What Happened in the '80s Stayed in the '80s (Or Did It?): "They Live"
"I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass," declares a character known only as Nada about halfway through John Carpenter's They Live, "and I'm all out of bubble gum."
It's a great line, an imprecation of doom on the aliens who’ve taken control of America in the film, delivered immediately before Nada blasts healthy quantities of them into the abyss with a shotgun. It was, in the years after the movie came out, a line to be savored, smirked at, quoted endlessly by teenagers hanging around on Friday nights in the parking lots of gas station convenience stores back when our main form of entertainment was face to face: talking, laughing, telling tale tales, trying to score illicit beer and maybe renting a movie on VHS from a place that doubled as a head shop and tripled as a record store.
Other than its comedic outrageousness (He hasn't come to chew bubble gum at all!) I think the line entertained us because of what we saw as its swaggering adult bravado. As an assertion of cocky manlines thrown against the void it appealed not only to our blustering teenage souls but also to our sense that the balance of power in the world was against us, forever and always. The uptight Reaganite repressives – shades of Assistant Principal Vernon in The Breakfast Club or the square parents in Repo Man – were in charge, and if you couldn't see what was wrong with that, what that kind of conformity did to your soul, then maybe, just maybe, you were an alien.
It was, in short, a time very, very different than this one. Or was it actually pretty similar?
The movie is a dystopia, roughly speaking, one of those that's so lacerating in its vision (like Starship Troopers or Network or Ace In the Hole) that it verges on discomfort, threatening to strip too many layers of varnish from our reality. It's set in a world just like the real world of 1988, and tells the story of Nada (Roddy Piper, yes, the professional wrestler) an unemployed construction worker drifting among the outcasts and homeless in a city that is more or less Los Angeles.
Nada's sword in the stone moment comes when he discovers that what appears to be a local church is actually the headquarters of a resistance movement of scientists and free-thinkers who've learned that our entire culture is being manipulated by aliens.
These aliens have a transmitter that blinds us to their presence – they walk among us, disguised to look like us – and to their method of control: all of our television and radio shows, our newspapers and billboards, all the advertisements we see, actually convey subliminal messages that force us to do what the aliens want: OBEY, CONSUME, WATCH TV.
The resistance group has created lenses – first in sunglasses, and then in contacts – that allow humans to see through this layer of visual distortion and also to see the aliens themselves. It's when Nada first puts on these glasses that he goes on his bubblegum rampage, maddened by the reality that's been around him the entire time but which he’s only now aware of.
Unable to sink back under the surface of reality, Nada convinces his friend Frank (Keith David) to put on the glasses too; this convincing takes the form of an amazing fist fight in an alley (justly famous in the annals of action movie history) because Frank, like virtually everyone, is reluctant to have his reality altered so completely. Once he sees the truth, Frank joins Nada and they set out to help the resistance rid the world of the aliens.
This quest takes them into the aliens' underground command center - where a group of rich humans who have sold out to their new overlords are being feted - and then to the top of a building where the alien transmitter is located. Although they're betrayed by a human collaborator (Meg Foster) who murders Frank, Nada manages to destroy the transmitter in the end. He's mortally wounded in the process, and dies flipping off the aliens.
Bombastic stuff, this. And not subtle in its attack. As the philosopher Slavoj Zizek and others have pointed out, the film serves nearly perfectly as a metaphor for the workings of ideology. The definitions of this phantasmagorical idea - ideology - and the way it wraps its soupy hands around us are topics for another time; rather than get into them here, I'll note that I think it's an idea that actually tends to be really clear to rebellious teenagers. To those blessed beings, the notion that adults are all bound into some kind of almost entirely unstated system of beliefs and rules that they (the adults) cannot quite fully defend or even articulate beyond saying "that's just the way it is" doesn't seem challenging but commonplace.
And in this, the young rebels are right. We swim in a sea of images and advertisements, inspirational slogans and sporting events and speeches, and beneath the surface of these things runs a great continuity of messaging. There are no billboards out there (unless they've been sprayed with graffiti) that say "Don't buy anything, ever!" There are no sporting events that – taken in their totality from uniforms to endorsements – argue you shouldn't work hard and dream big because that will get you nowhere. Instead, the great majority of everything we run into in the marketplace of our popular culture seems to push us in a pretty similar direction. Work hard. Believe that you can make it. Buy things that will help empower you and maybe even prove that you have succeed. You deserve it.
What They Live and a vast body of similar artworks do is to ask an remarkably simple question: what is the result of this messaging? In this, they follow the philosopher William James, who wanted to understand things like this in terms of what he endearingly called their "cash value." "Grant an idea or belief to be true," James wrote, and then ask "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life?" The question for James was always about the effects of ideas on us, and in the world, rather than whether they accorded with some eternal verity; that is, don't ask whether you think a principle is true in some abstract sense, ask what kind of effects in your internal and external life following that principle will have.
In They Live, the effect of the ideology that shapes both the surface and the subsurface of our culture is clear. It serves not to make us rich, happy, and successful; this is obvious because the majority of people are not rich, happy, and successful. Instead, the effect of our ideology is to convince us to stay in line with a set of dominant values that will perpetuate the existing power structure of society. Every billboard or book in Nada's world seems simply to be advertising a new car or telling a distracting story; in reality what it's doing is manipulating its consumers into buying things to prop up the wealthy rulers of the world, or distracting themselves from the kind of thought that might end up challenging those rulers.
This is, of course, the kind of radical whipsnackle that artistic types and long-haired dudes in Birkenstocks and wool socks are always going on about, and which most people are too busy trying to survive the economy to be able to give much time to, for better or worse. (Worse, insists Invasion of the Body Snatchers; better, insist many of my readers, a dispute which warms my heart – a lack of debate is death to both thought and art.) In any case, my sense is that everyone who watches They Live will pick up on the message, as it’s really not all that subtle. My sense is also that most viewers will also agree that in some ways this message is still relevant in our age of maddeningly enveloping media.
But what I've been wondering about since watching the movie is the qualifier I put into that last sentence. "In some ways." What’s the relationship between the moment it was made and now? Put differently, why were there so many filmmakers in the 1980s – Carpenter, Larry Cohen, Brian DePalma, Wes Craven, Oliver Stone, etc. – exploring this topic, and why are so few of them doing so now?
One way of thinking about this is to recall that one of the primary influences on John Carpenter's work is Howard Hawks' film Rio Bravo from 1959. Not only has Carpenter been open in his appreciation for the movie – he named his Sheriff in Halloween Leigh Brackett, after one of the screenwriters – the particular way that Rio Bravo is a siege film influenced nearly every one of Carpenter's movies. This model involves a band of rag-tag characters led by an ornery man, facing down an enveloping menace even though the hero may not initially want to be involved. The action is exterior but the motivation is interior, a matter of something akin to honor, protecting the weak, or even simple refusal be told what to do.
In They Live this is played out on a civilization-level scale, with the menace being the aliens, and the community to be defended being the resistance that Nada joins and then becomes the last hope for. But it also represents a feeling that attended, for many people, much of the 1980s. This was that the most powerful elements in the nation represented a threat to the kind of swaggering freedom – and also the communitarian values – laced through Carpenter's vision. The wealthy and the most powerful corporations, in this vision, were happy to plow under both freedom and community values for profit. This happened domestically with the assault on the working class that resulted in the destruction of cities in the Midwest – creating the "rust belt" – and internationally with the willingness to prop up malevolent dictators abroad as long as they pledged fidelity to American financial interests.
The feeling that They Live captures – also captured, incidentally, by a wide swath of popular music during the decade, from punk to early hip hop to main stream bards like Bruce Springsteen and John Cougar Mellancamp – was that this pursuit of profit lay beneath not just the obvious manifestations of consumer culture like advertising, but also the less obvious ones like professions of patriotism.
One begins to immediately, I think, the differences between then and now. One of these is that there is little sense, even among the "every billionaire is a policy failure" types, that celebrity and wealth are inherently corrupting, as opposed to being bad only in excess. A part of what gives They Live its potency is the idea that to become wealthy, or to put your face on a billboard, is to automatically align yourself with the forces that are laying siege to both freedom and the community; today, this situation is almost perfectly reversed. Celebrity and wealth, in our contemporary vision, are precisely the way that one makes a difference, the way one comes to feel empowered.
The vision of someone talking about chewing bubblegum and then blowing away aliens (rich people) with a shotgun feels terribly anachronistic, a remnant from a world in which just being a decent hard-working person was enough, as well as a world in you could be left alone, in which you weren't hog-tied to the internet and its incessant intrusions into every part of your life. What’s needed now, in much of our contemporary view, is not dreams of blue-collar sufficiency but virtuously powerful people who will use the internet to help others.
This connects to a second difference between then and now, which is that corporations are both smarter and more prevalent than they used to be. Their basic function of making money for shareholders is unchanged – and indeed cannot change, almost by definition – but what's different is the corporate relationship to pop culture. In the '80s this extended, basically, to coming up with an ad featuring happy white kids water-skiing to a catchy song in a Juicy Fruit commercial – The taste is gonna mo-ove ya! For someone with a satirical eye, this was a fairly easy target.
Now, from Apple to Netflix to Amazon to Spotify, corporations are popular culture. Make a punk song and it’ll get used to sell shoes; lay out a blistering critique of "The Man" on TikTok and watch it end up in an ad about the monumental importance of expressing yourself, as made possible by TikTok. The situation is very much like that espoused by Bill Hicks in his famous stand-up bit about marketing: no matter how virulently he declares that he hates marketing, the marketing folks applaud him because his enraged declarations are the perfect way to market his career.
Different indeed. It’s a brave new world. But also similar? Yeah, that too.
Because beyond its specifics, what They Live gets right is a feeling of powerlessness in the face of a system so large and comprehensive that it seems to be present behind every single thing around us, the feeling of being prey to forces that disguise themselves in the open by inundating us with facts and figures and images and memes and talking heads that may be sincere in what they’re saying…or may be something else entirely. And this is a feeling that hasn’t changed much between 1988 and now.
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