“They live, we sleep” is written on the wall of a vacant church where the protagonist, an unnamed man, wanders in search of answers. Currently an inhabitant of the homeless compound across the street, our blonde-haired hero has become suspicious after witnessing shady activity around it. Distrust seems to be his natural stance.
One could argue that the same could be said of the film’s director, John Carpenter. With his rugged heroes that often opted out of the system, the filmmaker carried on the cult surrounding the lone wolf types, who, like Snake Plissken, weren’t afraid to defy bite the hand that fed them and go their own way. They Live stands out in Carpenter’s filmography because it articulates in whole what has always caught my eye in his oeuvre: his passion for blue-collared types and his distrust of authority figures.
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Films like Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), Escape from New York (1981), Starman (1984), and Big Trouble In Little China (1986) hint at a deeply held sympathy for the everyman, but it’s 1988’s They Live that looks at working-class Americans in all of their subversive glory. They Live has attracted the attention of intellectuals like Slavoj Žižek, the eccentric Marxist philosopher who featured it in his 2012 documentary, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. However, Žižek and others have focused almost exclusively on its depiction of sunglasses as artifacts that can reveal what is hidden from plain sight, that is, ideology. Eyewear is undoubtedly its most famous feature, but it’s only a part of a grander movie.
The film tells the story of the unnamed protagonist, whose name is never uttered throughout, but is listed in the credits as Nada —Spanish for nothing — played by then wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper. He arrives in Los Angeles eager to find a job and a new life, settling at a construction site. There he meets Frank, an African American man who takes him to the homeless camp he calls home.
Nada, a himbo if there was ever one, is enthusiastic about starting over in a new city. In conversation with Frank, filmed against the backdrop of the LA skyscrapers, he says earnestly: “I believe in America. I follow the rules.” Meaning he still believes in the American Dream. Frank, on the other hand, speaks poorly of the prevailing culture of greed and selfishness. However, this position will soon be reversed as Nada fist fights him not long after.
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After Nada discovers that the church is a front for a subversive group focused on broadcasting conspiracies and mass-manufacturing sunglasses, the police destroy the encampment, and he finds himself pushed on a path of accidental rebelliousness. Thus, he quickly fashions himself into a resistance fighter for a scattered and poorly organized cause after an awakening caused by the all-revealing eyewear.
A predominantly silent scene shows that the world around him is laden with hidden messages intended to control the populace. Carpenter shot this sequence as a contrast between the standard, full-colored world seen by the naked eye, and the black & white version shaped by the sunglasses, in which Nada can see the true meaning of things. Consequently, he finds the street littered with bleak commands that seek to influence his behavior in place of the colorful ads, newspapers, and magazine covers. “Obey.” “Consume.” “Conform.” “No independent thought.” “Don’t question authority.” This discovery puts him on a path of doubt, erasing his previous optimism.
Carpenter’s portrayal of the 80s is rooted not in the “Greed Is Good” mantra of the era but rather on the Great Depression. Nada walks across LA, and the only time he rides in a car is because he has kidnapped its occupant. This might seem insignificant, but it establishes the central character and his place in society. His jeans, work shirts and worker boots place him firmly in the working class. In some ways, Nada can be seen as an avatar for the sector that handed Donald Trump his 2016 victory, reversing decades of the Democratic-blue collar alliance. It’s the kind of person who just wants to get by, one who only wishes to work and thrive.
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This is why I argue that They Live displays Carpenter’s love for the blue collar. In his protagonist he found a trustworthy-albeit-clunky leading everyman who stood for everything that regular people did. After all, it’s only upon learning the hidden truth that Nada’s all-American naïveté is replaced by a penchant for death and destruction against the aliens that rule the world. It’s a journey that maybe lacks sophistication, but in the overall scheme of the film, feels natural. After all, why shouldn’t this blonde hunk set off on a heroic journey of rebellion after fortuitously stumbling upon the vast conspiracy to enslave mankind by a cabal of sell-outs and their alien corruptors?
These “ghouls,” as Carpenter called them, were designed to resemble zombies — he has spoken about how their image reflects their corrupted interiors. The 1986 comic pictured them as shapeless blobs with plenty of eyes and referred to them as “the fascinators.” The decision to call them ghouls and liken them to the undead — visually, at least — was a decisive shift dictated both by the medium and the budgetary constraints, as well as the director’s background in horror. Like many of the filmmaker’s creative choices, it has been enshrined as an essential imagery of pop culture, recycled through memes and shirt designs.
Solidarity defines Nada’s brief stay at the homeless camp, where people care for each other without the need for money. They Live’s first act is one of hopeful optimism, even as it looks at the poor largely because it shows a community of those ignored both by society. And by Hollywood in its narrative of the decade, where money isn’t the only thing that matters —this ties in nicely when we consider that the special glasses reveal that printed money in reality says “THIS IS YOUR GOD.”
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Surprisingly, Carpenter portrayed this homeless community not as punk, nor plagued by drug addiction or any other sort of visual signifier. It’s striking the normalcy they are afforded. They just want to eat. They just want to watch T.V. This simplistic representation underlines the brutality of the forces that violently upheave them, and it also serves to build a certain empathy in the audience. “Nada, Frank, and these people are just like you or me,” Carpenter seems to say.
Based on the short story Eight O’Clock in the Morning by Ray Nelson, but mostly on its 1986 comic book adaptation simply titled Nada (penned by Nelson and illustrated by Bill Wray), the film was a respite for Carpenter. It was a low-budget movie made in the years after his Big Trouble in Little China (1986) flopped hard, angered the studio, and gave him a bad name. This time, he settled on adapting a short story with a small budget and a small cast. He gave his lead to a WWF wrestler and let him improvise some of his lines — the IMDB trivia section only states the “kick butt and chew bubblegum” line as ad-libbed, but the film is loaded with clever one-liners.
He filmed mostly outdoors and, from the looks of it, had a lot of fun shooting a B-movie that likened the Reagan era to fascism and presented its supporters as inhuman villains. In this reading, one could even consider that Nada is a buff stand-in for the director’s growing distrust of the mainstream who is let loose to raise hell.
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As Jonathan Lethem has pointed out, “They Live is probably the stupidest film ever to take ideology as its explicit subject. [But] it’s also the most fun.” Fun is an underrated facet of the film. Panned by most critics upon its release for its awkward tone, They Live feels straight out of a comic book. Its action is goofy and boisterous — case in point: Frank and Nada’s glorious six-minute fist fight in an alley, which makes it one of the best Dudes Rock movies ever made. Clever insults that Roddy Piper could have used in a wrestling match take up most the dialogue (my favorites include: “I’m giving you a chance, either put on these glasses or start eating that trash can.” “You know, you look like your head fell in the cheese dip back in 1957.” “You? You look OK. She? Real fucking ugly!”).
The characters are mostly one-dimensional, and the film doesn’t develop their back-stories, but these features don’t feel like flaws. Instead, they build towards an overall comic book feel. It’s light and dense with meaning at the same time, and most of all, hugely entertaining. Its status as a cult favorite has only highlighted these traits as its most significant assets.
They Live clocks in at 94 minutes, making it perfect as a case study of getting to the point. Once the end credits roll in, the first-time viewer will most likely be impressed that so much happened in such a short runtime. Nowadays, when every new film feels the need to expound on every single aspect of its characters, needlessly surpassing the 150-minute mark, They Live shows that sometimes, less is better, and that dumb and fun is just what you need to watch.
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