The Warriors (1979) - by Faro

It’s the end of the 1970’s, and the City has hit a wall… hard. Shards and fragments and burning bits of urban existence are strewn around the hollowed buildings and empty streets, covered in spray-painted tags and a neglect so profound it starts to smell like hatred. We all know this time, we all know this City, even if our knowledge is just from the movies.

But the Warriors know it all the way through to their bones. A street gang, as committed to token racial diversity as they are to wearing open leather vests without an undershirt, and we instantly feel an affinity for them because… well, because the camera is following them, and we love whatever the camera follows. We know they know the City because they tell us that whenever they get all the way back to Coney Island after some mindless mission of teenage testosterone, and see the ocean, they know they have returned to their own neighborhood and are safe. You know you’re short on security and sanctuary when bombed out late-1970’s Coney Island makes you feel safe, but for the Warriors it is home.

The larger narrative of this film is about an enormous underclass of fashion-minded street gangs coming together at a meeting in the Bronx to listen to a messianic figure who is trying to convince them to rise up and take outright ownership of what they have been content to merely spray-paint up to this moment… the entire City… but his plan falls apart when one nihilistic Spiccoliesque lunatic kills this-would-be Savior at the apex of his community building speech. In the chaos that follows the assassination, the Warriors are blamed, and subsequently hunted by the other gangs all the way back to Brooklyn’s southern most point.

There are a lot of terrific scenes as the Warriors engage with a wide array of other idiosyncratically attired gangs. But the true genius of this movie comes in a small moment on the subway. It should be noted that the Warriors are not traveling home alone at this point. The blonde-haired leader of the Warriors has picked up a dark-haired girl, named Mercy, during a street fight with another gang. Just minutes before this scene he rebuffed her aggressive sexual advances in a subway tunnel as being cheap and whorish, yet she continues to follow him… maybe to prove how tough she is. Or it could be a calculated attempt to prove her devotion to him and thus legitimize a future sexual encounter between them. Or perhaps she simply has nowhere else to go.

Anyway, at this particular moment the subway stops and lets on some other passengers. Two drunk and giggling couples, clearly coming home from some soiree in their fancy party-clothes, of roughly the same age as the harried and hunted Warriors and Mercy. These are teenagers living in another New York City of the 1970’s. These teenagers are friends with Mariel Hemmingway, who is not on the train with them but further uptown in Woody Allen’s Manhattan apartment.

The two couples look at the grime and the exhaustion of the Warriors and Mercy, and their disgust and contempt is palpable to everyone. So Mercy raises her hand to straighten her hair, just a simple gesture to regain some level of decency and social grace in this moment of judgment. And the leader of the Warriors quickly and authoritatively puts his hand on hers and stops her from adjusting herself under their critical gaze.

This is the moment of class conflict in shattering subtlety. All the rest of the fighting in this movie is internal-fighting, gang on gang, the disenfranchised defeating each other with every single petty fight between themselves. But here, for one moment, the classless and the homeless are judged by the pampered and the elite… and under that withering gaze, he is defiant.

He says, without speaking: “We will not respond to you and your judgment. Your aesthetics are not our aesthetics. Your culture is not our culture. You avoid the struggle, and we live it. We are the Warriors. We know this time, we know this City… it is ours.”

And for those of us watching, we realize how right he is, and how living in this current New York where stylish menswear is now sold at CBGB's, we must accept that we are all like those coiffed couples on the train… we will never know that time, we will never know that City.

(Which is fine of course, because they will never know ours... live your own moment... "Don't take me off your mailing list, cause I agree with the kids who think that IT is ENERGY, and it still exists... it still exists.")