down streets and crumbling facades of the city that lay before him and wonders what he's fighting for. While it's a much shallower, much more blunt take, it trades in the same unspoken sentiments of Tony Soprano in "Commendatori" where, with the beautiful vistas of Italy on his mind, Tony looks out the window of the car taking from the airport back to his home in New Jersey, sees the ugly remnants of industry and spoilage along the way, and the show implies a certain ambivalence about what this empire is really worth within Tony. Swan, like Tony, seems to see a futility of the war if these are the spoils. There's a weariness to those moments, a poisonousness to them, that changes the way the audience reflects on the otherwise rollicking adventures they've seen so far.
Sure, the film ends with another macho showdown, and 11th our save from the powers that be, and it lets our heroes walk off with the sun rising in the distance over the shoreline. But there's a darkness in the soul of *The Warriors*, just enough of a touch of the reality that underlies the fun and excitement to give the film a little depth and more of an edge that just its lurid or violent qualities. Few would call *The Warriors* a particularly deep film, but it has a thematic heft to it beyond what its neon-tinged, rock 'em sock 'em atmosphere portends, and that elevates it above the grindhouse fare whose style it embrace.
