Decline is a Choice

What the New York movies of the 60's and 70's tell us about our current cultural moment

Decades before Marvel coined the phrase “Cinematic Universe” a group of aggressive auteur directors accidentally created their own Cinematic Universe of films set in the dystopian New York of the late 60’s and 70’s. In these films, from Scorsese’s TAXI DRIVER, to Walter Hill’s THE WARRIORS, to Lumet’s SERPICO and DOG DAY AFTERNOON, to Friedkin’s FRENCH CONNECTION the streets of New York were filthy, dilapidated and dangerous. Even Sydney Pollack’s THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR, a film with the DNA of a pop action movie, features this same dystopian New York where everyone lives in cramped basement-level efficiency apartments and the streets are filled with mayhem.

Porn shops outnumber coffee shops in these films, and the streets are controlled not by families of tourists and the flagship stores of the world’s biggest brands, but by Cops on the take, Gangs, Drug Dealers, Hookers and their Pimps. There was a sense that all of these films existed in the same version of New York City, as if The Warriors might have gotten a ride in Travis Bickle’s taxi, or Paul Kersey and Popeye Doyle might have taken shots at some of the same scumbags as they walked by the bank where Sonny and Sal were holding their hostages.

This was not a fantasy version of New York, it was the New York that these directors knew personally, either from having grown up in the city or from having done business in what was, at the time, a vibrant independent film industry set in the Big Apple. They were making films set in the city as they saw it.

What they saw was often ugly.

Then, in 1980, a guy named Ronald Reagan came along, bringing with him a hands-off approach to the economy, and a tough-on-crime “we see you” attitude to the country’s crime problem. And things began to slowly turn around, even in Travis Bickle’s New York.

The cinematic New York of the late 80’s was not the moldering rat-infested subway tunnels of THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123, but the country clubs, Long Island estates, and off-menu specialties of Oliver Stone’s WALL STREET and the glittering office towers, glamorous lawn parties and upward mobility of Mike Nichols’ WORKING GIRL and Herb Ross’ THE SECRET OF MY SUCCESS. In 1992 John Hughes made a movie in which a ten-year-old kid named Kevin McCallister strolls through Central Park in the wee hours of the morning and is eventually found by his mother, safe-and-sound in Rockefeller Center well after midnight, having single-handedly vanquished the city’s criminal element in an orgy of highly-choreographed family-friendly violence.

Politics, as Andrew Breitbart said, is downstream from culture. And as the 80’s came to a close, New Yorkers decided they’d had more than their fill of the crime, corruption, and crappy city services that still remained a decade after Reagan appeared on the scene. And in 1994 they voted for a Mayor named Rudy Giuliani.

Giuliani, like Reagan, understood that decline was a choice and embraced the “broken windows” theory of crime prevention. Almost overnight the sex shops were gone from Times Square, replaced by the massive flagship stores of posh brands like Nike, Tiffany and Apple, and glittering restaurant chains pumping out portions too large for any one person to eat safely. Criminals understood that they were no longer welcome in the city and crime dropped to levels not seen in 50 years.

And then, as they say in the movies, we all lived happily ever after.

Until we didn’t.

One of my least favorite cliches is “Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it”, but in the case of the Dystopian New York of the 60’s and 70’s, it is a warning… if we don’t understand where the city was during the TAXI DRIVER era, how it got there, and how it emerged on the other side, it is impossible to understand where it might be headed.

Those who run the city and shape its character, primarily Government officials, Media figures and the members of a vast activist class, seem blissfully unaware of this “Cinematic Universe” version of New York. It’s hard to imagine that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Cori Bush, Nikole Hannah-Jones or Joy-Ann Reid have ever seen the original DEATH WISH. Or if they did, they would no doubt dismiss it as the violent fantasies of a demented, racist white man.

They’re too young, or too sure of themselves to remember the New York that produced the fake-but-plausible legend of Kitty Genovese’s very public murder. They believe that history always arcs towards justice and that New York’s status as a safe and prosperous city has been made permanent by this latest vacation from History.

Because of this obvious and self-evident truth, they would happily tell you, Government is now free to experiment with all sorts of Progressive anti-Capitalist, soft-on-crime policies, because there is no longer any danger that the City could ever slip back into the era that produced Travis Bickle, Paul Kersey, The Warriors and Popeye Doyle.

But it can.

And in fact, it is.

People like AOC, Bush, Reid, and Hannah-Jones don’t understand that polite society has always been a thin veneer held up by the most gossamer of threads, and that it wouldn’t take much to sever that thread entirely. Lately, it seems that all the people who run New York City have been running around with scissors.

The COVID lockdowns helped bring back the era of slow decay in New York by shuttering the museums, theaters and restaurants that were and are its lifeblood. Several companies, most notably Victoria’s Secret and The Gap, have announced that they will close their Flagship New York stores for good, and other companies are sure to follow suit. I imagine that managing a flagship location in Times Square pays a lot better than being a teller in the bank from DOG DAY AFTERNOON… but why would a politician or a Social Justice Activist ever worry about such prosaic things as good paying jobs?

Thousands of restaurants and small businesses have closed forever, their empty storefronts now nothing more than decaying sockets that are slowly infecting the value of the homes and businesses around them, in the same way that tooth decay inexorably spreads from one tooth to all the others.

Having forgotten the lessons of the Giuliani era, City Government has returned to its soft-on-crime 70’s roots, via the defund the police movement, the elimination of cash bail, the push for “Decarceration” and the decriminalization of theft below a certain dollar value. The city’s criminals have responded with enthusiasm… violent and property crime levels in the city have exploded.

Walter Hill’s 1979 film THE WARRIORS is about a small group of gang members trying to get from The Bronx to their home turf in Coney Island while being hunted by all the other gangs of New York. But why were The Warriors in The Bronx in the first place? Few remember the details, which turned out to be prophetic…

Nine member groups from each of one hundred gangs from all over the city were summoned to The Bronx for a conclave of all the city’s gangs. At this conclave, the boss of bosses, a man named Cyrus, pitched his vision for the future of the gangs and of the city. He did the math for them… there were 60,000 hardcore gang members in the city and only 20,000 cops. If they could learn to work together rather than trying to “waste” each other all the time, they could steal everything of value in the city, and there would be no one to stop them. Unfortunately for Cyrus, he’s murdered at the end of his speech and never has the chance to will his vision into reality.

But turn on the news these days and you’ll see that 40 years later, Cyrus’ vision has finally become reality. Gangs of 80 to 100 criminals, helpfully masked up and rendered anonymous by the COVID-regulatory regimes that still hold sway over our cities, are committing mass smash-and-grab attacks in high-end retails store across the nation. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars worth of merchandise has been stolen over the last year in what has become a highly sophisticated and well-coordinated series of spectacularly visible crimes.

Among the criminal classes, disrespect for the NYPD has evolved into outright contempt. And this contempt has expressed itself in a variety of ways, from the relatively benign… people video-taping themselves dumping buckets of water on unsuspecting officers, to the outright evil… suspects walking up to cops sitting in their cars and shooting them in the head in broad daylight. Nationwide, 264 Cops were killed in the line of duty during 2020, a 96% increase over the 2019 total of 135.

Something that cannot go on forever, won’t. The New York movies of the 60’s and 70’s were a cry for help. They were a vision of a dying city. And eventually, politics did respond to the culture. But for a while, it seemed that it could go either way.

Here in 2021, none of this new lawlessness and decay has yet begun to show up at the cinema. But there are signs that significant numbers of New Yorkers do remember the DEATH WISH/TAXI DRIVER/WARRIORS era. They’ve seen those movies and have no desire to return to those dark days. This year’s New York Mayoral race featured two candidates most famous for their zero-tolerance approach to crime. Eric Adams the Veteran former Cop, and Curtis Sliwa who is most famous for creating The Guardian Angels, the world’s best-known private sector crime interdiction organization. Eric Adams won, because while New Yorkers may be crazy, they aren’t stupid. But you can be sure that both men remember the TAXI DRIVER era very well… they’ve seen all the movies of this particular Cinematic Universe… and they have no more desire to return to that world than do the New Yorkers who voted for them.

I have confidence in this modern version of New York’s ability to arrest their slide and turn things around. Decline is a choice, it is not inevitable. While it was fourteen years between the end of the 70’s and the election of Rudy Giuliani, it only took two years of misery for New Yorkers to realize that they could no longer afford the luxury of electing feckless narcissists like Bill De Blasio to run their city.

If AOC and the Cuomos and Bill De Blasio are the disease, then perhaps… to paraphrase another famous film about crime… Eric Adams is the cure.

SUGGESTED VIEWING FROM THE TAXI DRIVER CINEMATIC UNIVERSE:

TAXI DRIVER directed by Martin Scorsese

DEATH WISH directed by Michael Winner

12 ANGRY MEN directed by Sidney Lumet

WAIT UNTIL DARK directed by Terence Young

THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123 directed by Joseph Sargent

AND JUSTICE FOR ALL directed by Norman Jewison

DOG DAY AFTERNOON directed by Sidney Lumet

THE WARRIORS directed by Walter Hill

SERPICO directed by Sidney Lumet

THE FRENCH CONNECTIPON directed by William Friedkin

THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR directed by Sydney Pollack