They Live

THEY LIVE   ***1/2

John Carpenter

1988

IDEA:  When a vagabond puts on a pair of sunglasses he finds at an abandoned church, he is awakened to the truth that the moneyed classes are extra-terrestrials brainwashing the masses through media.

BLURB:  What, exactly, is the nature of They Live’s relationship with consumer culture? The film’s vision of a society ruled by an alien power elite that manipulates and enslaves the working class through mass media is certainly an unmistakable ideological critique. Indeed, Carpenter’s realization of this quintessential Marxist dogma is so blatant as to be brilliant, so vividly, bluntly imagined that we wince and laugh not because he is revealing some buried truth, but because he is embossing the obvious to the point of absurdity. They Live mostly operates within this hyperbolic mode of satire, mocking, specifically, the inane and exaggerated machismo of 80s action films, sending up their sensationalized violence and jingoistic politics in sequences of anarchic, self-consciously silly excess. These scenes, which can be at once horrific and hilarious, exhibit a dissonance that makes They Live especially rich: they are the source of the film’s giddy thrills but also its troubling contradictions, images of our familiarized commercial pleasure that bite back. Yet, true to its postmodernist penchant for irony and pastiche, it is difficult to disentangle Carpenter’s film from the objects of its contempt. To what degree is the director merely reproducing the mind-numbing spectacle of the culture he’s indicting? Should a film targeting systemic social oppression be this fun, this digestible? They Live prompts us to question if any product of capitalism can be truly subversive. Its sardonic indulgence in the language of mass-mediated culture might even belie a piercing cynicism: that because the system in which we and the film are embedded cannot be vanquished, humor and amused recognition are maybe our last real defenses.