A switchboard rattles in a room circumscribed by the telltale crates and boxes of a place that’s about to be empty. “No, I’m sorry, the precinct has been relocated, let me give you the new number,” the woman in the yellow sweater says tiredly over the phone; the phone company was supposed to have taken care of this.
“I don’t understand why this place is still open,” comments the newly-promoted Black lieutenant whose job it is to oversee the final, quiet evening at the station.
“Well, it is and it isn’t, Lieutenant,” the precinct captain replies. “The result of transition.”
We sit, then, in a place that is both here and not here, a liminal space of papers that are merely waiting to be filed away in some other room in some other building. A rectangular area that simultaneously contains police and not-police. Is this a place where order can be restored, where evil can be defeated? Is it a place where the bodies of the dead will fall on top of each other, where fathers have daughters, where hierarchy matters?
Well, it is and it isn’t.
The image of the cat in the box is a superimposed one: both alive and dead. The random subatomic event happened—and it didn’t. John Carpenter’s camera captured a flip of the coin, a win at a game of chance; but cinema like this can force us to feel the presence of both the loss and the win, one a ghost haunting the other.
*
Assault on Precinct 13 isn’t difficult to explain on a surface level. The members of Street Thunder, a peculiarly pan-racial gang who troll the streets of a run-down Los Angeles neighborhood, are out for revenge after police gun down six of their members one night. Furious, driven, bound by a blood pact, they go on a rampage, killing anyone they come across—including, iconically, a blonde girl in a yellow dress with a vanilla ice cream cone. Her death sends the father of this girl into a fugue state that he’ll remain in the rest of the film—but he has enough adrenalized, primal, animal anger left after crouching over her body to hunt down and kill one of the men responsible, an action that makes him the new primary target of Street Thunder’s organized and wordless violence. Meanwhile, a bus transporting prisoners has had to stop after a very ill inmate worsens during the drive, his sweaty, rasping coughs escalating until everyone around him begins to worry about both his health and their own.1 Both the bus and the father end up at the same decommissioned police station—Anderson Precinct 9, Division 14.2 When Street Thunder descends on the station, the catatonic father in its sights, they lay siege to said prisoners; the precinct’s bare-bones staff; two secretaries, one of which is the Hawksian Woman Leigh (Laurie Zimmer); and Lieutenant Bishop (Austin Stoker), who’s been called in to supervise just for the night—an easy assignment, a favor from a friendly higher-up.
The easiest and most common read on the film is that it’s a direct descendent of Rio Bravo and Night of the Living Dead, successfully combining and elevating aspects of both films (the Western film teaming up cops and criminals to defend a building + the zombie attackers swarming a holed-up Black leading man). Some have watched Assault on Precinct 13 and come away with the (false) understanding that it is some sort of anti-crime or pro-cop film—that the Street Thunder gang is a representation of crime on urban streets that needs to be addressed. A less surface-level read could lead us to see Assault on Precinct 13 as the film that kickstarted the keystone Carpenter motif of nameless, inexplicable, relentlessly unstoppable evil—the type of evil we see in the masked and unkillable Michael Myers in Halloween (1978), in the ruthlessness and amorality of the abandoned prisoners in Escape from New York (1981), in the warped imitating and consuming tendons of the alien being from The Thing (1982), in the demonically-infected zombie vessels of Prince of Darkness (1987), in the predatory consumerist tentacles of the creatures in They Live (1988). Even this, though, isn’t quite right. Carpenter’s monsters, after all, aren’t just evil for the sake of evil. His films actually telegraph the way that monsters are born of flawed systems that will then attempt to control, manage, or eliminate them—a system creating the justification for its own power.
Everywhere you look, in both Carpenter’s frequently prescient films and in the world around us, systems are broken. The systems meant to educate us, to house us, to feed us, to heal us when we’re sick, to protect us. It’s this latter system—more specifically, the police system—that John Carpenter’s handheld camera pacing up a 3:10 am stairway captures, in all its broken and violent glory: The line of uniformed officers, firing indiscriminately on the gang members, before any provocation has occurred. The bodies in the tight hallway. The red blood splashed on walls illuminated a sickly yellow.
It’s not a stretch to reach the assumption that Street Thunder wouldn’t be half as lethal if the cops hadn’t backed them into a corner; the group that gathers munitions after the attack carves the number “6” into their arms as a tribute to the six people killed that night. “For the six,” one says, cementing the motivation for the coming offensive as merely revenge against the police. The radio report (so reminiscent of the opening of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, sun spots and all!) even acknowledges the issue: “It’s true that law enforcement is being driven to deplorable extremes, but …”
Carpenter’s frequent thesis seems to be that systems are always bad and almost always lethal, and any individuals who manage to prove themselves good can only do so after a rupture with these systems. In Assault on Precinct 13, Lieutenant Bishop has to stop being a cop and start being a man if he wants to win our hearts—and keep his head.
*
First, though, he has to enter the box.
In Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment, described in his 1935 paper “The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics,” this box was a steel chamber fashioned to contain a cat, along with a “diabolical device”: a Geiger counter containing a miniscule bit of radioactive material, “so small, that perhaps in the course of one hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none”; if any radioactive atom decays, a tube rigged to release a hammer will break a vial of hydrocyanic acid that would kill the cat. In Schrödinger’s scenario, there would therefore be a period of indeterminacy about the cat’s fate; during that hour, there would be no way of knowing whether the cat was alive or dead, and only direct observation could resolve it. However, Schrödinger chose a cat for his thought experiment because he thought it was clear that a cat could not be in two states at once—could not possibly be both alive and dead, disproving some quantum theorists’ work on “superposition” in quantum mechanics—the idea that a physical system could, thanks to certain observed properties of subatomic particles, exist in two simultaneous states at once. Not everyone agrees.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to start throwing equations at you here. But what is the packed-up police station in Assault on Precinct 13 if not a box containing both living creatures and the poison that could kill them (Street Thunder), one purposefully separated so distinctly from populated areas that no one on the outside could have any idea what was happening within?
The beauty of this film is that it does, for the most part, unfold almost in real time inside said box. We get just a brief glimpse of Bishop’s life outside of work—enough to know that he lives in a nice house on the west side, which immediately tells us a lot about his character. Most Black men in LA in 1976 weren’t able to ensconce themselves in the palm tree-d, beach-adjacent bubble of L.A.’s Westside life, and Stoker’s nuanced performance immediately signals to the viewer that he wasn’t born like this; he worked for it. Even before he explains that no one took him out of the Anderson precinct as a child—he walked out when he was 20—we understand that we’re watching a person who has spent most of their life defying others’ expectations of what they should be like. We also understand, though, that he’s not at all interested in putting up with anyone else’s bullshit. And even before he enters the abandoned precinct, Carpenter begins to seed the paranoia that creeps in throughout the film in a masterful driving sequence during which the same white car with the same driver pulls up in the lane next to Bishop multiple times, each time staring over at him pointedly, each time going unnoticed (except, perhaps, by the viewer). Is it a connection to Street Thunder? Just a curious person? We’ll never know. But we feel, as viewers, the need to begin scouring the edges of the anamorphic frame to pick up on whatever information might help us understand the threats this world contains. This need only amplifies when the space we navigate shifts from an open street to a dark room.
Genius, really, to keep the characters penned up for the majority of the film—an impulse so different from what fans of horror or paranoia-fueled films might have been used to seeing. Though I wouldn’t necessarily call Assault on Precinct 13 a horror film, it does share DNA with the horror Carpenter would later so adeptly breathe life into, horror that often used disorienting or dark, unknown spaces to convey danger to an unmoored viewer. This film, however, flips that script, relying on an over-familiarity with space to create tension for a viewer who feels the stress of perforable containment against a powerful monstrous force. There are rails or bars or windows—frames within frames—partitions and phone booths—in almost every shot; the characters are navigating a world explicitly bounded by hierarchies and exclusions, a fact that Bishop’s existence as a Black man in a police station wearing a uniform makes clear, and that the prison bars separating the criminals from Bishop and the secretaries literalize.3 By the end of the film, we have seen the interior of the station from almost every angle; we have traversed each possible path, we have studied the floor and the ceiling; we know where our nearest exits are; we understand the limitations of our movement. For a while, we have to hold, too, the dramatic irony of knowing that these characters are cats tempting a radioactive particle, even when they themselves are unaware.
The white men die first—all except the fascinatingly unruffled and charismatic murderer Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston), that is—a nicely subversive touch. Julie (a pre-Halloween Nancy Loomis), the brittle secretary who’s willing to sacrifice the catatonic father whose gun started this whole thing, also ends up dead on the floor, a victim of the men who won’t stop crawling through the shot-out windows, faces in darkness, piling in one after another wordlessly. Undead men killed by the oppressive parasitism of the American system and re-animated by its violent negligence. The zombie itself, of course, stands as one of the primal examples of our animal desire (potentially embedded on a subatomic level) to believe in a terrifying thing that could be two things at once: dead and not dead. Impossibly strong and simultaneously decomposing.4
Horror itself always wants to have the quantum particle frozen in both states. That’s what makes horror so chilling. Norman Bates is both Norman and Mother, telegraphed by Hitchcock’s literal superimposition of Mother’s skeletal smile over Norman’s. Carrie White, the same year as Lieutenant Bishop, is simultaneously dead and also shooting her bloody hand up through the earth by her grave to terrorize her best friend. Jack Torrance is frozen solid outside the Overlook Hotel while concurrently raising a Fourth of July toast in 1921 at an endless party in the Gold Room.
Fear emerges from the rupturing of our logical, contained, scientific timelines—from the unknown thing that seethes and bubbles its way up through the ordered layers and allows chaos to bleedingly seep its way through everything you thought you knew. The clean observation can no longer be made safely; as Carpenter himself literalizes in Prince of Darkness, the scientific vessel cannot hold the particles that constitute demonic energy for long. As viewers, we can only achieve the release horror offers if we allow every possible outcome to coexist—if we let the cat be both alive and dead. If we allow ourselves to glimpse the cat not directly, but through the medium of film—an ambiguous medium, a sequence of images that both tells a story and encourages us to interpret the purposeful gaps. “Reality resists imitation through a model,” Schrödinger writes, frustrated by his inability to conjure up a thought experiment that lacked informational gaps. What he didn’t understand was the seductive beauty of the model itself.
*
I want to be clear that it’s not just the idea that the station = a box that’s compelling me to draw these maybe obtuse, maybe overly-academic, maybe seemingly random connections. John Carpenter has built these ideas of superposition and coexisting states into the very thematic structure of his film. He is the same filmmaker who, 11 years later, would direct and pseudonymously write Prince of Darkness, a movie drenched in questions of quantum physics and wave states amidst a siege of zombified invaders surrounding a church. That film weaves these ideas in explicitly from its opening minutes, when Professor Howard Birack (Victor Wong) lectures passionately about quantum states of being with his students:
Say goodbye to classical reality, because our logic collapses on the subatomic level into ghosts and shadows. From Job’s friends insisting that the good are rewarded and the wicked punished, to the scientists of the 1930s proving, to their horror, a theorem that not everything can be proved, we’ve sought to impose order on the universe. But we have discovered something very surprising. While order does exist in the universe, it is not at all what we had in mind.
A few minutes later, Catherine tries to explain the roots of some of their professor’s ideas to a baffled Walter—
Walter: “I don’t get it … The whole thing, it doesn’t make sense.”
Catherine: “It violates common sense. That’s the whole point. That’s what Einstein
couldn’t accept … Walter, come on. There’s Schrödinger’s Cat.”
Walter: “I know, I know.”
Catherine: “So what’s the point? The point is: until the cat is observed by someone, he’s
not in any definite state, either alive or dead. He’s in a wave superposition state, both
dead and alive at the same time … Only when we open the box and observe the cat does he materialize into
reality, either dead or alive.”
Walter: “But it doesn’t make sense.”
Catherine: “That is the entire, complete point. It doesn’t make any common sense. Our
common sense breaks down on a subatomic level.”
Let’s set aside the fact that Walter, a graduate student in quantum physics, seems to not understand one of the primary quandaries of his field. What’s fascinating is the way Carpenter seizes on the concept of wave superposition as a methodology for the horror that will later unfold. And while it would take another entire essay (don’t tempt me) to unpack the way Prince of Darkness interprets Schrödinger’s Cat, I do think that Carpenter planted the seeds of these larger frameworks near the start of his career, back in Assault on Precinct 13.
Take Wells (Tony Burton), the prisoner who, along with Wilson, constitutes one of the core members of the station’s bare-bones brigade. Wells provides an enjoyable dynamic foil to Wilson’s exaggerated coolness; his reactive nature seems, in part, to be a result of his firm belief that if anything goes wrong, he’ll be on the receiving end of the pain. We feel confident that Wilson is responsible for the murder(s?) of which he’s been accused and convicted, but doubt hangs over Wells’s past, Carpenter’s script implying that (like too many Black men behind bars) he may have been unjustly convicted: “I always lose. I’ve had bad luck all my life. How do you think I ended up in here?” A person can exist in two simultaneous states: convicted and innocent.
When Wells loses against Wilson in the game of potatoes5 that ensures his (unlucky) fate as the person who agrees to crawl through a basement tunnel, exit through a manhole, and hotwire a car in order to drive it off the deserted lot and summon help, we feel resigned, knowing his mission won’t succeed. As viewers, we see him get almost all the way there, but as he approaches the desolate, lit-up phone booth that we saw the dead young girl’s father attempt to place a call from earlier in the film, a shadow rises up from behind him in the car: the danger had been inside the box with him the whole time. A shot rings out, the windshield shatters. And yet, not having had the privilege of direct observation, Bishop allows himself to hope, just for a moment: “Maybe it was just a window breaking.” For an instant, Wells has both succeeded and failed, and it’s this instant that allows Bishop to keep fighting.
Furthermore, the film only works because of Street Thunder’s uncanny ability to clear away any external evidence of the chaos immediately and silently, ensuring that outside observers couldn’t possibly get a glimpse of anything unfolding behind the walls. After one particularly long barrage of fire, Lieutenant Bishop tries to assure his companions that help will be coming: “This time I know somebody heard us. There’ll be squad cars here in five minutes.” But then comes the chilling realization that the cars, driven by Street Thunder members up towards the station during the attack, have been transported back to their original parking spots across the street. Silence hangs thick over the no man’s land between lot and station. If anyone were to drive by, it would look like “nothing happened.” Bishop can’t wrap his head around this—”They gunned down five police officers, a secretary, one prisoner! We killed a dozen of them, and that’s ‘nothing happened’? Where are the bodies?”
Bishop stares out onto the clean, green grass in shock: no bodies, no blood, no prison bus, no evidence. It’s an age-old trick, usually wielded by those in power; if you control the bodies (or the absence of bodies), you control the narrative. The United Fruit Company did it in Colombia in 1928, killing what is, to this day, an unknown number of workers (50? 2000?) during a strike for better working conditions, disappearing the bodies, and attempting to erase the event from documented history; one of the reasons we know about it today is that Gabriel García Márquez immortalized the event in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Magical realism and horror are perhaps the two genres most capable of containing and conveying subversive truths. What good is the memory of a dead cat if the dead cat itself has been destroyed? If the scientist who opens the box finds nothing but an empty box?
We may wonder, too, at this point, about the body of the girl, executed so quickly and shockingly—the bright red blood against her yellow dress, the vanilla ice cream puddling in the grass—that the MPAA threatened to give the film an X rating. Is she still there? Has anyone found her body? Identified it? Or is she in the trunk of a gang member’s car, eyes staring into the dark, cocooned in obscurity? Does anyone even know what happened? Leigh and Bishop don’t; the father is wordless from the moment of his daughter’s death, wordless even when being taken away at the end on a stretcher, mouth opening and closing, physically unharmed but spiritually decimated.
Every character, in fact, contains their own opposite: Leigh is compellingly feminine and surprisingly masculine, gorgeous 70s hair framing a face that doesn’t flinch as she shoots at the encroaching men. We feel extreme sympathy for and alignment with Wilson while also knowing that he’s not a good person. Bishop is both a symbol of law and order and a product of a system that can only create suspicion of authority.
The beauty of film—and especially of a film like this—is that it can give us a completely immersive experience in which we become familiar with every detail of someone’s face while also wielding the subjectivity of the lens to force our brains to fill in the dark spots. It can paralyze us with the paranoid fear that an experience may only exist through the eyes of an objective, omniscient observer.6 If Schrodinger’s scientist had taken the hour to do the dishes or go for a walk or take a nap, anything could have occurred to that cat.
*
The tension at the very end of this film doesn’t have much to do with whether or not Bishop and Wilson and Leigh will win against Street Thunder. You don’t get to a climactic sequence like the one in which they make a last stand against the men in a basement hallway, only a handful of shots left to their names, without feeling some sense of assurance that the filmmaker will do right by the characters he’s spent so much time with. The police finally enter, and as the fog from an explosion clears, we’re finally given the objective observation we’ve been waiting for: Bishop and Wilson and Leigh still standing, resolute.
But what happens to the cat if he does survive, and you take him out of the box? Do you put him back on the street? Does he enter a different type of containment—the scientist’s holding cell, the kennel’s cage? When the camera turns off, even our subjective ability to perceive the fate of our characters is lost. John Carpenter knows that to follow anyone outside of the box would be to break the spell. First Leigh walks out, refusing medical treatment, bullet-holed arm still tourniquetted with half of a sweater sleeve, revealing nothing about where she’s going. (Fascinatingly, the actress herself also walked away from her profession and her life—the subject of Charlotte Szlovak’s 2003 documentary, Do You Remember Laurie Zimmer?) Then it’s down to Wilson and Bishop. “It would be a privilege if you’d walk outside with me,” Bishop says. “I know it would,” responds Wilson.
As they walk up the stairs, we can’t help but wonder whether Wilson will end up back behind bars somewhere, or will escape, or will rely on Bishop’s testimony of his behavior to receive some sort of special dispensation. We wonder about Bishop, too: what does life look like for you in your white house on the Westside after a night like this? Perhaps nothing in the outside world has changed; systems are still broken and predatory—after all, even the rescuing police at the end feel faceless and disinterested—and the world is still sorted into meaningless hierarchies, still partitioned by bars. But for an hour or so,7 we were able to be transported into a beautifully ambiguous space of possibility, and that’s not something that dissipates easily.
- Carpenter couldn’t have imagined how well this scene would age, layering in an element of epidemiological horror that only post-2020 viewers could feel creep up their spines.
- Don’t think too hard about the title of the film. It is indeed completely disconnected from any specifics in the film itself. Thirteen is a scary number. Go with it for now, okay?
- One of my favorite shots is the first time we see Wilson in the holding area behind the station. The camera is inside his cell, so we see Wilson clearly, unobstructed; instead, it’s Bishop, the lieutenant in the hallway, who appears to be behind bars.
- This is absolutely a tangent, but I’d argue that it’s just this quantum superposition that makes vampires so incredibly sexy. Erotically hot and yet physically cold? Erect and bloodless? Undeniably fascinating.
- a sort of eeny-meeny-miney-moe game that definitely doesn’t give Wells a fair shot
- Fascinatingly, this film contains a device that creates a sort of meta-reality around its events: Bishop whistles the main theme within the movie, making the score an instrumentation and confirmation of a diegetic song. “Kind of pretty,” Wilson acknowledges.
- 51-ish minutes, if you start counting from the time everyone who matters arrives at the police station