The Warriors

"You know, you're just part of everything that's happening tonight- and it's all bad!"- Swan, The Warriors

Ugliness is, and always has been, a thorny subject for Art. The subordination of superficial judgements to deeper analyses is the stock theme of romantic comedy; Western culture and Hollywood have collaborated in creating an endlessly self-replicating audience whose only ambition is to slouch in front of the TV all day, shovelling food into their salivating maws whilst being reassured by made-for-TV romances that people will still love them despite -nay!- BECAUSE they're so big and fat and stupid. Beauty is only skin deep, it's what's inside that counts, blah blah blah- well, let us grant that the sentiment is a noble one. But it is one which has been perverted two-fold, not only by Hollywood's manipulation of it to inject a little hit of the feelgood factor into its consumers lard-lined veins, but also by Hollywood's blunt refusal to ever represent ugliness directly and unflinchingly on its silver screens. The Ugly Heroes of Tinseltown are stylised, squeamish imposters; Disney's melodic Quasimodo is an eminently presentable fellow, a far cry from the lumbering brute of Victor Hugo's novel; Branagh's Frankensteinian monster is Robert de Niro with stitches; Roxanne falls in love with C.D. Bates despite the fact that -gasp!- he looks like Steve Martin, only with a bigger nose. We can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of successful movies whose directors and producers have run the risk of offending their viewer's visual sensibilities with their choice of hero, but the question is one which reaches far beyond the casting couch. Our instinctive reaction to ugliness is almost antithetical to our reaction to Art, and yet the latter experience almost certainly must, in any meaningful work, encapsulate the former. The tension here is most often visible in the uncertain handling of battlefield scenes in war movies, and one of its most satisfactory resolutions is in the seedy, night-time streets of Taxi Driver; but the most fearlessly and relentlessly ugly movie I can think of is The Warriors.

The Warriors' storyline comes to you live from the world of coin-op beat 'em ups; attending a meeting of all the gangs in near-future New York, the eponymous heroes witness -and are framed for- the murder of the El Presidenté of the gang-warfare world, Cyrus. Pursued by thousands of police officers and furious gang members, the Warriors make their way back through the night to Coney Island by catching the subway, fighting a rival gang, getting off the subway, walking along for a bit, fighting a rival gang, catching the subway, getting off the subway, running away from a rival gang.... And so on. There are no developments, distractions or derivations from this basic formula, only interludes and episodes. The dialogue is mundane, the characters quite pointedly two-dimensional and motiveless (Lester -the actual murderer of Cyrus and chief persecutor of the Warriors- offers as justification of the killing "No reason. I just like doing things like that.") and every second of The Warriors ninety-plus minutes is made as arduous and exhausting for us as for the gang members themselves. The dark and indistinct visuals make for incredibly uncomfortable and confusing viewing, the choice of camera angles often ludicrously perverse, and the only spots of colour or light offered are in the costumes of the rival gangs who the Warriors customarily dispose of in unpleasant and crude bouts of hand-to-hand combat. Even the movie's most famous scene is a tour-de-force in setting teeth on edge, the Warriors cowering in the shadows and the veins in Lester's face bulging as he screams to an accompaniment of clanking bottles "Wa-rri-ors! Come out to pla-ay!". The Warriors isn't 'gritty' or 'realistic', the euphemisms we roll out to describe anything depicting the bloody and vicious underbelly of society; it's not even 'bleak' or 'pessimistic'; it's just hideous. Monstrous. An absolute abomination.

Ironically, in the 24 years since its release, The Warriors has found itself a cult favourite with audiences who can see the beauty in messy, incomprehensible skirmishes ending in victories and defeats alike inglorious- or, to put it another way, amongst people who like to see sharp things go through soft things that scream and bleed. The Warriors shunts along subway tracks for ninety minutes that each seem like eternities, dragging us kicking and screaming to the terminus that is Coney Island only to find that their destination is no less dismal and sickening than everything they've fought through to get there, and that even the watery grey light which finally flickers through the distant skyline redeems nothing. "This is what we fought all night to get back to?" demands Swan; a confrontation with Lester on the beach reveals nothing; and the movie's final, and most disturbing scene, as the gangs who have pursued the Warriors fall on Lester like an army of starving, scavenging dogs offers no more edifying a conclusion than that ugliness, unlike beauty, has nothing more to offer or teach us than ugliness itself.