They Live offers a lively take down on the mores of consumer culture and urban conformity without the eye roll sermonizing and tedious preaching that is endemic to many of its thematic peers. Eschewing more noble explication, Carpenter remains faithful to his singular vision of producing a biting socioeconomic critique couched within the auspices of a pedestrian sci fi flick. Yes, the rising action is carried infinite degrees beyond good taste but the lack of restraint demonstrates a laudable conceptual fidelity. The plot is patently ridiculous but if you suspend disbelief you’ll find it a bizarrely satisfying watch.
Extraterrestrials and subliminal messages are the canaries in the coalmine of late capitalism in the bizarre and wacky street level view of They Live’s Los Angeles. The Pacific megacity is a postmodern wild west of sorts where billboards contain binary meanings and back alley patriotism has gone rogue. There is a visceral divide between the working poor and the well heeled middle class and though they don’t quite occupy parallel realities, their experiences of the city chart divergent courses. Throughout They Live we encounter an ad hoc squatter’s colony, a church mission, and gritty railroad yards existing in tandem with the glittering commercial core of the professional classes. The cross fertilization of familiar scenes of urban despondence with the unfamiliar and patently outlandish alien angle feels original, and effective.
They Live makes some daring claims, the most salient being that we are all, well, asleep – dormant minds laid to waste by the insidiousness of chokehold capitalism. This aint a blissful slumber either, as the resting state of our collective dream is a conveyor belt of poverty, urban grit, and foreclosed ambitions. Our gruff lead, Roddy Piper, is a sojourner in this dystopian terrain. He runs around Los Angeles toting a gun, chewing gum, and using his mystical sunglasses to access an unknown mode of being, that is, the mode of the unshackled, the free.
One needn’t an advanced degree in semiotics to revel in the simplistic subliminal subtext beckoning us to Obey and Conform. Not quite revelatory material and not quite designed to be – the magic of They Live is that we take these gut punches to consumerism to be the most banal truisms: it is not controversial that magazines are imploring us to obey and conform. What else would they be doing? Therein lies the playful force behind the film: it wakes us up from our consumer stupor and allows us to see who we’ve invited into our bed. We all take subliminal posturing for granted as obvious because we have all digested and normalized the disturbing machinations of the capitalist industrial complex and now they feel inevitable, omniscient, and worst of all, harmless.
The film compels us to open our eyes but it never relies on academic posturing or psychological maneuvering to do so. It is like philosophy for the masses. They Live is based on a bedrock of delightful dissonance, flirting with subversive themes without ever daring to be subversive.
