They Live (1988)

 

100 best Science Fiction films

Popular Mechanics list

#91. They Live (1988)

 

 

Before I get into the nitty-gritty, let me summarize this film in four words that are totally to the point, but completely ambiguous without context, "They live, we sleep."

Got it? Good. Now let’s get started…

Filmmakers know they are communicators in the most mundane sense, but want to be seen as artists somewhat above that standard; this creates a conflict within the art because all narrative media is communicating some type of politics, even when it doesn’t want to, because the audience will tie that narrative to the real-world, and everything real has some kind of political implications/consequences. Both fiction and politics, both when honest or prevaricating, shares the struggle to mirror the real world, and so the mirror of fiction can no more escape the curse of its consequentialism any more than politics can, but unlike politics, fiction mostly doesn’t want it.

When you put politics up-front in a fiction, you’re begging for a double-judgement: first, you will be evaluated on the quality of your art; second, your ideology will be tested against a whole different, more contentious, litmus test imbedded in the audience’s head, and the artist presumably has less control of the second litmus test than the first. Many filmmakers have come to the conclusion that to protect that art, the more contentious messaging must become subterranean within the narrative as to not distract the audience from the art. Often times they still hold out hope that the message will still have force, maybe even more force, by not calling too much attention to it. The best example of this would be the film “Casablanca” (1942), which is one of the all-time great political propaganda films, tied specifically to an emerging deal between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin that would give birth to Operation Torch during WWII, but do you remember that from the film? Of course not, the then-unsettled deal upon which the film rested wasn’t even fully public on date-of-release (it was mere weeks behind it); what you remember about “Casablanca” is the love story.

This is one of the things that Marshall McLuhan was addressing in his famous dictum, "The medium is the message," wherein in the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. McLuhan also recognized that this also may mean that the artistry subverts the artist’s final control of the message, which was one of the things addressed in the potent but also deliberately-nearly-incomprehensible “The Medium Is the Massage” (first published in 1967). Perhaps the best example of this is the monster movie, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956, #93 on this list), which quite intentionally surrenders that final control -- despite wearing the fact that it is a political film on its sleeve, I defy anyone to make a truly definitive case whether the politics being presented are Right-wing or Left-wing in its messaging.

Now here we have a film that not only wears the fact that it’s political on its sleeve, but puts neon signs with blinking arrows around its ideological dialectic, which often makes for a bad film. Since its language is exaggerated metaphor rather than rigorous realism, it also takes of the additional risk of becoming a propaganda film for something it maybe oppositional, even embarrassing, to the filmmaker. It’s like this: imagine reading a film review that includes a sentence similar to, “This is the kinda of movie that a vile and delusional Conspiracy Masturbater like UFO Cult-leader David Icke would mistake as a documentary.” Such a sentence probably indicates that the reviewer hated the movie; but not this time. Yes, Icke would mistake this for a documentary, but this movie 100 times smarter than Icke, it also never lets you forget that.

This film is a cry of unrestrained rage at the fake moralities in service of soul-deadening consumerism that were engendered by President Ronald Reagan’s brutal Neo-Conservatism. Reagan beat incumbent Carter in 1980 in a landslide after powerfully asking the American people, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Yet four years later the USA was worse off by virtually every measure, and Reagan had repeatedly broken his promise not to raise taxes, shifted the tax-burden from off the rich onto everyone else, shredded the safety next of those he additionally burdened, accelerated the shift of our jobs over-seas, crushed he unions, and allowed the Federal deficit to skyrocket -- yet still won re-election by an even wider margin than the first time around. Faced with this, John Carpenter clearly was thinking that maybe the majority of Americans were not seeing the same reality as he, so --writing under the snarky pseudonym Frank Armitage (a Lovecraft reference) and drawing inspiration from a 1963 short story, “Eight O’Clock in The Morning” by Ray Nelson (a seriously unrated author, he’s is more famous as the inventor of the propeller-beanie hat than his prose) -- he vented his rage at what he viewed as our national complacency and ignorance with one of the most unapologetically subversive movies ever to get a major release in the USA.

Wisely, it keeps it focus on the power of propaganda, a tool of oppression that can be bipartisanly exploited, so given that this is an anti-propaganda propaganda film inevitably, even though Reagan is the main target, like “Invasion…” before it, it had no intentions of letting either side off the hook. Carpenter explained the film in an interview this way, "I began watching TV again. I quickly realized that everything we see is designed to sell us something... It's all about wanting us to buy something. The only thing they want to do is take our money."

It’s got a pretty rigorous three-part script, all about the political evolution of our work-class guy incrementally realizing how much his mainstream-Conservative viewpoint had betrayed him. The first third outlines the grinding inhumanity that challenges his illusions, the second focuses on his painful process of realization, and the last on his retribution against those who had lied to and exploited him.

Our working class hero is John Nada, played by “Rowdy” Roddy Piper whose blunt features and broad and bulky frame was a wonderful relief of the dilettantishly sculpted pretty boy- physiques that dominating 1980s action heroes. Piper gave what was, up till then, the finest performance in a film by a former WWF professional wrestler, and Piper would never be this good again in a movie again (director Carpenter is often under-credited on how good he is with his casts, please refer to “The Fog” (1980), #91 on this list, for Jamie Lee Curtis’ praise for the director who defined the early part of her career). John’s character was aptly described by an un-named critic on the “Rivers of Grue” blogspot as, “just a regular guy trying to make an honest wage in a world predisposed with affording the well-to-do greater riches, while sticking it to the poor man.”

Arriving in LA, Nada is sent away by the unemployment office, sleeps in an alley and tries to get a gig at a construction site only to be tuned down without being given a chance. He makes a friend, Frank (Keith David, who also has an awesomely massive body) who does find him some work, and takes John to “Justiceville,” a contemporary Hooverville with a soup kitchen occupying a vacant lot across the street from a Spanish Deco church. Frank introduces John to Gilbert (Peter Jason), the nominal leader of the encampment and the film’s voice of outrage against contemporary Capitalism, “The whole deal’s like some kinda crazy game…and the name of the game is make it through life…only everyone’s out for themselves and lookin’ to do you in at the same time.”

John’s not buying it, “You oughtta have a little more patience in life…I believe in America.”

The first indications of the weirdness to come is the presence of black helicopters, pirate TV interruptions of regular programing warning about things to come, and a decidedly odd vibe coming from that church.

The pirate TV guy rants:

“The poor and the underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent. 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, to others. We are focused only on our own gain…Please, understand: They are safe so long as They are not discovered. That is Their primary method of survival. Keep us asleep, keep us selfish, keep us sedated…”

John checks out the church, finds the door unlocked, and discovers that singing congregation is a tape recording. In a back room there’s a low-tech lab with rows and rows of…sunglasses? Oh yeah, and the graffiti on the wall, “They Live, We Sleep.”

Before I continue, a note about how important the homeless encampment setting is to the anti-Reagan messaging of this film. In the USA there has likely always been a homeless problem, but it never grew unmanageable until the rise of urbanization, when if you lost your job you were also denied the option to live off the land. Every financial crisis since the emergence of the Gilded Age (1890s) has carried with it a severe, and quickly forgotten homelessness crisis.

The shockingly quick emergence, and massive size, of the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression spurred a rare public commitment to the crises and brought about the reforms of the New Deal and the birth of America’s rather stingy federal safety net. During the 1930s, we were not asleep.

The next time the issue of homelessness managed to penetrate the public’s stubborn indifference was not until the 1970s, and that one featured a larger number of mentally ill, which was blamed on opening up the prison-like mental hospitals and freeing from indefinite incarceration patients who were guilty of no crimes. This crisis was used cynically to decry the failures of the Liberal policies of the era by cynical operators who exaggerated the percentage of mentally-ill former-inmates among those who could not find housing, and not-for-nothing, those telling the exaggerations themselves had no interest in investing in the infrastructure to support the mentally-ill homeless that they complained so much about.

By the time we reach the 1980s, and the disaster that Reaganomics wrought, it became obvious that the fastest growing demographic among the homeless were children, exposing the perception that homelessness and mental illness being synonymous for the cynical lie that it was – homelessness was about the inability to afford housing, that was the beginning and the end of it. Homeless became a national shame, but no one seemed capable of forcing the Leviathan into living up to its end to the Social Contract when it came to our most vulnerable, be they children, mentally ill, or basically anyone else.

In the city of LA, where this film is set, the open sore of homelessness was a district called Skid Row, and it had been so pretty much continuously since at least the Great Depression, maybe even back to the 1890s. The city had always dealt with this issue of humans without housing by expecting the Police to fix it, a cruel policy absurdity as the Police have nothing in their powers or resources that have anything to do with shelter, unless you call jail shelter. The consequences of this stupidity was a never-ending (but ignored during most election-cycles) human rights crisis and periodic outbreaks of official abuse of the most defenseless.

During the era that this filmed was made, the brutalism was especially pronounced as it was well into the second decade of the tenure of arrogant Darryl Gates as Chief of Police, whose hardline, paramilitary, and explicitly biased approach to law enforcement would cause the city to burn with rage in 1992. Though reforms would be instituted after his forced resignation, regarding Skid Row there has been no appreciable change in over-all-policy, and even today Skid Row is the dumping-ground for 3,000 to 6,000 homeless.

Something that we must be very clear about, after Reagan left office, our media stopped looking at homelessness even though the number of homeless families in the USA have steadily increased across the next four Presidential Administrations, two for each party. As of 2013 it’s been calculated that 1-in-30 American children lived in shelters, on the streets, in cars, on campgrounds or doubled up with other families in tight quarters, often forced to move from one temporary residence to another so frequently that attending school regularly is out of the question.

Now back to the film, because the very next scene was a “police riot.” That term was popularized after its use in the “Walker Report,” which was the result of a federal investigation of the violence surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and described as the "unrestrained and indiscriminate" use of force that Police "inflicted upon persons who had broken no law, disobeyed no order, made no threat." The police riots that erupted when officers were ordered to clear homeless encampments in the 1980s drew much media attention, but not so much anymore.

Faceless, riot-gear-clad, officers with nightsticks descended of Justiceville, beating the citizens and destroying the property of those who had next-to-nothing, in an orgy of totalitarian self-indulgence that unfortunately was not much exaggerated compared to real-world incidents. John protects a child, stops taking it from the man, and gets his ass handed to him.

And thus, the illusions are shattered and we move on the revelations.

In the morning, the already-homeless have to pick through the wreckage of their already-marginal existence and the church across the street is a burnt-out shell. The Police are gone, and John surmises that the riot was never about the homeless, but to cover the arson of the lab. As it happens, he still has access to a box of those sunglasses that no one else knows about.

This was the second in a three-picture deal Carpenter was able to secure with Alive Films. That deal marked a turning point in career, as his access to new talent made his films less-dominated by people both in front and behind the camera that he had long-working relationships with (in this film, only one cast member, Keith David, was a Carpenter alumni from the days before this deal). It can be argued this contributed to the decline in the quality of his output post-“The Thing” (1982, later on the list) but one of the new names on this film was a clear blessing to him, cinematographer Gray B. Kibbe, who Carpenter was impressed enough with to use again on “Into the Mouth of Madness” (1994, #89 on this list). Kibbe capture a landscape of bleak-decay and emptiness in a crowded city. The look was deliberately unattractive, something a lot of critics complained about, but I gotta ask, is a Hooverville supposed to look like a Caribbean beach? The color palette interestingly mixing sun-bleached mutedness with frequent incursions of un-distracting vividness, the mutedness serves the despairing look while the vividness essential for the coming contrast we see when John puts the glasses on.

In a striking POV shot, easily achieved with today’s CGI but enormously difficult for a low-budget film from the 1980s, the frame of the glasses slide across the landscape and in the lenses the world becomes black & white (Carpenter intended that as a subtle slur against Ted Turner’s policy of colorizing classic films). Though the buildings and streets are all the same, all the billboards, magazine covers, and even the image on our money are radically different. A colorful vacation billboard now reads simply, “Obey,” in big block-letters. The list of ingredients on a can of soup now only says, “Consume.” Other messages, so much more to the point than the naked lady in the ice cube, are “Sleep,” “Watch TV,” “Doubt Humanity,” “Do Not Question Authority,” “Surrender,” “Follow,” “No Independent Thought,” “Marry and Reproduce,” and all dollar bills read, "THIS IS YOUR GOD."

And then when he looks into a crowd, he sees that some of these people are, well, not people. Some of them are grotesque, lipless monsters with glowing bug-eyes. And now that he can see which ones are the monsters, you also notice the monsters where higher-priced suits than everyone else.

John is less horrified than you’d expect, “It figures it’d be something like this.”

Revelation becomes retribution pretty quickly, as John, not entirely up to speed as to how Police-States work, finds aliens disguised as cops chasing him, and goes on a shooting spree. Now a fugitive, he needs allies. One he finds by accident, cable TV assistant director Holly Thompson (Meg Foster, an actress blessed with almost supernaturally blue eyes that sparkle as much as the…well…aliens, so I guess that was foreshadowing), the other is Frank.

Frank takes a lot of convincing, maybe it’s John’s lack of negotiation skills, “I'm giving you a choice: Either put on these glasses, or start eating that trashcan.” This deteriorates into a fist-fight that goes on for a full seven minutes that is still the movies most famous sequence (it was even parodied on “South Park” (TV series first aired in 1997). Carpenter wanted an “incredibly brutal and funny fight, along the lines of the slugfest between John Wayne and Victor McLaglen in ‘The Quiet Man’ [1952]," and devoted three-weeks to rehearsal for this one scene. In the end, he surpassed his own template, and I’d say the only fist-fight in American cinema that is this scene’s equal for dumb brutishness combined with an exhausting epicness was in the sadly under-appreciated “Soldiers in the Rain” (1963, its box-office was badly hurt by being released on the day JFK was shot).

Now this is where I should tell the as we move into the retribution stage the films messaging deepens further still, and it achieves an analysis of the rot threatening the American ideal equal to the original (and never released) version of Orson Welles’ “The Magnificent Ambersons” (1942).

Fuck no. This is a 1980s action movie. We’ve been waiting two-thirds of the running time to see some serious ass-kicking, and now that time has come.

I should stop here to address this film’s relationship with “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” (if you don’t get that reference, it is your own job to look it up). John and Frank can morally murder anyone their sunglasses tell them to, because they aren’t really human. Above referenced Conspiracy Masturbater David Icke embraces a similar ideology as he is 100% convinced that Jews, the British Royal Family, both President Bushes (and Jed too, who will never be President), Barak Obama, Bob Hope, and I don’t know how many other people, are actually lizard-aliens disguised as humans. Let’s kill ‘em all! That raises the question of where we draw the line between our heroes and the like of Charles Whitman and Adam Lanza.

The answer is, we don’t. Once John shouts out the film’s most famous two lines of dialogue, “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum,” our hearts belong to him forever.

Ahhh…but there’s a deeper issue. It was best summarized by one of the film’s fans, David DeMoss:

“[The aliens are a] wish-fulfilling, adolescent projection…John Carpenter only wishes (as do I) it were this simple. He wishes that the virulent, psychopathic, death-mongering destructiveness of modern civilization could be lain at the feet of alien invaders…And wouldn’t that make things so much easier? A computer virus in their mothership, a real virus in their bodies, or a single bullet in just the right place at just the right time and poof, done. Like a video game.

“Much simpler than the real work of changing our world and making it a better place for ourselves and those unlucky enough to come after us. Much better than the wretched Truth. There are no aliens among us…only broken, fractured human beings with no conception of the consequences of their actions. Don’t let their lack of glowing bug-eyes fool you: They exist, as surely as We do, and while We Sleep, They do indeed Live.

“There’s no need for them to be aliens unless you (like most of us) require some form of psychological displacement to get yourself through the day and absolve humanity of any and all responsibility its many crimes against the planet…If I were a money-mongering bug-eyed monster with (say) a movie studio under my belt, ‘They Live’ is exactly kind of flick I’d want recalcitrant filmmakers to churn out. It manages to perfectly describe the problems of our modern world while flattening their causes and offering no good solutions. It’s the kind of TV We are meant to watch while We Sleep…and that I will not have to apologize to my non-existent future children for the poisoned, add-cluttered, acid rain-soaked world I leave them.”

And remember, that’s from someone who loved the film.

Trailer:

They Live Official Trailer #1 - Keith David Movie (1988)