They Live

 Few directors can boast a run of movies as good the one John Carpenter had in the decade between Halloween and They Live. And as a capper to a streak that includes films as disparate as Halloween, Escape from New York, Big Trouble in Little China, Starman and The Thing... well, you can do a lot worse than They Live, a science fiction satire that's about as funny as it is pointed.

 It's as carefully crafted as any Carpenter film, which is really saying something; While memorable for the chaos that always ends up overtaking everything else sooner or later, what always gets me in most of his movies is the amount of groundwork they start laying down for said chaos as soon as the credits start rolling.

 They Live is a prime example of that. The title card melds into some graffiti as John Nada (wrestler 'Rowdy' Roddy Piper) enters the scene at a seemingly derelict trainyard. He's accompanied by some awfully cheesy blues-rock (courtesy of the director and Alan Howarth) and opening credits in a font that screams TV movie, but I'll always associate with Carpenter.

 John's lugging a huge backpack as he wanders the Los Angeles financial district, looking up at the skyscrapers, and then across more urban areas until he finds a building site and goes in looking for work. He's a drifter, then, explaining the big backpack. At the end of the day co-worker Frank (Keith David), recognizing a kindred soul, invites him back to the shantytown Frank is staying at.

 A blind street preacher warns ominously of invisible overlords, TV channels are hijacked by a mysterious pirate station warning that They are among us, people stare slack-jawed at purposefully shallow interviews and commercials - you can sort of see the shape the movie is eventually going to take.

 But it takes its time getting there, there's some groundwork to be laid first. John first notices something's amiss with a church across the street from the shantytown, where the guy who runs the soup kitchen (Carpenter regular Peter Jason) has some clandestine-seeming meetings and leads what looks like some sort of smuggling operation, so he begins investigating. Meanwhile there's a bit of... well, not subtle, but cool character work between Frank, who has a very cynical approach to things and doesn't want to rock the boat, and John, who has a sort of cautious faith in the system and trusts that they will get their due if they put in the work. A believer in the American Dream. I like that they keep race completely out of it, even as it informs their respective points of view.

 When the church is raided by the police and the authorities raze the shanty town, kicking off the second act, John sifts through the wreckage and finds that what the church group was smuggling... sunglasses. But when he puts them on (Spoilers for a thirty-five year old movie!) he can suddenly see that all the signage in the city, every written word, becomes instructions to keep us tame and under control. Conform! Consume! Obey!

 He also discovers that he can see the They that the preacher and the pirate TV station were talking about; the hidden skeletal alien overlords that are enslaving humanity using greed and corruption.

 They Live is famous for a bunch of pretty great one-liners (90s videogames would not be the same without it) but my favorite quote of the film is when Nada realizes how deeply fucked we are as a race: "It figures it would be something like this!" He says, laughing. What else are you going to do?
 Well, what he does, I guess - grab a shotgun and shoot a bunch of aliens, terrorize a lot of bystanders, and behave like a goddamn terrorist. But, you know, one we know is right and is in a movie. Please don't do that.

 In his rampage he kidnaps a beautiful rich woman (Meg Foster, made up to look otherworldly) who... well, she doesn't take well to his attempts to show her the truth.

 But in that respect she's got nothing on John's buddy Frank. In what's perhaps the film's biggest claim to fame, Frank and John get into a knockdown fight that lasts for more than five minutes because Frank refuses to put on the fucking glasses. It's a hilarious, overblown fight, an absolutely brilliant scene, not the least because of the tension between what we know and what Frank thinks he knows. Mixed in with a point about how far people are willing to go not to have their worldview challenged. It's an all-timer.

 So... yeah, it's a deeply political film. Just as the director was ending one hell of cinematic run, the US had spent the better part of that under Ronald Reagan's administration, and you can tell Carpenter had some things to say about that. He wasn't subtle, and he did not hold back his views on the encroaching neoliberal worldview that would unfortunately come to be the new normal.
 It's an angry, angry film that nonetheless handles its message with wit and a wicked sense of humour, one that's just as relevant today as on the day it was filmed, thanks to the neolibs pretty much conning everyone into thinking their way was the best option. Mostly by tempting people in power to join them so they could make themselves richer, basically, and making the rest of us poor suckers believe we could get their scraps. I wish we could blame it on evil aliens.

 They live is not *quite* perfect: genre obligations and the scope of the threat being dealt with mean that quite a few contrivances are going to be needed to wrap things in about ninety minutes. It's also a very low-budget movie, but the brilliant decision to make the scenes where we see the world as the characters do through the glasses in black and white manage to make a virtue out of its B-movie-ness, linking it back to the B-movies of three decades prior.

 The action, bar that one fight scene, is your standard 80's gunplay; Not very exciting, but there's a lot of squibs. And while we're on that: I guess that the heroes happily gunning down what look like civilians can get a bit uncomfortable, but fuck that; it's well justified in the movie. That's on a bunch of fuckwads in the last few decades deciding to go out and end other people, and on the much bigger bunch of fuckwads that fight to allow them to get as many weapons as they please.

 All pretty minor nitpicks as far as I'm concerned. This, ladies and gentlemen, theys and uses, is a fucking masterpiece.