In John Carpenter’s They Live (1988), a man finally starts seeing things for what they are. Known simply as Nada (Roddy Piper), that man drifts into Los Angeles with no prospects at the start of the movie and quickly finds work in construction. Not long into the film, he happens upon a box of seemingly cast-away sunglasses offering more than mere sunny-day stylishness. When he trains his eyes on a billboard with them on — say, a vacation ad with a red bikini’d woman lazing on a golden shore inviting you to “Come to the Caribbean,” or another promoting a state-of-the-art new computer system — the image seen by the naked eye vanishes. A subliminal command, like “Marry & Reproduce” or “Obey,” suddenly replaces the visual once there in big, blocky letters.
Before you can think “so what?” — critical thinking is barely required to fathom an ad’s manipulative crux — some investigation reveals the promos in Nada’s world are more than just extensions of money-famished corporations. It turns out aliens actually descended on Earth an unspecified long time ago — and these ads are among their handiwork. All don skin suits that make them look human; they comprise the 1 percent of the 1 percent. Conquering is on the brain. Their master plan involves draining the world of all its riches before zooming off to the next vulnerable planet.
When Nada wears his nifty glasses, he isn’t just able to see the hidden messages behind product logos: he can also tell which members of society are aliens incognito. It’s obvious who’s who. Alien faces are sunken and nearly skeletal — “real fuckin’ ugly,” Nada succintly puts it. And when passersby have their backs turned those aliens may be spotted speaking into a radio-like device implanted in their expensive matching watches, communicating with each other when they’re suspicious about covers getting blown. The police and military, of course, work to preserve alien, not public, interest and power.
Nada is so inflamed by his discovery that his mind goes all action-hero mode. He’ll stop at nothing to figure out how to best these strange invaders. And because he’s both an underdog and played by an oxen professional wrestler comfy with one-liners (“I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass — and I’m all out of bubblegum”), you know he won’t merely accomplish what he sets out to do: he’ll also manage to do it far faster and even more effectively than the in-on-the-truth underground resistance fighters who have been refining their attack plan. Piper’s casting is inspired. He’s like a living spoof of figures like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. Those stars’ movies often found their characters using extreme violence as a way to restore the threatened status quo. But in They Live, violence is the only way to vanquish that status quo.
Nada has a worthy second banana in Frank (Keith David), a co-worker who helps him find housing and food early on in the film. Frank is initially resistant to putting on the glasses. Shortly after he put on a pair himself, Nada went on an alien-shooting spree — which obviously looked like a regular one to the average Joe’s eye — and Frank, a father and husband, reasonably wants nothing to do with him. There’s some squabbling when they meet up again. In one of the film’s best scenes, Frank and Nada spend five and a half delightfully slow-going minutes fist-fighting in an alleyway, Nada determined to get a pair on Frank’s face. It’s as much a nod to Piper’s pro-wrestling roots as it is a goofy-but-not-ineffective representation of how hard it can be to give yourself over to a radically different way of thinking when you’ve gotten too used to the one to which you’re accustomed.
Though the directness of its message is unheard of for a mainstream movie, They Live isn’t saying anything unobvious. Take away the alien element and it’s practically a documentary, as Carpenter has himself put it before. Carpenter doesn’t practice a patronizing wake-up-sheeple tone here, though — like he believes himself to have a third eye open. They Live is pure exasperation with consumerist culture, and the way politics, media, and other institutions help propagate it, with a sense of humor. It’s like a warm embrace for the like-minded who have to maintain at least a bare-minimum complicity in consumerist society in order to live. The pliability of its core idea — that we’re being controlled by — has unfortunately made They Live vulnerable to bad-faith interpretations. In 2017, Carpenter, for instance, had to put out a statement unbelievably having to clarify the movie was never meant to be an allegory for “Jewish control” of the world.
Since a clever conceit can only take a movie so far, it’s where Carpenter goes next that really matters. The rest of They Live never quite matches the darkly funny exhilaration of that defining sequence where Nada walks through downtown L.A. at long last seeing ads and magazines and cigarettes and other products without embellishment. But it still evolves into a genuinely thrilling, but also cheekily funny, chase movie where it’s totally possible to overthrow alien capitalism within just a couple of weeks.
Carpenter conceived of They Live to work through his frustrations with Reagan-era avarice and how it widened the already vast gulf between the haves and the have-nots. They Live isn’t traditionally scary the way most of the director’s films are. But what’s enduringly unsettling about it is that it’s hardly an exaggeration to call its overarching idea — that everything when you live in America is bastardized in some way or another by capitalism, puppeteered by the people benefiting from it most — timeless.
Peterson Reviews 