HALLOWEEN 2K20: John Carpenter Tribute - A Review of "They Live"

"I have come here to get ripped off by Duke Nukem, and look cool... Man if only Vince let me
carry all of these guns down to the ring. I'd never lose!"

Oh boy, now we're getting down to the nitty gritty with one of my all time favorite movies, not just John Carpenter movies, but movies in general. Let's move on after Prince of Darkness and talk about They Live. The film follows an unnamed drifter... who literally doesn't have a name in the entire film and is addressed as "Nada" in the end credits... who discovers through special sunglasses that the ruling class of the United States and possibly even the rest of the world are aliens, concealing their appearance and manipulating people to spend money, breed, and accept the status quo with subliminal messages in mass media.

Yeah, it's pretty American to take the land away from the
Natives just to turn it into a shopping mall.

The idea for They Live came from a short story called "Eight O'Clock in the Morning" by Ray Nelson, originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in November 1963. John Carpenter described Nelson's story during the making of They Live as "... a D.O.A.-type of story in which a man is put in a trance by a stage hypnotist. When he awakens, he realizes that the entire human race has been hypnotized, and that alien creatures are controlling humanity. He has only until eight o'clock in the morning to solve the problem." So what makes They Live yet another excellent work by John Carpenter? Let's dig right in and find out! This is They Live, a movie that teaches us that be it Republican or Democrat, the politicians and top one-percent own you, own your house, and own your things... and there's nothing you can do about it... oh and maybe they're aliens? Alien heritage up for debate, they definitely own you.

A drifter, credited simply as "Nada" ("Rowdy" Roddy Piper) arrives in Los Angeles. While out on the streets, looking for food and looking for work, he sees a street preacher warning that “they” have recruited the rich and powerful to control humanity. Nada takes a job on a construction site and befriends fellow construction worker Frank (Keith David), who leads him to a shanty town soup kitchen and its leader, Gilbert (Peter Jason). That night, a hacker takes over television broadcasts, claiming that scientists had discovered signals that were enslaving the population and keeping them in a dream-like state, and that the only way to stop it is to shut off the signal at its source. Those watching the broadcast complain of headaches and the apparent "Bullshit" emanating from the hacker's mouth, not believing that the human race could be so easily controlled.

The next day, after another transmission from the hackers, Nada secretly follows Gilbert and the street preacher into a nearby church, and discovers them meeting with a group that includes the hacker that was on the T.V. He sees scientific equipment and cardboard boxes inside, and hears Gilbert worrying that the Hoffman lenses they made won’t be enough without "strong people" to help them. Nada is discovered by the blind preacher and escapes. That night, the homeless people's shantytown and church are destroyed in a police raid, and the hacker and preacher are surrounded and beaten by riot police. The following day, Nada retrieves one of the boxes from the now empty and abandoned church and learns of its contents; sunglasses. He takes a pair of sunglasses from it, hiding the rest in a trash can. Nada discovers that the sunglasses make the world appear black and white, but also reveal subliminal messages in the media to "OBEY", "CONSUME", "REPRODUCE", and "CONFORM". The glasses also reveal that many people are actually aliens with skull-like faces rather than humans, proving the hacker was telling the truth and that the middle and lower classes are being controlled.

"How long have the aliens been here, man?"
"Hold on, Frank. First let's talk about the
ringing in my ears after you slammed my head
on the pavement."

When Nada mocks an alien woman at a supermarket, she alerts other aliens via a mysterious wristwatch. Nada leaves, but is confronted by two alien cops. He kills them and steals their weapons. We continue Grand Theft Nada as Nada enters a bank, where he sees that several of the employees and customers are aliens. After taunting them, revealing it was in fact They Live that came up with the phrase "I have come here to chew bubble gum, and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubble gum.", Nada murders several aliens with a shotgun and escapes by taking Cable 54 employee Holly Thompson (Meg Foster) hostage. At Holly’s home, Nada tries to get her to try on the glasses, but she knocks him out of the window and down a hill... a fall that no one besides probably "Rowdy" Roddy himself could survive... and then calls the police. Beaten up, Nada returns to the alley and retrieves the box of sunglasses from a garbage truck. Frank meets Nada to give him his paycheck, but Nada tries to get Frank to put on a pair of the glasses. Frank thinks Nada is a murderer and wants nothing to do with him to protect his family. Frank and Nada get into a nearly six-minute alley brawl, after which Frank is too tired to prevent Nada from putting the sunglasses on him. After seeing the aliens and a flying saucer, Frank agrees to go into hiding with Nada.

Frank and Nada later find Gilbert laying low at the hotel they're hiding in, who leads them to a meeting of the anti-alien movement. At the meeting, they are given contact lenses to replace the sunglasses, and learn that the aliens are using global warming to make Earth more like their own planet, and are depleting the Earth’s resources for their own gain. They also learn that the aliens have been bribing humans to become collaborators, promoting them into positions of power. Hmm... I can't figure out why anyone thought this movie was more of a documentary than a science-fiction film. Holly arrives at the meeting, apologizing to Nada, with information on the source of the signal. However, the meeting is raided by police and the vast majority of those present are killed, with the survivors (including Frank, Nada, and Holly) scattering into the night as the police surround the area. Nada and Frank are cornered by police in an alley, but they accidentally activate an alien wristwatch, opening a portal that they escape through.

This must be how consumers left the Apple Store
the day after the Apple Watch came out.

The portal takes them to the aliens' spaceport, where they discover a meeting of aliens and human collaborators, celebrating the elimination of the "terrorists". They are approached by a former drifter, now a collaborator (George Buck Flower), who gives them a tour of the facility. He leads them to the basement of Cable 54, the source of the signal, which is protected by armed guards. Nada and Frank find Holly and fight their way to the transmitter on the roof, but Holly kills Frank, revealing that she is a collaborator. Nada kills Holly and destroys the transmitter, but is fatally wounded by aliens in a helicopter. Nada gives the aliens the middle finger as he dies. With the transmitter destroyed, humans all over the world discover the aliens hiding among them....

So that's They Live, a jaw-dropping alternative look at how the top one-percent, the politicians and the wealthy, have the middle and lower classes wrapped around their fingers. The political elements seen in the film are apparently staged from John Carpenter's growing distaste with the apparently ever-prominent commercialization of 1980s pop culture and politics, particularly the influence of Reaganomics... thanks Reagan. Carpenter once remarked, "The picture's premise is that the 'Reagan Revolution' is run by aliens from another galaxy. Free enterprisers from outer space have taken over the world, and are exploiting Earth as if it's a third world planet. As soon as they exhaust all our resources, they'll move on to another world" (*cough* American *cough*)... "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." The politicization of They Live is so rampant, they are actually memes out there of the ghoul aliens from the film relating to COVID-19 and coronavirus quarantine in America. The movie's subtexts and imagery is a launch pad from which to attack an authoritarian figure holding you back.

They Live is a phenomenal entry in 1980s pop culture as well as being a top-notch science-fiction action film, and it's definitely one of my absolute favorite movies of all time. I love it for its premise, its writing, and the idea that the wealthy exploit the poor, something very prominent in my nation that those who are all for it choose to turn a blind eye to. It really speaks to the realness of the situation of the world we live in, and oh yeah, manages to use science-fiction elements like aliens and interstellar travel as a means of conveying it. I love Roddy Piper and Keith David's chemistry, and while it is a pratfall that they're the only characters who have more than one or two pages' worth of dialogue, the dialogue of the other characters is certainly never dull. It's nearly six-minute alley fight between Nada and Frank has been contested but never beaten, and it often ranks as one of the best if not the best movie fight you'll ever see. It was even parodied, shot for shot, move for move, in the South Park episode "Cripple Fight", in case you were curious.

If you haven't watched it already, salute Mr. Carpenter and watch They Live, while proudly giving your hardest, most earnest middle finger up in the sky at "the man".