Tuesday, October 22, 2024

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 22: They Live

Day 22: They Live (1988), dir. John Carpenter

Streaming Availability: Peacock (and Tubi, weirdly)

"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."

The Reagan Era was bad. I know the Eighties is this fetishized decade in terms of fashion and music and even horror fandom, but all it also sucked hard in a million ways. The Seventies are a rough wake-up call for America that the Post-War prosperity would not last infinity. Our brilliant plan to fix the Stagflation economy was generally to make things much worse for regular people. We start seeing the demolishing of welfare, a rejection of Keynesian economics for tax cut supply-side fantasies, and more importantly, labor rights on the decline. Reagan was at war with unions, but it extended all across the economy. Before the Eighties, a middle-class job was a stable career. It was easy to believe in the Ford Motor Company as an employee, because there was a good chance you would be working there your entire life. By the Eighties that changed. The new doctrine was "stockholder value above all else". If your salary, no matter how much good you did the company, made the stock price look bad, too bad so sad, you're on the streets, fucker. Now you go to work every day with no dreams of climbing up the ladder, just nightmares that you and some semi-random sampling of 20% of your coworkers might get cut. And that's the problems of the white-collar middle class, they at least could find new jobs. The industrial blue-collar economy was being left to rust away and those jobs were never coming back.

But hey, if you were a kid, you got to watch Ghostbusters cartoons, so nostalgia is all we need for the Eighties. Let us never examine it any further.

In case you've heard otherwise, no, They Live is not an antisemitic fantasy about Jews or lizard people secretly running the world. If you ask John Carpenter what he thinks about your (((Evil Globalists))) tweets, he'll grab his synth board and break it in half over your skull. There is a universal paranoia and grievance at the heart of They Live, which can be manipulated. It's the same way that The Matrix, a movie made by trans women about escaping the illusions of their visible bodies somehow became a rallying symbol for the most toxic misogynist pieces of shit in modern online society. Yes, the Gnostic metaphors of control are scary and can be misapplied if you really want to work hard. The only problem is that They Live is not quiet about who it is afraid of, and it isn't whatever DEI boogeyman reactionary streamers are fuming about this week (one of the two leads is a Black man).

There's an evil alien on TV talking about how "It's a new morning in America", a play on Reagan's 1984 political ad, "It's morning again in America". Maybe that reference is a bit too dated now, you might miss it.

They Live does not show a single alien for an entire act of the film. Before that, there's this palpable sense of unease, something fundamentally wrong with the world. And then those vibes are tossed away for a direct statement of institutional violence. Carpenter stages a terrifying night crackdown with the police savaging a homeless encampment. The police have their faces covered in clouded riot helmets, allowing them to be faceless instruments of violence. Our hero, Nada (Rowdy Roddy Piper) tries to make his new friend, Frank (Keith David) relax. They're both are out-of-work men, having been chewed out by Reaganomics. Nada says, "I deliver a hard day's work for my money. I just want the chance. It'll come. I believe in America." The ideology says hard work will pay off. Everybody gets what they earn under capitalism. Nada instead sees there are no chances, just nightsticks and riot shields as the government torments anybody on the outside.

Within a few scenes, Nada is carrying around a shotgun and coming up with action movie one-liners as he shoots up a bank. That is both the industry he got shat out of, and the most capitalist institution he can lay violence upon. Remember, They Live was made well before the epidemic of random mass violence, so there are parts of this that have aged poorly, even noting how "kick ass and chew bubblegum" is maybe the greatest line ever written in the history of cinema.

Another figure at this homeless encampment is an unnamed Drifter played by legendary actor of drunkards and bums, Buck Flowers, a Carpenter regular. At the end of the movie, we meet Buck Flowers, now shockingly cleaned up in a tuxedo and holding a martini. He's fully bought in on the alien conspiracy, slipping easily in the role of a Fat Cat. "We all sell out every day, might as well be on the winning team."

There's a lot done with the visual metaphor of the Magic Sunglasses. It's this device that allows Nada to suddenly see through all the ideology baked into every aspect of modern life. You can read a lot of Derrida or Foucault whatever, or you can you just put on some glasses and see that every newspaper is demanding "OBEY", "CONSUME", and even heteronormativity with "MARRY AND REPRODUCE". On that note, They Live is up there as Carpenter's gayer movies. The main relationship is between Nada and Frank, who even joke as they get a hotel room together "isn't love grand?" There's a legendary six-minute-long wrestling match in a back alley of LA as Nada demands his new best friend wear the sunglasses and unlock his revolutionary potential. It's violent, sure, but there's a lot of heightened homoerotic emotion to put into this, especially Keith David keeps kneeing Roddy Piper in the balls. A lot of big-shouldered dad bodies slapping each other in acid-washed jeans. Holly (Meg Thompson) is the one bit of female sexuality in this film, and her steel blue eyes and stylish suit is the threatening "MARRY AND REPRODUCE" symbolism written in such a way even the sunglasses cannot help Nada see. Of course, she's working for the aliens.

The Magic Sunglasses also allow Carpenter to have fun with some really goofy special effects. It flips the movie over from this dreary vision of Downtown LA into a Fifties black and white B-movie, complete with flying saucers. The alien design is as silly as they are creepy. It evokes skulls. They have no eyelids or lips, but instead of a skull smile, their mouths hang open with a kind of floppy frog-like expression. With their big shiny eyes, they like something you'd see on a Twilight Zone episode. You cannot actually solve the world's problems with a random rampage, but that's when dealing with humans. When dealing with these adorable freaks, action schlock fantasy rules apply.

As angry as They Live is, and it is very angry, Carpenter still makes a fun movie. This is a vision of America that's been colonized by free market sleazebags the same way we colonized the Earth. Yet, it has got tons of action, big gunfights, Roddy Piper never lacks for a great one-liner. And it ends on a fantastic gag where a topless woman discovers the man she's riding is a gross blue-faced skull being from beyond the stars. "Hey, baby, what's wrong?" That's how you end a movie, man. These visions of full government control and conspiracies are going to get a lot darker and more sinister as the Nineties roll in. The X-Files is coming. And the resistance against conspiracies will see more Timothy McVeys, fewer WWF stars.

Next time! Maybe the single weirdest movie of the month, Communion.

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