Hellscapes, Real and Imagined

There are some stories worth taking in once, but too brutal to return to.

Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 film “Straw Dogs” still haunts me decades after renting the tape from Kim’s Video when I was a teen in the early 1990s. I’ve never wanted to revisit it, let alone see the 2011 remake.

Then there’s “The Warriors.”

Not director Walter Hill’s comic-book-toned movie about “the armies of the night [who] outnumber the cops five-to-one” that was a surprise box office hit in 1979 despite (or maybe because of) news reports about how it made gang violence look dangerously awesome. A young Curtis Sliwa and his newly formed Guardian Angels, whose red berets made them look like rejects from the movie, protested outside of a theater showing it.

While that’s endlessly rewatchable, I’d occasionally think about but never want to return to Marxist novelist Sol Yurick’s profoundly gloomy 1965 potboiler that had been mostly forgotten well before its fond, but not so faithful, screen adaptation.

From slaughter to celebration

The movie swapped out a story that was brutally honest about its characters’ profound limitations — Yurick had been working as a social worker in New York City when he wrote it — for a visually spectacular story glamorizing them.

The book’s Black and Hispanic gang of 13- and 14-year-olds, The Coney Island Dominators, became the movie’s mixed-race Warriors, with grown men playing 17- and 18-year-olds.

In the book, each boy in the Family — as they call each other while referring to their family homes, and the rest of the city as the Prison — has sex with the same girl in turn. They’re raping her, I think, though Yurick leaves that ugly-ambiguous. They just leave her there afterward, not far from the corpse of the random man they’d slaughtered for the crime of looking at them the wrong way, with each boy passing a knife to the next one for a stab.

A couple hours after that, three of the Dominators come across a stout, older woman who’s drunk in Central Park in the middle of the night. She’s up for a tumble in the grass with at least one of them, but takes issue when a different boy, getting in on the action, also tries to open her purse. She starts screaming “rape” and the cops come to arrest the boys while beating them back into their place.

Each terrible act is described simply and directly. None of them leave any evident mark on these scarred and scared and scary kids.

Yurick’s novel made the sexual and other violence of Herbert Selby's “Last Exit To Brooklyn,” published a year earlier, feel downright sentimental. By contrast, the movie is of course a heroes’ journey, as our protagonists must fight through a gauntlet of colorfully costumed crews trying to hunt them down.

The movie is packed with hardboiled throwaway lines — “I want something now. This is the life I got left, you know what I mean?,” “You’re just part of everything that’s happening tonight, and it’s all bad,” “Let’s just get to the next station, okay?” — but its violence is mostly harmless.

It ends, memorably, with most of the Warriors (and the girl, played in the film by Deborah Van Valkenburgh, who’s with the hero Swan now) together on the sands of Coney Island celebrating their safe return.

The book ends, more memorably, with its central character, a thinker named Hinton who’s led the only two other remaining Dominators back home to Coney Island, returning alone to his slum apartment.

An infant is crying by itself in a cradle, his cynical junkie older brother is sharing a bed with one of his sisters, and his mother and stepfather are annoyed to hear Hinton arrive while they’re in the middle of having sex.

Hinton goes out to the fire escape, facing other slums, and falls asleep there sucking his thumb. 

The half-life of a journey home

I reread “The Warriors” for the first time since the early 1990s after The New York Post, citing “a source,” reported last August that Lin-Manuel Miranda was adapting it for his first Broadway show since “Hamilton.” The item didn’t explain why the mega-talented craftsman would be using the mostly forgotten book instead of the much-loved movie for his nostalgia play. I figured it had something to do with intellectual property rights, but was still excited to see him taking on material this challenging.

Spoiler alert: It turned out that the Post, New York City’s Greek chorus of fear-mongering, got the particulars wrong.

“Warriors,” co-written with Eisa Davis and dropping the definite article from its title, is out this October. It’s a concept album, not a stage show, and it’s based on the movie, not the book. That makes more sense but feels disappointing — a Disney treatment of a classical tale, for better and worse.

“We’ve spent the past three years musicalizing the Warriors’ journey home, from the South Bronx to Coney Island,” the press materials for the album proclaim. 

It includes hip-hop whitebeards playing boroughs, whatever that turns out to mean. Cam’ron is Manhattan, album executive producer Nas is Queens (a borough that doesn’t appear in the book or the movie), and the Wu-Tang’s Ghostface Killah and RZA are Staten Island (which doesn’t even have trains).

It was in 1997, 18 years after “The Warriors” hit movie theaters, that The Onion ran the headline “U.S. Dept. Of Retro Warns: ‘We May Be Running Out Of Past.’” Twenty-seven years after that, the nostalgia gap is overflowing with old trash.

It’s been 45 years since “The Warriors” was raced into theaters to beat out several competing productions about city gangs. And 59 years since Yurick boiled Xenophon’s circa 370 BC account of 10,000 Greek mercenaries fighting their way a thousand miles back home from Persia into a handful of kids wearing “war pins” clumsily trying to navigate seven miles on the train from the Bronx back to Brooklyn.

What made the book so terribly compelling is that it shows the fear-driven rampage of its barely teenage protagonists without making allowances for their brutal actions or stripping the kids behaving so terribly of their individual integrity and intelligence. What made the movie so awesome, on the other hand, is its stylish portrayal of young men’s mostly righteous, and harmless, violence.

Listeners will be able to judge Miranda’s “musicalization” for themselves soon enough, but it sounds like one revival or half-life of its licensed source material too many to produce anything radioactive or resonant.

Fear City flashbacks

It’s a striking moment for a project promoting gang nostalgia, as New Yorkers have been struggling to come to terms with a new, post-pandemic “Fear City.” 

Crime rates are declining again, but the perception that things are getting worse is widespread — seemingly more so every time Eric Adams and his corrupt clown-car cop bosses have talked about how safe everything actually is after the latest subway pushing or shooting.

Yurick’s book spoke to the seriousness, and the stupidity, of young men left to their own devices.

The book opens with an epigraph from Xenophon’s “Anabasis” — “My friends, these people whom you see are the last obstacle which stops us from being where we have so long struggled to be. We ought, if we could, to eat them up alive.” — and then “July 4th, 11:10 P.M.: Six warriors crouched in the shadow of a tomb. They were panting after their long run. The moon was shining above them; all the spaces between the gravestones and the tombs were bright but the shadows were hard and deep. Embracing cherubs, smiled down on them from the eaves of the tomb, fat-faced and benevolent.”

But one of these warriors wants to curl up for a nap, another needs a candy bar. Looking from the gloomy cemetery darkness to the light of the train tracks pointed toward home. They’re scared of ghosts and fireworks, of other gangs, of cops, of showing weakness to each other.

From there, the book eventually goes back to the Fourth of July gang summit minutes earlier, with Cyrus delivering his vision for uniting into a force that could run the city, and then his assassination. It’s a scene that captures, on both the page and the screen, the simultaneously grand and ridiculous hopes, inevitably disappointed, of every kid devouring candy bars and fantasies about men with great powers.

But where the book dissects that delusion, the movie celebrates it. The Dominators live in a city full of the regular enough people who happen to be up and about after midnight for all the usual reasons, including a vividly described group of disconcerting zombies inching through a 1 a.m. train in the Bronx who, Hinton eventually realizes, are the steady losers headed home from the track.

The movie filters out the regular enough New Yorkers and boils the city down to gang members, costumed to the ridiculous nines, and the occasional cop. Civilians, as it were, are rarely seen and never say anything, like the pair of young, white couples dressed for a night on the town who end up on the train with the Warriors in Brooklyn as they’re nearly home.

The couples look meaningfully at the gang members, with a mixture of pity and fear, and Swan’s girl reflexively tries to smooth her hair. He grabs her arm to stop her, and they hold steady eye contact with the late-night celebrators, who exit shame-faced at the next stop.

That’s the screen fantasy. The book has the three remaining Dominators, eating candy cars and reading a comic book, look up as two couples “got on the train, blond-hair crew-cuts and their doll-eyed girls … wearing fancy evening clothes as if they had just come from a dance — a prom maybe.”

The young men with their dates give the gang members wearing their war pins “a hard look even though they hadn’t done anything. What right did these squares have to look at them that way?”

Hinton, the most self-aware Dominator, sneaks a sideways look at them and begins daydreaming, at some length, about how “it would be nice to have a girl … innocent, sweet. … Having someone like her to marry would give him ambition. They would have a home and a dog. He would rise in the world and he would become—he wasn’t sure what.”

Eventually he looks up and recognizes that the prom-boys, still wary, are sneering at him now.

“He didn’t look back at them because then he’d have to recognize what that stare meant, and he’d have to challenge them, and that would lead to a little back and forth jive, and you couldn’t tell even about prom cats. Everybody packed a little two- or three-inch slice. Everybody knew that.”

The couples exit at Avenue J, with the men shooting a parting put-down look at the Dominators and Hinton swapping out his hazy domestic fantasy for a martial one about returning to punish those men, because “Who were they to jive the Family.”

‘No walk along the beach’

While the movie that sparked a moral panic on its release became a comfort food to stream in a vastly safer luxury city, the book still speaks many decades later to the trains today and the shared nightmares about what can happen when most everyone is afraid of most everyone else. The space between a good Samaritan and a vigilante killer can be as thin as a box cutter blade.

“The movie is an evisceration and distortion of my book. Though it formally follows the plot of the book, the contents are changed enormously,” Yurick said after it hit theaters.

“I wanted to show a dream of uniting, and the real conditions people live under. I also wanted to depict these kids as they actually were. Life has become almost hopeless for them. The return home is a downer. There’s no walk along the beach, no hope. It’s home to a welfare setup and the worst that can mean,” he continued.

“I wanted people to understand what will happen if you do not bring everyone into society.”

Something to consider the next time you’re keeping a cautious eye on some scary person on the train journey home.