They Live (Alive Films, Larry Franco Pruductions, Universal, Carolco, 1988)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nighyts ago my husband Charles and I ran They Live, a 1988 film from director John Carpenter, who also wrote the script under the pseudonym “Frank Armitage” based on a 1963 science-fiction short story by Ray Faraday Nelson called “Eight O’Clock in the Morning.” (The story is available online at https://pvto.weebly.com/uploads/9/1/5/0/91508780/eight_o’clock_in_the_morning-nelson.pdf.) I first encountered this remarkable movie a year after it was made, when my then-partner John Gabrish and I rented a VHS tape of it and were stunned by it. (This was a year before John’s long-standing alcoholism finally killed him.) When the Wachowski siblings released the first Matrix movie in 1999 and followed it up with two sequelae, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions (both 2003), Charles and I watched them together and I came to the conclusion that John Carpemter, a cisgender heterosexual, had done more with the central premise – that the world we think we live in is a comforting illusion created by all-powerful intelligences from outside humanity (aloems frp, a planet in the Andromeda galaxy in They Live, our own machines who have conquered and enslaved us in the Matrices) – in one 95-minute movie than the Wachowskis (whose status as Transgender people who went through gender reassignment – Larry became Lana and Andy became Lilly – has added to the aura of weirdness surrounding their movies) were able to do in three 135-minute movies (plus a fourth 150-minute movie in the sequence, The Matrix: Resurrections, released ini 2021). Even the names of the central characters are similar: “Nada” (Roddy Piper) in They Live and “Neo” (Keanu Reeves) in the Matrices. (In Ray Nelson’s story Nada has a first name, “George,” but he doesn’t in the film.)

I didn’t realize until now that he was mostly a professional wrestler (he died in 2015 at the age of 61) who was known as “Rowdy Roddy Piper,” which explains why Carpenter stretched out the fight scene between Nada and his Black buddy Frank (Keith David) to five minutes when it makes its dramatic point in 20 seconds – it’s the one part of this movie I’ve never cared for. Otherwise I love this movie. It begins in Los Angeles in 1988, in a society where the rich are getting richer and everyone else is getting poorer. The middle class is rapidly disappearing and the factories that once provided good-paying jobs to people with strong bodies and a willingness to work have closed up. In other words, it’s the world we were living in in 1988 and still are. Nada gets a construction job (and it’s a delight to see Roddy Piper’s great pecs with his shirt off; I got a crush on him the first time I saw this movie and he’s still a physical wonder) after having traveled to L.A. from Denver, but after his first day he’s told by the boss not to sleep on the job site and tht he won’t be paid until Thursday. Frank, a former auto worker who left his wife and two sons back home in Detroit to come to California in search of work, hooks up with Nada and takes him to a camp run by an Episcopal church. The people running the camp ask Nada to help rebuild their shower room, whose ceiling is in imminent danger of collapsing, but just when Nada and Frank have settled in for the night, the camp is raided by police, who come in with bulldozers and destroy the place. In the wreckage,. Nada stumbles on a box full of sunglasses which, when he tries on a pair, reveals the black-and-white subliminal messages being beamed to the rest of humanity to tell them, “OBEY,” “CONSUME,” “STAY ASLEEP,” “MARRY AND REPRODUCE,” “CONFORM” and other similar messages of control.

He also learns that the streets are literally full of alien beings, who through their technology have mass-hypnotized the human population into supporting a political agenda of laissez-faire capitalism. In one scene Nada hijacks the car of Holly Thompson (Med Foster, the one significant female character in this movie) and insists she drive him to her house, where he holds her hostage until she calls the police on him. Later Holly turns up at a meeting of the organized resistance, which periodically cuts in on TV broadcasts to feature a professor-type explaining that the world is being secretly controlled by the aliens and their human allies, who have been recruited to their side with promises of great wealth and power. Only Holly, who works as a program executive for cable channel 54 – the source of the alien mind-control signal – is really one of the aliens’ human allies,and she alerts the police t raid the meeting and force Nada and Frank to flee again. When I first saw They Live I assumed the impirationi for it had been the 1956 classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, whose director, Don Siegel, always said he interpreted the story as a psychological rather than a political allegory. Siegel said he meant the film, based on a novel by Jack Finney published in 1954 – two years before the film was made – as a critique of people who had literally turned off their emotions and willed themselves into a state of blind conformity.

Others, though, tried to read both Right-wing and Left-wing political metaphors into the film – in fact I first hears of Invasion of the Body Snatchers through an article in Ramparts magazine calling the film a Right-wing propaganda piece and taking its central metaphor (in which people are taken over by malevolent creatures from outer space who take the form of seed pods) as a reference to what the American Left was trying to do: brainwash the American population en masse into accepting Communist domination. Carpenter quite literally took the Invasion of the Body Snatchers metaphor and used it explicitly for a Left-wing agenda. The aliens are influencing the world’s politics to push an aggressive laissez-faire capitalist agenda because this will mean that the earth’s environment will become so polluted that its atmosphere will ultimately resemble their home planet’s, so they can colonize it. In one scene, a spokesperson for the aliens’ human allies (the counterpart to the scene in Siegel’s film in which a pod psychiatrist tries to recruit the central character to join voluntarily by convincing him that the human race is better off without emotions) explains that the alien-human alliance is the way to go because everybody wants to be rich. He even tells Nada that to the aliens, Earth is “their Third World” – an interesting conceit from Raymond F. Jones’ novel This Island Earth (though not used in the film version) in which a spokesperson for the aliens exlplains that just as Earth corporations have offshored their industrial production to various islands where labor is cheaper, so the aliens have announced their production to other planets and Earth is literally their “island,” sort of like Saipan.

There’s even one scene in which Nada puts on his sunglasses during a speech by then-President Ronald Reagan using his familiar “monringin America” lines. Through the glasses he sees that “Reagan” is a space alien, and he mutters to himself, “I should have known he’d be une.” (This scene was cut from the film when They Live was shown on broadcast TV.) Though it’s not a perfect film – like Blade Runner, They Live wouldn’t make my list of the top five science-fiction movies ever made, but it might crack the Top Ten – They Live holds up surprisingly well. I hadn’t remembered how violent the movie is – Nada uses his stolen guns to massacre the aliens en masse, though with one exception he spares their human allies – and I did remember a great gag towards the end once Nada shoots out the tube that is broadcasting the aliens’ mind-control signals, a woman who’s been in the throes of a hot sexual enncounter with one of the males suddenly turns off and finds him repulsive once the signal dies out and she can see what he really looks like.