They Live (

1988

) ½

At the start of They Live, it's not entirely clear when the story is taking place. The clothes, technology, and general appearance of the characters say modern-day, but the blues soundtrack and certain touches of the landscape scream great depression. This is because the film is set in the very near-term future: The Roaring '90s. A future imagined by director John Carpenter, not the real 1990s, which were much more evenly distributed with their economic success. We're left to gradually pick up the pieces about how this brave new world works and how it differs from the one we live in, which is my favorite approach to sci-fi settings. Sure, an expository text dump, al la Star Wars (1977) can be effective, and even a fun way to introduce viewers to a fantastic world, but for my money there is nothing better than being plopped down in the middle of a setting and made to wander about a bit, getting acquainted with all the strange features. What we quickly glean from characters and dialogue in They Live is that at some point in the early 90s the economy collapsed, leaving millions out of work and living in latter-day Hoover-villes. However, unlike previous economic downturns, this one did not bring any social conflict along with it, instead, the populace sunk into a state of lethargic despondence.

The film follows a drifter named Nada (presumably another man with no name variant al la the Sergio Leone Westerns of the Akira Kurosawa samurai films) who comes to Los Angeles to find work in a construction yard. He gets a job (mostly because he brought his own tools with him) but is left homeless until his first payday. So, he sets up in a shanty-town with his coworker Frank Armitage. Things are going well enough for Nada, the camp has hot meals, showers, and even a working communal TV set, the only odd thing is that every so often the TV signal is interrupted by a strange pirate broadcast of a bearded intellectual-type talking about brainwashing and social control. During one of these broadcasts, Nada sees the old blind priest from a nearby church mouthing along with the man on the TV, almost as if the old codger knows all the words before they are spoken. Nada, a curious sort by nature, wants to know more, so the next day he sneaks into the church and makes a startling discovery: The constant choir music booming out of the building is a ruse, it's just a recording. Indeed, the whole church is being used for other purposes. Just what those are won't be clear for some time, but there's a set up in there that looks like a drug-lab along with boxes and boxes of sunglasses. Nada may be curious, but this is getting too strange even for him, so he hightails it out of the church.

The next night, the whole camp is raided by the riot police, the church is ransacked and the homeless shelters are bulldozed. The sequence of riot cops marching lockstep before the pink backdrop of flares, and the roar of sirens is one of the best moments in the film. It hammers home both the power of the authority and the weakness of those caught in it grinding gears. Even though at this point, the audience has no idea what the guys in the church were really doing, or why the police find it so threatening, the callous actions of the cops make it obvious just who we are going to sympathize with. The cops kill whatever members of the church they can, and confiscate all the glasses kept within, but they miss one box that Nada takes for himself the next day. On a whim, and probably wondering what all the fuss was about, he tries on the glasses. At first, it seems like nothing much has changed, but then he catches sight of a billboard that just reads “Obey.” After a few moments of looking around he sees that all the advertisements, billboards, and newspaper articles have been replaced with simple, and ominously authoritarian messages like: “Obey” “Stay Asleep” and “Do not question authority.” What's more, some of the people walking around are not people at all, but some sort of inhuman monsters. Invariably it's the guys in the fancy suits, the women with all the diamond jewelry, and the cops with chevrons on their arms.

The more I watch and write about films, the more I realize how rare Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) really was. Sci-fi stories with contemporary political dimensions are common enough, but for the most part, they either devolve into boring propaganda or (more amusingly) prove the opposite point from that which they set out to (looking at you Tacoma [2017]). It's the rare fantasy film that taps into something so fundamental and so powerful, that it immediately gets re-interpreted to fit multiple competing political ideologies. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is a film about alien doppelgangers being grown in seed pods, with no ambitions beyond being entertaining and profitable. Yet nonetheless, it was interpreted by those who saw it as both an allegorical tale of Soviet infiltration of America, and as an allegorical jab a the fearful conformity of the McCarthyite Red Scare. Indeed, They Live reminds me a lot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), in the ways its central fantasy can be twisted and re-imagined depending on the viewer's biases. A cadre of disguised aliens brainwashing the world through the TV could work as a political fable for most of the more popular modern ideologies, and nearly all of the fringe ones to boot. Leftists would obviously see the film through a Marxist lens of capitalists exploiting and controlling the population, while right-wingers could see the aliens as stand-ins for the globalist types and their brain-washing TVs as symptomatic of the liberal domination of media. The bones of the story work regardless of whether you read the aliens as Freemasons, Jews, or reptilians; just so long as you believe that a particular group is secretively controlling the world. The notion of seeing through the propaganda of a sinister elite is also very attractive for a lot of viewers. Indeed, a quick search online will show you a multitude of edits of the famous glasses scene, where Nada first discovers the extent of the alien brainwashing, with political slogans for various parties being swapped out for what their opponents see as the true message. It's a fantasy common to people of all political stripes because all political ideologies are rife with nonsense and hypocrisy (some more than others). We enjoy imagining that we see through the bullshit that blinds other people, even when it is highly likely that we are ourselves blind to the mountain of crap in our own chosen belief systems.

Given all that, I'm a little surprised that They Live opts for an explicitly Marxist worldview rather than going the full Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and being explicitly apolitical while having a multitude of political interpretations. Sadly, we would have to wait for The Matrix (1999), for a film where the political message of a similar theme was left ambiguous. On the plus side though, They Live handles its political overtones with a degree of subtlety normally lacking in Marxist artwork, taking place mostly in a few quiet exchanges between Nada and Frank at the beginning, and in a few speeches and scenes towards the end. Frank complains about the bastards at the steel mill who cut his hours and gave themselves raises; the aliens are referred to as developers cultivating the cosmic third-world, that sort of thing. It skirts being propaganda by a fair margin (which is too bad because a film that denounces the evils of being propaganda while being itself thinly-veiled propaganda would be hilarious), but it's pretty clear what the film's intentions are throughout. Even though the political overtones are handled well, they still cause a problem for They Live, as the film's genre and politics are at odds with one another.

The two most iconic moments in They Live, show just how divided the film is. The first, as mentioned above, is the scene where Nada, puts on a pair of sunglasses that lets him see through the alien disguises. Before him, the world opens up, and the sinister truth of reality, to which he has previously been blind, is revealed to him in all its horror. He sees the subliminal messages that are beamed into everyone's subconscious from every advertisement, newspaper article, and stop sign: “Obey”, “Marry and Reproduce”, and “Stay Asleep.” He sees the sinister alien overlords who rule the earth from the shadows, secretly controlling every aspect of our lives with the aid of their human quislings. It's a powerful scene, rife with political meanings. Following his revelation about the world though, Nada grabs a shotgun and bursts into a bank which is positively crawling with the alien bastards. There he announces to all present that he is here to “Kick ass and chew bubblegum... and I'm all out of bubble gum” before mowing down every alien he can lay eyes on. The two scenes scarcely seem like they could exist in the same film, yet they are less than five minutes apart. The problem is that while this is, on one hand, a serious movie with unusually deep political layers for its genre, it is nonetheless an over the top 80s action movie in the mold of Commando (1985) and Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985). It's a genre that was, at this point, dominated by right-wing patriotic propaganda. Carpenter is trying to lay a communist (or at the very least leftist) claim on the genre but there is a problem with his effort, the conventions of the genre favor conservative politics. These are stories about lone heroes besting all odds, they are innately individualistic stories and consequently gel quite nicely with conservative politics. It is possible to make a good apolitical action movie along these lines, but making an openly leftist film seems misguided at best. As a result, the tone of the movie zig-zags all over the place from disturbing to absurd and back again. Crammed as it is in such a short window, it's enough to give you emotional whiplash.

The infamous scene where Nada forces Frank to wear the glasses, is emblematic of this problem. The political subtext is that its difficult to open someone's mind to the truth when they have a vested interest in not seeing it, but this clashes with the generic conventions that demand this conflict be played out in the form of an exciting fist-fight. Moreover, since Nada and Frank are our two heroes, it would not be at all acceptable for either one of them to easily overpower the other. These guys are peers, and in an action movie, this means that neither one could easily beat the other in a straight fight. The result is an absurd scene that lasts for 10 minutes where Frank and Nada beat the snot out of each other over the prospect of wearing a pair of sunglasses for a few minutes. It starts off funny, but quickly wears out its welcome and leaves you staring in disbelief that this scene has really been going on for so long. We're left with two guys almost killing each other because one of them won't try on a pair of fucking sunglasses, and that is more than enough to snap anyone's sense of immersion.