They Live (1988) Directed by John Carpenter. Written by John Carpenter, based on the short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” by Ray Nelson. Starring Roddy Piper, Keith David, and Meg Foster.
In 1984, when Ronald Reagan was running for re-election, conservative columnist George Will went to a concert. He enjoyed the show quite a lot, and he went home to write a column about how whiny blue-collar workers should love America as much as this rock star and “his merry band.”
The rock star in question was Bruce Springsteen, and the song that Will so famously misinterpreted as glowingly, cheerfully patriotic was “Born in the U.S.A.,” a song that is about the ways the United States failed its working-class young men, first by sending them to fight in Vietnam, then by abandoning them to hardship and despair when they returned. Will may have had a great time raging at the concert, but he clearly wasn’t listening very closely to any of the lyrics besides the chorus.
As far as I can tell, Reagan never played “Born in the U.S.A.” during his campaign. His campaign staff did reach out to Springsteen for use of the song and an endorsement; Springsteen’s people declined, and Springsteen almost immediately became more outspoken about his progressive politics. Reagan did reference Springsteen in a speech in New Jersey, but even at the time people found it bizarre. Reagan was campaigning on a platform of hope and abundance, and Springsteen’s music is not exactly characterized by a portrayal of America that fits that vision. But that didn’t stop other Republican politicians, including Bob Dole and Pat Buchanan, from using “Born in the U.S.A.” in their own future campaigns.
We’re not here to talk about the Boss and his music. But the decades-long misappropriation of “Born in the U.S.A.” is the most infamous example of a trend that has been around for ages and won’t be going away anytime soon: people misinterpreting art for political messages that are obviously contrary to what that art actually stands for. American conservatives are particularly notorious for it—I’ll leave it to psychologists and sociologists to figure out why—but they aren’t the only ones who do it. It happens all the time. It’s probably happened five times since I started writing this paragraph.
We can’t talk about They Live (1988) without talking about the intersection of art and politics, particularly in the U.S., and particularly in the 1980s. It is a very political movie with a very deliberate political message. It is also a movie that people wanting to convey a very different political message have since tried to co-opt—unsuccessfully, as it turns out, but we’ll get to that.
Let’s back up and start at the beginning.
In the beginning, sci fi writer and cartoonist Ray Nelson published a short story called “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1963. Several years later, in 1986, Nelson and artist Bill Wray adapted that story into a comic called “Nada” for the sci fi comics anthology Alien Encounters. (The comic is incomplete in that link; it’s missing the first page/opening scene.) Nelson’s story, in both formats, is about a man named George Nada who discovers that the world is secretly controlled by aliens who have hypnotized humans into not noticing their presence. He spends the story trying to reveal them to the rest of the world.
Stories about aliens secretly controlling humanity are pretty common in sci fi, especially in the post-World War II era, when the tension and paranoia of the Cold War led to books like Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters (1951) and Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers (1954), and movies like It Came From Outer Space (1953), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, based on Finney’s novel), and Quartermass II (1955). Like a lot of ’50s Cold War sci fi, these stories often have a political theme, although sometimes the allegories are a bit muddled. To this day people still argue about whether the 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is pro- or anti-McCarthyism. (I think we’ll watch that one for this film club soon. I’m on an alien invasion kick lately.)
Nelson’s story is not obviously political, except in that very ’60s way of portraying a man trying to liberate people from a powerful and controlling authority. The 1986 comic version is more or less identical, although it leans a bit more into the horror and absurdity, with a sort of noir style to the artwork.
The story didn’t become a pointed political allegory until John Carpenter got a hold of it. He read the comic when it came out, when he was actively looking for ideas and inspiration for a low-budget film. He acquired the rights to both the story and the comic, and he wrote the screenplay. The screenplay is credited to “Frank Armitage,” but that’s a case of Carpenter using a pseudonym—something he has done several times over the years. The name “Frank Armitage” is a reference to the H.P. Lovecraft story The Dunwich Horror, which Carpenter has said he picked simply because he likes Lovecraft’s work. (In 1994, Carpenter would direct In the Mouth of Madness, which references and incorporates many Lovecraft stories.)
When Carpenter was casting They Live, he wanted somebody who didn’t have a Hollywood aura about them (which meant, among other things, he wasn’t going to call up his BFF Kurt Russell). He met Canadian pro wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper in 1987. Carpenter was a wrestling fan, and Piper was looking to do more acting, so Piper’s manager introduced them over dinner. Carpenter asked, “Want to be in my movie?” and Piper, who had no idea who Carpenter was, basically thought, “Why the hell not?” and the rest is history. Yes, I’m paraphrasing, but honestly, according to both of them that’s about how it went.
A fairly high-profile professional wrestler is perhaps an odd choice for a character who is meant to be a working-class everyman, but I can appreciate the logic. Carpenter wanted somebody a little unpolished, a little rough around the edges—somebody who could convincingly portray a regular guy who also happens to be capable of kicking ass. That ordinariness is central to the story Carpenter wanted to tell. And, yes, the bubblegum line came from Piper.
When the film opens, Nada (the film never uses his name, but it’s listed in the credits) is new to Los Angeles, homeless and jobless. All he wants is a chance to do an honest day’s work for honest pay. He meets Frank (Keith David), a guy in a very similar position, on a construction site, and Frank brings him to Justiceville, a homeless encampment that provides Nana with a place to stay and a bit of community support.
The camp featured in the movie is a real one, filmed on site in Los Angeles; the residents were hired as extras for the movie. That realism, combined with the bluesy score by Carpenter and Alan Howarth, firmly ground the film in a very particular corner of the American experience. These are hard times for a lot of people. Mills are closing, jobs are scarce, families are living in shantytowns, and people with almost nothing are constantly bombarded by media and advertisements telling them that success in life is defined by buying more, acquiring more, having more. This is the height of the extravagant ’80s, but the film’s point of view is centered far, far away from the worlds of Risky Business (1983) or Wall Street (1987).
Nada has no time to settle into his new life, because there are strange things afoot. A pirate television signal cuts into regular broadcasts to warn people about some shadowy force that is controlling people. Nada notices suspicious goings on at the church across the street, and when he investigates he discovers that one of the men from the camp, Gilbert (Peter Jason), is working with some other people on some secretive project.
Nada isn’t the only one who notices. The police are watching as well. The sequence in which the militarized police force bulldozes Justiceville, brutally beats the residents, and raids a Black church is incredibly upsetting—maybe even more so now than it was thirty-six years ago, because nothing in the last thirty-six years has made such events less common or likely.
The reason for both the show of force and the resistance to it becomes apparent after Nada manages to get away. He finds a box of sunglasses in the now-ruined church and discovers, entirely by accident, that the sunglasses allow him to see the real world, a world that brainwashing has hidden from people. The city is filled with subliminal messages everywhere, on billboards, on magazine stands, in grocery stores, on television: OBEY, CONSUME, CONFORM, MARRY AND REPRODUCE. NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT. DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY. Just in case those messages aren’t clear enough, a glimpse of money in a man’s wallet reveals THIS IS YOUR GOD.
Along with the subliminal messages, Nada also discovers that a large number of people around him are not human. They are aliens masquerading as human. Naturally, he finds this rather upsetting. He reacts as anyone would: by telling an alien in a grocery store that she looks like she fell in cheese dip. (I can’t help it. I love this movie’s terrible, cringey one-liners.)
They Live was made on a pretty small budget ($3-4 million, depending on who you ask). It was filmed on location in Los Angeles, with very few sets. A number of the props came from other movies, because secondhand props are cheaper than new ones. The sunglasses were a leftover from Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China (1986), and the alien communication devices come from Ghostbusters (1984). According to Carpenter, the most expensive part of the production was the creation of certain shots of the hidden world. The scene in the grocery store, in which every single item on the shelves has a subliminal message when viewed through the sunglasses, was one of the few sets they had to build from scratch.
One of favorite details about the production of They Live is about a member of the crew: Jeff Imada, a stuntman and actor who has worked on dozens of movies over the past few decades. He’s the fight choreographer behind They Live’s legendary six-minute alley fight scene between Nada and Frank. Imada worked with Piper and David for three or four weeks to practice every beat (pun intended) of that scene, which is still counted among favorite fight scenes every time audiences and critics are asked.
Why is the fight so long? Wrong question! If you have the power to film a six-minute fight scene in which a WWE wrestler and a classically-trained stage actor beat each other senseless in a garbage-filled Los Angeles alley due to a disagreement about one man’s unwillingness to put on a pair of cheap plastic sunglasses, the only question to ask yourself is: Why not?
But aside from the fight, this is a detail I love: Imada also plays the aliens. Not all of them, but most of them. Any time there is a close-up shot or a speaking part, that’s Jeff Imada. Apparently, Carpenter wasn’t happy with the actors he hired for those parts, so he just stuck Imada in hideous makeup and a series of outfits (both men’s and women’s) and filmed him over and over again.
Carpenter has never shied away from stating exactly who those aliens represent. They are the yuppies of the ’80s. They are Gordon Gecko and Patrick Bateman. They are the supporters of Ronald Reagan’s economic policies, the ones who promoted deregulation for the benefit of the rich and powerful, the ones who promised trickle-down economics knowing full well that nothing would ever trickle down. They are the Americans who prioritize wealth and consumerism over everything else, including the lives of other people and the health of the planet. They are the wealthy and powerful who view the poor and marginalized as nothing but populations to be exploited for wealth and power. One of the alien newscasters even references Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign ad.
The allegory doesn’t end there. In the film, the aliens need human collaborators. There’s where characters like Holly Thompson (Meg Foster) and the construction foreman (Norman Alden) come in, the working people who know about the aliens and side with them. These are the people who are in reality closer to being homeless than they are to being rich and powerful, but still align themselves with the rich and powerful who are actively exploiting them.
(Aside: Sure, she joined the aliens in the end, but the scene in which Holly pushes Nada out of her window is completely awesome. Yes, girl, that is the appropriate response to having an armed kidnapper and carjacker in your house!)
The point is, none of the movie’s meaning is subtle. Subtlety hasn’t left the building, because subtlety was never in the building in the first place. This is an example of a sci fi story that was conceived, developed, and created, from start to finish, with a particular theme in mind. Carpenter has said this repeatedly over the years, in countless interviews. He liked Nelson’s comic, and he saw it as an opportunity to explore this political allegory. He was angry and alarmed at how the ideals of the previous decades, such as the communal counterculture of the ’60s and the civil rights movement, had given way to unrestrained, obsessive consumerism wrapped up in the fervor of evangelicalism.
I like They Live a lot, cheesy one-liners and six-minute fight scenes and surprise defenestration and all, but I can also see why some critics found it clunky. There are stories from the ’80s about how executives at Universal (being rich yuppies themselves) had been uncertain about the film’s theme and had suggested giving the aliens a motivation beyond money. (In the original story and comic, the aliens also eat people.) Carpenter didn’t want that, however, and stuck with the message of characterizing the aliens as colonizers with no goal other than to exploit Earth for wealth.
It was only some twenty years after the movie’s release that people began to claim the film had an entirely different meaning. I don’t care to give attention to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, but the short version is that neo-Nazis decided that the movie is about Jewish people secretly controlling the world, because that’s what neo-Nazis think everything is about. This was tied into the rise of other anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, such as notable asshole David Icke’s shapeshifting lizard people nonsense. This misinterpretation never spread broadly, but it pops up from time to time, not in the sense of gaining true mainstream traction, but in the sense of movie fans being reminded, yet again, that people on the internet often say and believe disgusting things. Every time this interpretation returns, there is generally prompt and exasperated correction; searching online leads to at least half a dozen articles in various publications that explain, in great detail, why it’s wrong.
So this isn’t so much a case of a posteriori interpretations ruining the legacy of a movie. The movie’s legacy is just fine, for the most part. Like many John Carpenter movies, They Live has grown to become a beloved cult classic over time, and the majority of people have no trouble understanding what it’s about. It just also gets roped into being an example of what happens when people who are determined to do harm seize onto a misinterpretation of a piece of media or art.
Leaving that aside, I think They Live is an interesting example of the limits of using a sci fi premise as a political allegory. There are always going to be limits to any metaphor that divides people into us and them. This is especially true in speculative fiction, when exaggerated characteristics drawn from human behavior are assigned to fictional species and monsters. Sometimes the result of trying to walk this line in sci fi is very complex and nuanced, and sometimes it is not.
They Live is not. It expands on the source material, but it leaves its nuance behind with its subtlety. And that’s fine, because it’s an action movie with blister-faced aliens who look like they fell in cheese dip, not a rigorous sociopolitical op-ed. To watch the movie and pick apart how convincing one finds its central thesis is to miss the point entirely. There is a reason the film focuses on the character of Nada, a man of immediate action and violent reaction, and not members of the established resistance. They Live is not about how systemic economic oppression can be understood and the myriad imperfect ways of dismantling it. That’s a different story, for a different film.
They Live is an expression of frustration, a scream into the void about how fucking unfair it is to be told that success comes from following the rules and working hard, only to realize that the people who make the rules and dictate your hard work have been exploiting you for their own benefit all along.
And, in the end, it doesn’t offer a simple conclusion. We don’t know what happens after the aliens’ presence is revealed. We don’t know if Nada and Frank and the resistance—none of whom survive the movie—achieve any sort of lasting change in the end. We see that the aliens are revealed, but not what happens next. Nada dies after all the violence, all the brutality and death, all the fear and betrayal, all the horror and anger, and he dies without knowing whether humans will rise up against the aliens—or if they’ll simply shrug and go about their lives.
What do you think of They Live? Its theme, its epic fight scene, its aliens? Its terrible (amazing) dialogue? Or that wonderful soundtrack with its electro-synth blues?
Next week: What’s that?!—oh, never mind. I just thought I saw a dude in a mask lurking behind that hedge. Watch Halloween on Fubo, AMC+, Shudder, Indieflix, Cultpix, Amazon.
