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Snake Plissken, the taciturn antihero of John Carpenter’s “Escape from New York,” was clearly modeled after Clint Eastwood’s character from the celebrated Man With No Name trilogy.<\/a> They both have similarly gravely voices and seem to be resolutely amoral. If the parallels aren’t clear enough, Carpenter cast Lee Van Cleef, Eastwood’s frequent Name Trilogy co-star, in “Escape from New York.” Unlike Eastwood’s Man, however, Snake possesses a note of punk rock nihilism. He doesn’t care about the world and doesn’t give a damn if the U.S. President has been kidnapped or if some distant peace talks may fail. Snake has seen untold horrors from his one remaining eye, and he clearly lost his faith in humanity long ago.<\/p>\n Kurt Russell played Snake Plissken, and he has long felt that it’s one of his best roles. Snake is memorable, tough, and kind of cartoony, a movie character for the ages. At the end of “Escape from New York,”<\/a> Snake deliberately sabotages a political summit because, well, he doesn’t give a damn about a system that never gave a damn about him. Indeed, it was the system that transformed New York into a city-sized prison for ultra-criminals. The same is true in the 1996 sequel “Escape from L.A.,”<\/a> which predicted the rise of a Christo-fascist regime. At the end of “L.A.,” Snake pretty much ushers in the end of the world, sickened by the dystopia around him.<\/p>\n In 1996, shortly before the release of “Escape from L.A.,” Carpenter spoke about Snake with the Sci-Fi Entertainment Magazine put out by the Sci-Fi Channel (now called Syfy<\/a>), and he felt that the character was pretty much the ideal hero. For Carpenter, Snake possessed perfect resolve and never wavered from his life’s goal, which was to save his own ass. Not in a cowardly way; he would never sell someone out. But Snake definitely didn’t care about anyone else.<\/p>\n