It’s amazing how all the signs have been right in front of us the entire time. We have been living in a consumer-based society for decades but have never truly known how deep we were getting until it was too late. Or have we? In 1988,They Livewas a film that laid out the entire plan far in advance, and we didn’t listen. We smiled and said it was just another entertaining film starring a wrestler.
But we were so wrong, andThey Livewas so right. Here’s how the movie is more relevant than ever with its depiction of marketing paranoia.
What Is They Live?
They Livewas written anddirected by John Carpenter. It stars Roddy Piper (a famous wrestler at the time) as a drifter who goes by “Nada” and learns that there is a nefarious secret about who, or what, is actually running the world.
Nada learns of a conspiracy that says aliens live among us and control the world. He doesn’t believe it until he puts on a pair of special sunglasses that show him what is truly going on around him. It turns out that the glasses allow him to see that many people are aliens in disguise, and much of our advertising and popular culture is aimed at getting us to conform.
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Nada teams up with other people who know and those he has to convince in an effort to stop the aliens and their human allies from taking over.
Though it debuted at number one,They Livedid not do terribly well at the box office. However, it has been a cult hit and is seen as a canary in the coal mine for what was happening both at that time and in the future.
Taking Cues From the Real World
John Carpenter wanted to make a filmabout the rise of consumerism and the issues that he and others saw in the 1980s political climate. The film is based on a short story, but Carpenter saw it as an opportunity to drill the ideas of control into viewers in a way that was anything but subtle.
One way this is shown in the film is when Nada looks at everyday billboards through his sunglasses and instead sees giant white squares with large black block letters saying things such as “Obey,” “Consume,” and “Conform.” The movie also shows the populace in a state of calm hypnosis that makes them more docile and easy to control.
Carpenter even worked on the concept of climate change by saying that global warming was a direct result of alien meddling in an attempt to make our planet more like its own.
However, Carpenter’s message of hope is that in the end, we can beat back these powers that be and take back our lives. We just need to open our eyes to the truth. Unfortunately, it does not appear that he told us in time.
Public Reaction
The overall reaction to the film was similar to much of Carpenter’s work. It was looked at by many as nothing more than a B-movie that happened to make it to the big screen. One of the main pieces of the movie is that whenever Nada puts on the glasses, he sees the world in a gray spectrum. In a world of colorful films, this wasn’t seen as a step forward.
However, the film almost immediately hit cult status, due in large part to Roddy Piper and his rabid wrestling followers. It also features iconic lines such as “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass… and I’m all out of bubblegum” and years later gave us Shepard Fairey’s iconic OBEY artwork featuring the face of Andre the Giant (and, strangely, not Roddy Piper).
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Now, the film is watched by people who cannot believe how much it got right about our current culture, invasive advertising, and the incessant politicization of things such as war and natural resources. In fact, the film’s messages are often spoken of in the same breath as the technology from shows likeStar Trek. The ideas were there; it just took us decades to fully realize them.
The film was released ten years afterCarpenter’s most well-known film,Halloween. That film put him in an iconic status for horror fans and proved to studios that he was worth bankrolling. However, his films were often seen as fun but of lower quality.They Liveslipped past the public radar as just another weird John Carpenter movie. Since then, it continuously shows up on lists of not only his best films but the best films of the 1980s.
Would It Work Today?
They Livecould be made today, but it would feel unnecessary. Unfortunately, many people would see it and say, “Yeah, we know. And this movie is just another way that studios will make even more money off of us.” The film has become post-prescient. Everything except the aliens is true, including subliminal messaging. We are tracked, traced, and listened to. Our decisions are made by algorithms, and our options have become fewer.
This type of movie is still being made today, but the villain isn’t aliens. They have been replaced by AI. We seem willing to accept that our choices are being made by something we ourselves created. Movies such as1999’sThe Matrixor 2014’sTranscendencegive us worlds where AI has taken over our lives to the degree that most people no longer care. It isn’t a fight for 99% of the people. We seem to have come to accept this.They Livetold us we would.
