They Live*
(1988)
(SPOILERS) Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big
fan of They Live – I was a big fan of
most things Carpenter at the time of its release – but the manner in which its
reputation as a prophecy of (or insight into) “the way things are” has grown is
a touch out of proportion with the picture’s relatively modest merits. Indeed,
its feting rests almost entirely on the admittedly bravura sequence in which WWF-star-turned-movie-actor
Roddy Piper, under the influence of a pair of sunglasses, first witnesses the
pervasive influence of aliens among us who are sucking mankind dry. That, and
the ludicrously genius sequence in which Roddy, full of transformative fervour,
attempts to convince Keith David to don said sunglasses, for his own good. They Live should definitely be viewed by
all, for their own good, but it’s only fair to point out that it doesn’t have
the consistency of John Carpenter at his very, very best.
Nada: I have come here to chew
bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubble gum.
One of They
Live’s most vocal advocates is the much-ridiculed David Icke, who rates it
up there with The Matrix as an exposé of the aforementioned way things really are. Devoted conspiracy
theorist as I am, one of the problems I have with the conspiracist view of
Hollywood (and movies generally) is that, while there’s much that is
undoubtedly provably tainted (military backing and support of pictures that
will only occur if it paints the armed forces in a positive light, for example)
the response of the beholder to any kind of creative content, pro or con their
view, is that it is simply espousing the agenda of the elite (even if that’s no
more than being dedicated to a grim, violent and/or apocalyptic worldview; in
every instance it’s been designed to prime us for such actual developments), or
is “soft disclosure” of some description.
In this eye’s view, there is zero room for
the genuine creative agenda of an artist; they must have been buffeted into presenting a tarnished perspective, or
alternatively somehow have their paws on the truth and have somehow prevailed
enough to present the unvarnished facts. Thus, based on personal tastes and
prejudices, you get Icke vouching for The
Matrix on one hand while on the other, others claim the Wachowski are mere
Illuminati stooges. Perhaps it’s even worse than that – anyone up to their neck
in the mire of Hollywood is presumably suffused with Archons, and thus
inescapably corrupted.
It’s also a frequent proud pronouncement of
the conspiracy theorist that they don’t watch movies, or remove themselves from
popular media, which inevitably leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby any
access to TV and movies feels like a bombardment of pertinent commentary, mainlining
straight to their brains. Which, depending on their aforementioned predilections,
yields responses either revelatory or simply presenting the views of our secret
masters. You only have to look at David Wilcock’s recent piece on Pizzagate
(which he, ever modestly – if he were addressing his modesty, you can bet he
would announce that he would prove conclusively in the article you were about
to read, backed by hundreds of indisputable sources, that he was the most
modest and retiring person who ever there was or would be – claims to be “what may well be the definitive… expose”),
in which he has found pretty much any and every reference to pizza ever, right
back to the inventions of dough, cheese and tomatoes, to be highly suspect and
leading. When he then concludes, as he always does, by spending paragraphs documenting
the inane synchronicities of his page view counts, that no one outside of
Charlie Babbitt would find interesting, you end up with a sense that he’s as frequently
running on the fumes of his own insurmountable ego as Ben Fulford is on the effluent
of wildly variable (but always entertaining) secret government sources; in both
cases, this isn’t really of any consequence,
so long as they, as would-be exposers of all that is hidden, don’t mind having
seriously suspect credibility from the off.
Icke, at least, isn’t wildly insecure, but
he’s as prone – as we all are – to seeing confirmations of his biases
everywhere and ignoring those that conflict. So, in They Live’s case, David surmised, “I thought, either that guy got real lucky, or he’s got a very good idea
what’s going on. I suspect the latter”. He proceeds to recount how
Carpenter replied to a letter concerning Icke’s take on the movie: “He said, ‘Oh no, the aliens in the movie
hiding behind human form were symbolic of the Republican Party’. Well, anyone
who’s seen They Live, you’re having a
laugh”. Attempting to further reinforce a slightly desperate position (why
not just recognise that’s what it’s about, but that, through the power of
metaphor and personal interpretation, it also provides an eerie depiction of
what David believes it’s about?), Icke asserts “I think when you watch John Carpenter’s filmmaking history, that’s a
guy who’s got a very good idea of much of what’s happening. That’s my view,
anyway”.
Whatever else can be said about John
Carpenter’s filmmaking history, it’s that it most certainly doesn’t present any kind of unified
perspective on the state of things. This is a guy who loves Howard Hawkes and
Nigel Kneale, who has made movies as tight as they come and as sloppy as hell.
No doubt in some way Icke could force the disparate likes of The Fog, Christine, Star Man and Vampyres to fit his theory, but it
would take some manoeuvring. And while he was about it, he’d could probably do
the same with Tobe Hooper’s consummate oeuvre.
Icke’s take on the real forces at work in
the world has its basis in the gnostic view of Archons (tantamount to
reptilians and greys in modern lore), and “these
entities, so brilliantly portrayed in They Live, are feeding off human low vibrational energy, emotional energy, fear,
anxiety, depression, hatred, because that’s the frequency band that they can
absorb, because that’s their stage of being” (the only part of the movie
that connects with this is Frank’s speculative speech about the aliens “feeding on our cold fuckin’ hearts”),
and how “it gives a brilliant visual
representation of what we’re dealing with and how the world could be if we rid
the world of this force in the shadows”.
Street
Preacher: They
have taken the hearts and minds of our leaders, they have recruited the rich
and powerful, and they have blinded us to the truth.
On the commentary track, Carpenter
explicitly said he made the picture during the Reagan era, and was “trying to say something about that”, and
that’s really pretty evident throughout; this is a movie about the trodden down
underclasses (he charitably suggests Roddy was right for the role because he
knew something about that, and Piper is fine, but I still wish Hollywood blue
blood Kurt Russell had starred; it would have been a punctuation point to his
performance in Big Trouble in Little
China and Nada even has the same mullet; of course, if he had consented to show up in a low budget
Carpenter movie, we wouldn’t have got the movie’s most famous line, improvised
by Piper.
Nada: I just want the chance,
it’ll come. I believe in America. I follow the rules. Everybody’s got their own
hard times these days.
The first images we see are of urban decay
(and They Live’s title wittily
appearing as graffiti) and homelessness with Piper’s John Nada (not a subtle name) told “There’s nothing available for you right now”
at the job centre. Frank’s story (“We
gave the steel company a break when they needed it. You know what they gave
themselves? Raises”) is effectively that of the incipient collapse of
capitalism as a tail-eating snake that can never be sated. But it isn’t a prescient picture; it’s merely
reflecting how things were, how they are and how they will continue to be until
a new presiding paradigm replaces this unsustainable one.
Beardy
Broadcaster: Our
impulses are being redirected We are living in an artificially induced state of
consciousness that resembles sleep.
Now, They
Live definitely does work if you
want to look at it from Icke’s point of view, but that’s as much because
science fiction is blessed with being able to tap into broader themes and
truths; that’s its currency (assuming for a minute that you accept Icke’s
reading of reality, which I’m not – assuming, that is). It diminishes the authors
and artists to suggest all they’re capable of is parroting a script at the
dictation of their overlords (if that’s what the Icke or Wilcock are getting at;
it’s either that or malign subconscious influence via the Archons). The idea
that we are all sheep or zombies sleepwalking our way through lives, dictated
by remote or inaccessible slave masters is nothing new; it’s simply that
Carpenter and the Wachowskis come armed with arresting means of conveying that idea.
Beardy
Broadcaster: The
poor and the underclass are growing. Racial Justice and human rights are
non-existent. They have created a repressive society and we are their unwitting
accomplices. Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of
consciousness. We have been lulled into a trance. They have made us indifferent
to ourselves and others. We are focussed only on our own gain. They are safe as long as they are not
discovered. Their primary method of survival is to keep us asleep keep us
selfish, keep us sedated. They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More
and more people are becoming poor. We are the cattle. We are being bred for
slavery.
The movie’s a fairly resounding attack on
‘80s consumerism and the self-gratifying automatons it breeds, disguised as a
rather nifty science fiction scenario. Carpenter is doing much the same thing with
the genre here as he did for horror in his previous picture, Prince of Darkness, offering a mechanism
(a broadcast in both movies) that fosters a whole different perspective on
reality (religious there, economic here). And, like Prince of Darkness, They Live’s
strength is all in the set up.
The payoff here comes thirty minutes in,
when Nada puts the sunglasses on for the first time, and we witness the
iconically-designed aliens (simple, but hugely effective) and the litany of
subliminal instructions that control our very actions (it’s the next step on
from Alex Cox’s blank supermarket products in Repo Man – notably, Sy Richards appears in both movies): OBEY,
MARRY & REPRODUCE, NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, CONSUME, WATCH TV, SUBMIT, BUY,
STAY ASLEEP, DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY and (on the nose, but perfect) THIS IS
YOUR GOD (on the dollar bill). All with a background hum of “Sleep, sleep” on a metropolitan loop.
Nada: Heh heh. It figures it would
be like this.
This is the picture’s signature sequence in
terms of its “truth” label, one that conjures Invasion of the Body Snatchers-esque paranoia as Nada suddenly realises
he’s in an environment awash with aliens relying on his (and every other somnambulant
human’s) blithe indifference. As a no longer blind man he’s a very real threat:
“I’ve got one that can see”. Piper’s
stream of insults are very amusing too, of course.
Nada: I’m giving you a choice.
Either put on these glasses or start eating that trash can.
The picture’s other famed episode is the
extended fight with the awesome Keith David, as the reluctant Frank Armitage (“Okay. You’re fighting the forces of evil,
that none of us can see without sunglasses”). Frank prefers to do what we
all do, not rocking the boat (“I’ve got a
wife and kids, so leave me alone”). Their altercation reaches a kind of blissfully
inane plateau, where the motivation is
the motivation. The idea of forcing someone to wear a pair of sunglasses, in
isolation, is ludicrously inspired, and the sequence commendably never quite
divorces itself from that absurdity and is all the better for it (as is the bit
where Piper laughs after kneeing Frank in the balls).
Frank: Maybe they’ve always been
with us… those things out there. Maybe they love it… seeing us hate each other,
watching us kill each other off, feeding on our cold fucking hearts.
After this, the picture can’t hope to
maintain such heights. There’s still some decent dialogue, and ideas, such as
the lure of wealth and power to those who work complicity with the aliens, and
the signal that continues transmitting even when the TV set is switched off.
Those disturbed by chem trails will seize on “Earth is being acclimatised. They are changing our atmosphere into
their atmosphere”, but their motivation is very much of the capitalist
creed (depleting the planet and moving on to another, all humans are livestock –
that’s one of the key pieces of evidence for Icke right there – and the Earth is just another developing
planet, their Third World). There’s an excellent scene in which the human collaborators
receive a pep talk concerning the resources the aliens need for multi-dimensional
expansion; in return, the per capita of income of each collaborator has gone up
that year by an average of 39%! And the response when questioned on such moral
turpitude is also pretty damning to the majority of the western world: “What’s the big deal? We all sell out every
day. May as well be on the wrong team”.
But the denouement is perfunctory, reflecting
the limited time and resources Carpenter had to play with, and it means there’s
little resonance to the big idea. At any rate, not in the lingering way there
is with The Thing. That happened in
the first donning sunglasses scene, later underlined, but not really advanced. The
rest is very much cheesy B-movie hokum. The cinematography from Gary B Kibbe is
underwhelming, which would contribute to the lifelessness of much of the
director’s ‘90s output, and Meg Foster, apart from having crazy blue eyes and
pushing Roddy through a window, doesn’t have the most of rewarding of
supporting roles. The reveal ending, though, if indebted to both Network and The Howling, is amusing and adroit.
Its patchiness is part of its charm, of
course, and more directors should do what Carpenter did, dabbling in low
budgets when big success proved elusive; the majority of his ‘90s fare, and
subsequent descent into a semi-retirement of videogaming, are illustration
enough of that. Icke would certainly appreciate Carpenter’s take on aliens,
though, that “I always believe that
aliens should be evil. I don’t believe that Close Encounters and E.T. is valid because they’re not evil. They’re nice’. Certainly, that
accounts for The Thing, and They Live (and the Village of the Damned remake). But Starman, John? Starman’s not
evil. A bit wet, but not evil. That one’s also getting a remake, it seems. They Live could do well from a reinterpretation,
in distinction to almost all of the other remakes we’ve had of Carpenter movies,
since it’s an imperfect picture blessed with a perfect idea; a filmmaker with
the savvy and budget to do it justice could be a godsend. It could even have a
cameo from Icke, provided, if the Archons are amenable.
*Or is it They Live! - I certainly remember the title having an exclamation mark. So perhaps the damn mysterious Mandela Effect is at work here too.
