They Live (1988)

No we haven’t, excluding the Allen picture, stumbled into another thirty days of horror, but They Live was on television the other night, and though it has been written about endlessly by other enthusiasts, I watch no questions asked when that picture is playing, regardless of what DVDs may be stacked in the corners of the room. I briefly mentioned the film over at Joe’s place the other day, but wasn’t going to write about it for fear that my readers think me possessed of some tunnel vision.

I’ll risk it. They Live may, along with Big Trouble in Little China, be John Carpenter’s most purely pleasurable picture, seemingly less interested in pressing its effect upon the audience than most of Carpenter’s work. The film is flakey and loose; wearing its frustration bluntly on its sleeve, blessed with a total absence of self-consciousness, effectively reflecting the personality that Carpenter exudes in his generally appealing, self-effacing interviews.

And this may be what the current political war pictures are missing, a feel for the everyday as well as a punk cover screw the critics outrage. Filmmakers concerning themselves with Iraq seem less interested in making a great Iraq movie than being the director of a great Iraq movie, ego divorcing them from any immediacy of feeling, we generally feel as if we’re just sitting through another disingenuous politician’s platform, and critics wonder why we skip the pictures! My readers have convinced me that I was probably too kind on Stop-Loss recently, I essentially reviewed the first act, only to shut my eyes and ears of everything that followed, but that picture signaled, in the beginning, a bit of hope for the current coming home movie. Peirce at least had conviction and, dare we get a little maudlin, heart which needn’t be encased in quotation marks.

If Stop-Loss has conviction, They Live has conviction in its lack of conviction, the thing has a flip despair. Carpenter’s pictures, with few exceptions, normally receive shitty notices, and this seems to free the director to take on a vaguely political B picture without any illusions as to how it will ultimately be received. The “message” is front and center, in your face, a gifted amateur’s outrage. Ridiculous looking skeletons have taken over Earth, aligned with the government, and are assuring our complacency through a solid middle class lifestyle, which is why it falls upon the bums on the edge of town to save the world, primarily because they haven’t been cut in on the deal; aided by a cheap pair of sunglasses that exposes the aliens, as well as their subliminal messages which include SLEEP, MARRY, and CONSUME, they seek to set matters straight.

The film has an undeniably quaint those were the good old days (in genre cinema) quality, but there is an inspired black joke that Carpenter should’ve further played up, that the difference between the aliens’ reign and our own is negligible, the stakes non-existent. Our heroes, Roddy Piper and Keith David, are intent to free the human race from enslavement, but we never understand why the victory matters, which is to say that it doesn’t matter, except to establish to which victor goes the spoils, which will never be Rowdy Roddy Piper or Keith David or anyone of their social standing anyway. Their plight is bitter, not particularly well-intentioned, and pointless. They Live captures American indifference in a more honest and memorable fashion than any five Jarheads.

Some have expressed disappointment in the stunt casting of Rowdy Roddy, but that’s essential to the film’s junk ennui vibe. Some have suggested that this would have been an ideal collaboration with Carpenter’s favorite leading man, Kurt Russell, and while I generally make it my practice to encourage casting Russell in anything, he would be too flexible, too commanding, too just plain good, of an actor for the part. They Live needs a square, clunky hero, with just enough self-awareness to be in on the joke, and that’s precisely what Piper supplies. His delivery of the film’s oft quoted “kick ass and chew bubble gum” line is labored, and perfect; a construction worker seizing the end of the world as ultimate opportunity to blow away bankers whom he (probably) would’ve killed even if they were human. Russell’s approach would’ve been too outright satirical (a bit like his funnier than the movie deserves role in Overboard) and would’ve elevated the film a bit too much out of the muck.

Casting Russell would’ve also denied us just a bit of the primal charge of the film’s most famous scene, where David and Piper beat the unholy shit out of each other, for no other reason than neither of them have anything else to do. Many have commented on the scene’s comic effect, that it goes on so long that it crosses the divide from funny to tedious to funny again (and I couldn’t help but notice parallels between it and Cronenberg’s vicious bathhouse scene in Eastern Promises, any college students reading are welcome to that term paper), but the scene also firmly belongs thematically, tapping into an emasculated poor beefy guy rage that Fight Club doesn’t satirize nearly as well as people claim. Carpenter’s picture has a Samuel Fuller outrage from the economical pits of pulp thing going on, and I bet if Fuller had made the exact same picture it would enjoy considerably higher critical regard.

The ending is broad, tasteless and perhaps the closest the picture comes to being legitimately brilliant. The world is saved, but you’re still left fucking an alien. The sunglasses revealed, more than anything, to be a pain in the ass.

★★★½

Posted on April 11th, 2008 in Reviews, Horror, 1988 |

© Copyright 2007 Bowen's Cinematic.
Site Designed by Ben Markowitz.
Bowen's Cinematic is powered by WordPress.