Warriors in the Tube

Behind all of these blog posts is a secret campaign. It isn't just about the relentless need for my ego to parade itself up and down the super-information highway, like a streaker waving at passing trucks from the hard shoulder of the M8. I am waging a war against the mundane reality that excludes art from the traffic of daily life.

The Glasgow Film Festival has always had my heart, because it is not just aimed at the industry (festivals can frequently become hermetically sealed bubbles, in which the artists and the audience are the same people). It did get the Glasgow Marketing Board involved, and they say it is about attracting tourists, but we all know the truth. The GFF is for the people of Glasgow. That's why it has the classic film strand, and the cool art films that fit in with the culture of a city that is full of DIY projects and galleries.

I am championed SPT's use of the subway as a cinema today. Since it is sold out, I can't be accused of being a salesman. I just believe that this is exactly the sort of project that fits my secret agenda.

The experience of watching a film in an unfamiliar location is good enough (how I remember the magic of seeing Back to the Future projected on a wall in Athens - the romance of the warm night breeze and the thrill of hearing Michael J Fox speak in badly dubbed Greek), but the choice of film, which might be The Warriors, connects the film to the space. The magic of bisociation is made all the more complex: it is a film set in a subway, shown in a subway.

And it works both ways. It is a reminder that a station can be more than a station. St Enoch is no longer the place where I get off to buy toys at Hamley's. It retains the traces of the film.

I long to see a city alive with art, where the discussions of music, film and theatre inform the broader understanding of politics, architecture and life. And if everyone is talking about it, more of those passing trucks might stop for this naked hitcher...

The Warriors. Nothing to do with the GFF or SPT

This blog post in no way reveals the film being shown at Secret Subway. I am merely speculating on what might be a good choice.

The Warriors is a relic from a time when action films did not have to be brain dead. Yes, it's very exciting watching Bruce Willis die hard again, this time with his son, but I don't think that there is going to be any great insights into the nature of community. The Warriors, on the other hand, took an ancient Greek text, updated it to New York in the 1970s, took it on a thrill ride through the underground and portrayed gang culture with a sympathetic understanding of the yearning to belong.

The challenge for any film about gang culture is not to glamorise a lifestyle that is violent and exclusive. Glasgow has a tradition of gangs and, unfortunately, a perverse pride in its status as No Mean City. The Warriors refuses to compromise. The gang might have a heroic leader, but its members are misogynistic (one attempts to assault a woman in a park), violent (plenty of fighting, most memorably in a public toilet) and badly dressed (leather waist coasts and no shirt is a look that never goes out of fashion).

Although it begins with an attempt by Cyrus to unify the gangs, it soon devolves into a dark trip home for The Warriors, chased by other gangs and experiencing the full alienation of being downtown boys in an uptown world. Taking place over the course of a single night, it emphasises the dislocation of the lads through the repeated exhortations of a faceless DJ and the bleak urban landscape.

Coney Island, the fun-fair that has been used as a symbol of faded dreams in everything from Godspeed You Black Emperor's musical meditations on late capitalism to Angel Heart, suddenly becomes a symbol of homecoming. The city, hostile as it is, has a character of its own - brutal, perhaps, but also familiar and lending its feral children battlegrounds and a sense of belonging.

Placing a film like this in a Subway station - say, St Enoch's - would resonate with the fundamental themes of movement and the unfamiliar. Sure, it's a familiar station, but a lot less familiar a film theatre.