Film Review: John Carpenter's They Live
by Vic Neptune
John Carpenter sometimes puts his name in front of his film titles, something Federico Fellini did, as in Fellini Roma and Fellini Casanova. I guess it’s a way of imprinting the subject matter with a specific point of view. Others have made versions of Casanova’s life, but Fellini’s version with Donald Sutherland stands out as decidedly Felliniesque. Similarly, John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) features Carpenter’s distinctive style of mixing outrageous situations with character driven plots. Even a relatively gentle film like Starman, with Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen, manages to combine elements of a road film with an alien on the run, the alien looking exactly like the dead husband of the woman he’s abducted, and a government effort to find him for the sake of study and dissection. A deeply moving film, Starman is also a love story. This elaboration is meant to convey Carpenter’s ability to make multi-layered films that on the one hand, serve to entertain, but also to provide food for thought to those who tend to think about what they watch.
They Live, on the surface, depicts the low level of Los Angeles homeless life, with the protagonist, Nada (Roddy Piper), a man who’s hitchhiked from Denver, coming to the city with a backpack and a bedroll, his eyes open to drinking in the atmosphere of the metropolis. He gets a construction job, befriends an African-American coworker, Frank (Keith David), who takes him to a community of homeless people provided with food by a charitable group led by a preacher. Nada one night notices that a TV set watched by a few of the homeless men features interruptions by an intense bearded man telling viewers to turn off Channel 54, to realize that there are forces at work manipulating their minds.
The bearded man fades in and out, replaced by static. The men watching Channel 54 seem mesmerized, unaware of their surroundings. The next day, Nada enters the chapel run by the preacher, overhears the preacher, the bearded man from TV, and one or two others talking with intensity about distribution of some item to the public. That night, cops come along with bulldozers to demolish and terrorize the community, scattering them. This scene reminded me of something that happened several months ago when Governor Gavin Newsom of California “rolled up his sleeves” and assisted with the breaking up of a homeless area. Possessions of the homeless in that action were tossed about and gotten rid of in the most callous manner. The scene in the film proved to have several similarities with real aspects of our lives in this century.
Nada escapes arrest or injury in the destructive raid. The next day he enters the chapel and finds a cardboard box sealed with tape. He takes it away and opens it in an alley, finding dark glasses inside, nothing but dark glasses. He takes out a pair and puts them on, sees a man walk by at the alley’s mouth. The “man” has a skull-like face blended with a mechanical look, bulging eyes, and lipless mouth. With the glasses off, the person looks normal. Nada closes the box and stows it in a garbage can, then ventures onto a busy sidewalk. He sees signs on buildings that say things like “BUY” or “CONSUME”. With the glasses down, it might be an image of a fabric softener, or a bottle of whiskey. He looks at a magazine at a newstand. The pages say things like “DON’T USE YOUR IMAGINATION”, “CONFORM”, “DON’T THINK”, “DON’T QUESTION AUTHORITY”.
Nada’s sense of reality unravels. He realizes he’s stuck in an alien-like world that seems familiar but is hostile to humanity. He draws attention to himself, staring at people in a convenience store. He notes that some people appear human, while others are not. He loses it, gets noticed right away, the aliens sound the alert, he’s pursued, he gets away, but cops track him down. He overpowers them, takes a gun, kills them--they’re not human. He uses the gun on a few more of the aliens.
He goes to his worksite, finds Frank, who doesn’t turn him in, but gives him his pay for the week he worked. Nada insists that he try on the glasses, but Frank refuses. They fight in what has to be one of the longest fist and whatever else fights in the history of movies. It occupies at least ten to fifteen minutes of the film. I can only assume, in Carpenter’s favor, that he meant to show how the aliens control us by getting us to fight each other. This could apply to how in our time we get worked up over cultural issues, something encouraged by the wealthy elites, as we worry more about those issues than about the control exerted over us by power structures that don’t have our best interests in mind.
Frank finally puts on the glasses and sees the truth. The pair team up to go after the source of the transmissions coming from Channel 54, a tall building somewhere in LA. Once inside, they overhear a speech in progress. A room filled with aliens in human form hear about how the “Project” to completely take over Earth will come to fruition in “2025.” I laughed when I heard this, but I also felt a chill, since this film, which anticipated, from 1988, some of the common features of our current society, seems on the one hand to be an action adventure movie with wacky science fiction/horror elements, but is also a prophetic look at the effects of propaganda, advertising, and group think on a population. Can you be certain that what you think and believe is actually what YOU think and believe? Are ideas planted in our heads by those without our best interests at heart? Look at political advertising. When an election is on the way, sometimes months in advance, a battery of simple-minded political ads attempt to convince us to vote this way or that way. They use the approach of a sledgehammer knocking down a wall, banging away, hoping to penetrate enough minds to make a difference in the ballot counts. But are any of these ads reflective of the truth?
They Live depicts a situation in which humanity is being consumed and swayed by bullshit. The citizens don’t know about this coercion. Being human, we are also subject to such coercion, outside the fictional world of the film. If only the people trying to manipulate us into bad economic situations and into unnecessary wars had bulging eyes, mechanical faces, and lipless mouths, perhaps we would not be so susceptible to believing in their lies.
John Carpenter was on to something, and it is 2025
Vic Neptune writes, makes movies (YouTube Channel John Berner), collages, paintings. Moves made as Rhombus. Film criticism based on thousands of movies of all eras seen. Strong interest in literature: Shakespeare, Thomas Mann, Jack London, Robert . Howard, Joan Didion, Philip K. Dick, and many others. History and religion other interests also. Favorite filmmakers: Jean- Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasonlini, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Federico Fellini. Life without art is art without life.
