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Recommended Content | They Live!

by | Jan 26, 2025 | Recommended Content | 0 comments

Sunglasses image: Photo by Lucas George Wendt on Unsplash

This post is the first in an ongoing series of recommended movies, shows, books, music, or other form of artistic expression.

I’ll start with a bold assertion: John Carpenter is one of the most relevant and powerful artists of our era. A writer, director, producer, actor, and composer that most people might know best for creating our era’s first unstoppable boogeyman – Michael Myers.

Of course, he is the writer and director of the original Halloween, which launched the career of legacy scream-queen Jamie Lee Curtis.

And let’s not overlook Halloween (2018) and the two following sequels Halloween Kills (2021) and Halloween Ends* (2022) – films that returned to the original storyline of Laurie Strode and what that unspeakable trauma of 1978 might look like on a woman four decades later. This trilogy honestly elevates the slasher-horror genre. *(but did it?)

However, I digress. Because I thought I knew John Carpenter’s writer and/or director catalog pretty well, The Thing and Starman among my favorites. In fact, checking out Carpenter’s filmography on IMDB will take you on a tour of 1980s and ‘90s horror/thriller classics, as either the director or writer (or both).

It took a recent session of mindless scrolling to lead me to John Carpenter’s most prescient work. One that he knew was so prescient that he used a pseudonym for the screenplay-writing credit. Because, well, yeah, watch the movie.

They Live! (1988)

The premise of They Live! is a delightfully late-80s, somewhat campy, thawing-cold-war-era cautionary tale.

  • The Time: 1988 (when it was filmed).
  • The Place: The grittier side of a still-sunny Los Angeles (like, across town from Pretty Woman).
  • The Star: ‘Rowdy’ Roddy Piper (yes, the WWF villain to Hulk Hogan’s hero).
  • Runtime: 90 minutes (which is just like watching two episodes of a show).
  • CW: Gun violence in workplaces and public spaces (it was the 80s).

Roddy and his magnificent blonde mullet portray ‘Nada,’ who hoofs it into LA with his whole life on his back looking for work, which he finds at a construction site.

With nowhere to go until payday, Nada ends up at Justiceville, a mutual-aid encampment for unhoused people. There are hot meals, community, relative safety, and even television since a screen is so … soothing. All there in a lot across the street from a church.

It’s on that communal t.v. that Nada first sees something odd*, which eventually leads to a startling discovery about how our entire world works. Or doesn’t. Depends on who you ask.

*Hang out til the end to find out what it is!

They Live! also contains one of the greatest movie quotes of all time. You can go in cold like I did (available to rent on YouTube or Prime, or check the DVD out of your local library), or peek a preview from the movie trailer:

Fun Fact: You might recognize one of the residents of Justiceville from his fine work on a park bench in Back to the Future.

Now Begins the Analysis …. And Spoilers

First, Nada. As in ‘no one’ or ‘no name.’ Because he, living on the margins of society, is potentially everyone. Nada comes from Denver, a place of no more work and shuttered banks – a barely-concealed side-eye at the recession, high inflation, and bank deregulation of the early 1980s (thanks, Reagan!).

Nada meets Frank* at the construction site, a black man who hasn’t seen his family in the six months since migrating from Michigan, where all the steel mills have closed.

*Portrayed by Keith David, one of those steadily working Hollywood actors you will realize you’ve seen or heard his voice work, and enjoyed, a thousand times.

We Interrupt This Program

So back to that odd thing Nada sees on the Justiceville t.v.

In between programs glorifying celebrity status and commercials for the next thing to buy or way to look even better, is a scratchy interruption to the signal. A man implores the viewer to SEE. But the hacking isn’t strong enough and regular broadcast resumes. Most people watching get annoyed by the interruption and experience a headache after watching it.

But not Nada. Moving to the background tune of a ponderous bass line backed by faint harmonica echoes, Nada does some quick detective work. He finds that the church across the street is where the hacking signal is coming from. There’s no choir practicing; it’s a recording. There’s no bible study. But there is a stash of boxes hidden in a wall. Inside the boxes are … sunglasses.

A Very Meta Experience

Pretty soon the helicopter that has been hovering over Justiceville off and on now has a sniper riding the rail. They are providing cover for the SWAT troops that break down the door of the church and then, helmeted and shield-to-shield, push across the encampment.

What follows is a night of brutality, with the residents of Justiceville, Los Angeles, scattering as many of them are cornered, beaten by a crowd of batons, and arrested. A full three years before Rodney King was cornered, beaten by a crowd of batons, and arrested.

Anywhooo ….

As Justiceville picks up the following day (you can easily toss an encampment, but you can’t so easily stamp out a community), Nada makes a beeline for the burned-out church and makes off with one of the boxes from the undiscovered stash, which he then stashes himself.

And that’s when things get really good.

“I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick a**…”

Nada’s stroll past a newsstand and through a corner store is, to say the least, eye-opening. Wearing his found sunglasses, he sees billboards and magazines as they really are, notices peculiar technology piggybacking on the crosswalk signals, and spots surveillance drones hovering overhead.

He also sees a bunch of people for who they really are.

But what are they? (According to Nada, they are a least “real f*ckin’ ugly.”)

I do get the irony that I had to stare at a screen for 90 minutes in order to write this post.

“…and I’m all out of bubblegum.”

The action really kicks up now. The They of our story figure out Nada can see them and what follows is Nada dispatching some They cops with some sweet wrestling moves and rampaging with the weapons they intended to use on him.

Content Warning revisited: Even being raised on the wanton violence of 80s flicks didn’t insulate me from the discomfort of watching gun violence unfold on my screen in 2025. All I can offer is Nada is targeting the They, and even notably sends a non-They cop safely on his way. And maybe there wasn’t much left in the special effects budget, because there’s little to no depiction of blood.

Nada then rather politely carjacks Holly who takes him to her home in the Hills for Chardonnay (really), with a so-quick-you’ll-almost-miss-it hello from the obvious gay-bears living next door.

Wouldn’t ya know it – Holly works at the big cable t.v. network!

Fight for Your Right

Following a run-in with Holly’s bottle of Chardonnay, Nada is ejected from this swanky apartment and literally sent back down the hill into the dirty street. It’s a stunt/action sequence that drips with class symbolism. <chef’s kiss>

I’m really paraphrasing now because I didn’t set out to recount They Live! frame by frame.

Nada retrieves his box of stashed special sunglasses and Frank resurfaces. But Frank wants nothing to do with what he views as Nada’s nonsense ravings. After the longest fistfight scene I think I’ve ever seen in a movie, Frank, uh, relents.

Yep, Nada has to fight his only friend to get him to see.

The two then team up with the underground resistance, where Holly suddenly shows up.

“It’s just business. We all sell out every day.”

I’m really going to tighten this up now – Holly is a spy and one of many humans complicit with what we find out are alien invaders here to deplete the planet of resources. (Wait till you hear what the invaders say will happen by 2025.)

But how do you do that so easily, even with a set of humans bribed to complicity by wealth and power?

You do it by duping, conditioning, repressing, and sedating an entire population. With subliminal messages wherever they look, on screens and billboards, hidden in their news and entertainment, and with the one true god that’s in their wallets.

OBEY. MARRY. REPRODUCE. CONSUME. CONFORM. BUY. SLEEP. SUBMIT.

But always there will be people who SEE. And they will help other people to SEE. Collaborating to do the work to amplify a message until everyone can SEE.

A message like the hacker signal in They Live!:

“The poor and underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are non-existent. 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. We have been made indifferent to ourselves and others. We are focused only on our own gain. They keep us asleep … selfish … sedated.
We are their cattle bred for slavery.”

THey Live!

Thank you, Mr. Carpenter, for revealing the real boogeyman.

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