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Jonathan Lethem THEY LIVE
JONATHAN LETHEM is the author of eight novels and five other books of fiction and nonfiction. His writing has been translated into thirty languages, and he has received many awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Pushcart Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Lethem lives in California and Maine.
also available in this series:
Death Wish by Christopher Sorrentino
For Giuseppe Sorrentino
Its one of those peculiarly impoverishing gifts that popular post-modernism has bestowed on textual (so to speak) analysisscatter clues on the surface (intertexuality, symbolism, ironic juxtapositions, etcetera) like so much flotsam and you, the reader/viewer/ listener get to say Hey! I think there might have been a shipwreck here! If only all those Coast Guard cutters and Air-Sea Rescue helicopters would get out of here so I could study these signs more closely!CHRISTOPHER SORRENTINO
Carpenter has been in the past a conservative director. But theres no mistaking the films satiric intent, which he expounded upon in his interview with [Lewis] Beale. There Carpenter linked Reagans presidency to fascism and the rise of the fundamentalist right and the kind of mind control theyre putting out. Oddly, Carpenter underestimated his audience intellectually while overestimating them economically by concluding, My prediction is a few folks will get [the allegory], but most will say: What is he talking about? Is he talking about me? Then theyll get in their BMWs, drive home, take off their expensive clothes and Rolex watches and slip into their Jacuzzis and say, Nah, thats not about me. For whatever its worth, both times that I saw They Live, the audience seemed to be fully clued in to what the film was about, and I sincerely doubt that any of them owned a Jacuzzi... In fact, the movie is a confusing blend of anti-Reagan satire and genre conventions that make the film every bit as crass, amoral, and mulishly blinkered in its many rightwing assumptions as the attitudes it is ostensibly attacking. It all adds up to an ideological incoherence that is rather suggestive in relation to the recent president election.
JONATHAN ROSENBAUM,
Liberals Kick Ass, Chicago Reader
I think the real question about They Live is why its so great despite its baldly obvious satire of 80s consumerism. They Live is beyond scholarship.ANDREW HULTKRANS
These unjust and scornful remarks are easily understandable. Their motives lie in the reactionary commentators sense that they themselves are the zombies so acutely exposed and satirized in the movie. It is this feeling of those who not only do not understand, but do not wish to understand, that stirs their indignant contempt, and not any concern to show some real shortcomings of the film which, if existent, are definitely of secondary nature... Asked if his approach is somehow related with Marxism, Carpenter answered in the negative. Nevertheless, They Live does not cease to be perhaps the Marxist movie par excellence in the history of the seventh art. Even if it appeared 20 years ago, it does not cease to be topical and will remain so until the social evils it so graphically and skillfully depicts will be removed through social transformation.
CHRISTOS KEFALIS,
When Science Fiction Meets Marxism, Dissident Voice
As soon as I get back Im going to tell my superiors all about this fucked-up planet.NATASHA HENSTRIDGE, in John Carpenters Ghosts of Mars
What Youll Recall of the Dream in the Morning
A street preachers warning and a pirate television broadcast.
The demolition by riot policemen, helicopters, and bulldozers of an open-air homeless-persons compound in a vast vacant lot. A brazen assault on a ghetto church.
The hero, a wrestler garbed as a construction worker.
A pair of sunglasses that reveals yuppies as alien ghouls.
A chilly, enigmatic beauty, her intentions toward our hero unknown.
The black guy and the white guy. They begin in distrust, but soon learn theyve got enemies in common. From that point theyll cover each others backs.
Machine-gun fire in a television studio.
A surprise with tits.
But, above all, two sequences:
One, when the wrestler first dons the sunglasses and, exiting an alley, walks through a city revealed. Ten minutes of cognitive dissonance as sublime as anything in the history of paranoid cinema, shot partly in black-and-white, and composed with the serene assurance of Hitchcock or Kubrick.
Two, a fistfight in that same alley: crass, bruising farce stretched to an absurd limit, wagering the films whole stakes decisively on a pop-culture/termite art bet.
Note on Approach I
This is the first monograph on They Live. My apologies for not offering production details, or for not placing the film in the context of John Carpenters oeuvre, or within the science-fiction or horror-film genres per se. I didnt interview Carpenter, or anyone else close to the filmmakers process. I did read everything I could find written on the film: not much. If youre in the camp that sees Carpenter as a master auteur, youll think the existing literature on his career is appallingly scant. If you believe hes an errant journeyman, youll be amazed to know hes attracted scholarship at all.
My first encounter with a Carpenter film was Dark Star, at a mideighties campus screening. I loved it. Then, years later, I played catch-up, with VHS tapes and, later, DVDs. My interest was intermittent, and frequently disappointed. Ive never seen a John Carpenter film in the theater except Memoirs of an Invisible Man (which, because Id relished the H. F. Saint novel that was its source, I found thin and toneless). Like a lot of people, I think 1982s The Thing is his best film, but I probably adore Dark Star and They Live just as much, and Ive got a weak spot for Escape from New York. As that list suggests, I find Carpenter more compelling as a science-fiction (or science-fiction-horror) director than I do in his official role as Master of Horror. In the years when I took Carpenter most seriously as an auteur I labored to find Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13 interestingwell, they are interesting, but they didnt interest me so much that Ive ever gone back to them. Two or three of his films Ive never managed to see, and Im not worried about it.
After a strong beginning, Carpenters role as an auteur has a somewhat fizzled-out quality to it. Or is that the auteur approach gives diminishing returns lately? Recent candidates for that kind of enshrinement accumulate less evidenceCarpenters seventeen features in thirty-six years to, say, Don Siegels thirty-six in thirty-six. So it may simply be easier now to read individual films than whole careers. Anyway, without wanting to give Carpenter short shrift, Ill do my best just to read the film. In the vanity of my aspirations, Id do for
