We sold out and They Live
Big Corporations have sold out humanity for Guru Kant Desai’s pet word ‘Munafa’, profit.
Working class toils day and night, live honestly but dont get anywhere. Steel plant workers push hard, while the bosses pushed them out. You believe in American Dream, well it is exported now. Life is so hard, things are so costly that you dont have any hope left, and working hard to stay in status quo is worser than doing nothing and drift away. Your choices are prepaid and your role in your choices is definitely not making them. Law is theirs and order is to OBEY them and they have got life – They Live.
Offcourse the previous paragraph is not the description of the high inflation, slipping into depression American society. This is the state of America in 1988 that John Carpenter who is know more for slasher flicks like Halloween, showed in the 1988 movie ‘They Live’. ‘They’ referring to aliens in the world who have occupied the earth, unknown to the earthlings, controlling the top corporates that inturn beam TV signals and other electro magnetic pulses to make the normal earth people OBEY and asleep to the presence of the aliens, serving them and exploited by them biologically, economically and intellectually. The story, similar to ‘The invasion of Body Snatchers’ elevates itself thanks to the references to the current scenario (in 1988 – or 2008?)
The film praises American workers and makes one of them as protagonists. This is a breakaway from the usual trend of making computer programmers and renegade scientists as the heroes of scifi movies. Did I say scifi movie? For most part the movie is more a hard hitting diatribe and social statement against corporatized media, police system that takes the side of powerful, conscienceless corporate world and all the middleclass and upperclass, educated employees whose life is always measured in terms of raises they get from corporate bosses. An ordinary migrant worker, Nada(Wrestling star Rodd Piper), who is forced to leave Detroit as the car makers shut shops and drive workers out of jobs, enters LA to work. True to the word drifter, he is a loner, yet seems to be smart enough to spot the shady goings on in the nearby episopal church. He parks himself in a makeshift slum facing the church that beams out a broadcast of a man who warns the public of the large scale manipulation of perceptions and beliefs to keep consuming the ‘corporate products’ and obeying laws that were made to protect the aliens amongst us. He gets hold of a crate of sunglasses that the chirch was trying to hide from the brutal police assault – a special glass that would reveal the aliens living under the guise of humans. The rest of the movie is all about whetherhe and his working class buddy Frank Armitage(Keith David) are able to tell the whole world of this secret and make them realize that they are no more than livestock to the ruling alien race (pretty similar to the Matrix movie huh?).
The film’s best moment is when Nada puts on the glasses for the first time and slowly menaders around staring at the mind – controlling messages in TV ads, advertisement bill boards, commercial magazines and TV programmes. He trips into a bank and finds the whole desk of bank employees and security guards as aliens. He gets hold of a gun from a police man and kills a dozen aliens. In a matter of hours he gets promotion to the status of ‘terrorist’ and soon manages to join a group of humans with goggles to fight the aliens. This not before encountering Holly a programmer in the local TV that seems to be the beacon for signals that control the human minds who injures him and tries to hand him over to police. The group meets in a place where the police assault and kill many humans. Nada and Frank escape the police assault by slipping into the teleporting devices and eventually emerging in the basement of the media company running cable TV . They stumble into what could be easily mistaken for a corporate board meeting where the aliens announce ‘bonus and raise’ for the humans who are cooperating with the aliens. Soon the ‘terrorists’ reate enough movies and finally blow up the tower that beams the mind control signal, revealing the true alien face to the now awakened humans.
The whole movie was independantly produced at a low budget and yet Carpenter’s control over the subject and his ability to create disturbing imagery without slipping into grotesque horror visualization is well seen in this film. The movie creates a striking comparison of two different societies. The rich, polished, opulent and seemingly gentle higher class that has sold out itself and the lower, downtrodden and exploited class who stand no chance in the modified order of things. This underlying subtext of class war and the consistent projection of the corporatized class’ sell out to shady forces for an Alien Vs Humans film is one of the most interesting and spirited choices that make for compelling viewing except if you are the IBMs, coca colas or General Motors of the world.
Most interesting aspect of the movie for me that propelled me to write this post is the depiction of 1988 – urban poverty in USA which is being revisited all over the media while discussing over job losses, Sub prime mortgage rate meltdown, high gas prices and closure of car factories. When the whole movie completes, one feels like blasting the commercialised media, the corporates that limit choices, that run movie studios controlling the media content and artistic expression, critics and opinion shapers and reclaim total individual freedom to think and be (are they one and the same?). That is the success of the movie – a success without any memorable performances or dialogues. Just the true depiction of the written word.
Tags: 80s movies, John Carpenter, World Cinema
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
hey guess what.. we just made a terrific one-two piece for the working classes..
am really short on Carpenter and yeah, if it wasn’t for this, i wouldn’t really make an attempt to see a movie titled ‘They Live with the promos the show on TV.. i think i’ve seen it but yeah… ignorance
and yeah.. a real good one, this write-up
I saw this movie on demand and thought I have to clean vessels – lets see a carpenter horror movie.
But this one turned out something else totally. I had to celan up vessels 1 hour and 45 mins later watching CNN.
what a fantastic piece. you deserve an 80’s record. with a vacation in whereveryouwant to enjoy it.
Thanks to Raaja’s mesmerizing music of 80s, I am an 80s fan. 80s are my age of innocence and any work of 80s gets my ears twitching in anticipation. That bias – notwithstanding, it was so ‘different’ to see this ‘Black and White’ anti-capitalism work in USA that too in Reagan era.
keep walking this line man.
Oh, you can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union,
I’m sticking to the union, I’m sticking to the union.
Oh, you can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union,
I’m sticking to the union, ’til the day I die.
Get Rich or Die Tryin’.
All these are just complains… even the Rich were poor once.