They Live is one of those unfortunately good movies that cannot be adequately analyzed without betraying the very elements designed to entrance first time viewers and inspire the unfettered love that those of us who’ve seen the movie far too many times still hold for it, even after our two hundred and fifty-fifth viewing. As such, standard Spoiler Warnings apply. All bastards unfortunate enough to have never experience a context-free viewing of this picture are hereby placed On Notice. You’ve been warned. They Live, We Sleep.

The movie also served as my introduction to the outré one John Carpenter, last seen around these parts when…my god, has it been as long as al that? (Note from behind the fourth wall: I’d meant to examine his sophomore effort, Assault on Precinct 13, neigh on a year ago. Anyone reading this site can properly tell where that little effort went) Made twelve years after a little bit of paranoid schizophrenia called Assault on Precinct 13 and two years after the apocryphal, artist vs. studio row over Big Trouble in Little China, They Live presents a portrait of the artist as a not-so-young man, no longer trustful of the authoritarian forces that served as Assault’s protagonists and point-of-view characters. Here we find Big JC making no bones about his distasteful distrust, not only of the entertainment industry, but the whole of capitalist society. No surprise, really. A decade living and working inside the studio system could do that to anyone…but imagine if that decade was…(dramatic pause)…the 1980s.

According to legend, Carpenter was so miffed over studio manhandling of Big Trouble in Little China (that bullshit cliffhanger ending? Not his) that he threatened and cajoled his way into a multi-picture deal, complete with total creative control and all the fresh squeezed human blood he could drink, provided he turned them in on time and under budget. Prince of Darkness is the first love child of said sweetheart deal. They Live is the second.

Like any second child worth time and effort They Live manages to upstage its elder brother with fewer resources and sheer, attention grabbing pluck. Apart from Keith David there are no reliable stalwarts from the Carpenter cannon to supply the ubiquitous name-above-the-title. There’s no Donald Pleasence here to chase down the Shatner-faced psycho killer, no Victor Wong to explain this movie’s metaphysical threat and no Kurt Russell to jam a boomstick up its ass once Victor’s through identifying which other-worldly hole serves that particular biological function. In They Live the fate of our world wrest in the hands of a wrestler with a mullet and decidedly ‘80s physique. Indeed, God help us all.

Said wrestler, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, plays a nameless working man from “Denver, Colorado,” a man with no name that Clint Eastwood would never play, whom’ I’ll refer to simply as Our Hero, or Roddy. He begins the movie railriding into smog-choked canyons of Los Angelis. Nothing’s changed there since this movie was made save the movies and the air. Both have gotten worse, but it’s not as if things are looking up for Roddy as it is. Sent away by the unemployment office, he spends a night camped out in a back alley before visiting a construction sight. “This is a union job,” the foreman informs him with an indistinguishable air of get-the-hell-away-from-me. Roddy, not missing a beat, inquires, “Can I please speak to the shop steward…sir?”

Somehow, Roddy’s powers of hockey hair triumph and secure him, not just a job, but a friend in the form of Frank (Keith David). Frank, in turn, directs Roddy to “Justiceville’s on Fourth Street,” a shanty village on a desolate urban plain, across the street from a Spanish Deco church. There, food is procured and Frank introduces Our Hero to Gilbert (Peter Jason), the man who nominally runs things at Justiceville. Now, Frank begins the movie as the voice of outrage, fed up . As he guides Roddy through “Justiceville” he mentions his “wife and two kids back in Detroit…I haven’t seen ‘um in six years,” and offers a critique of modern capitalism (call it Reganomics or globalization…though I prefer George H.W. Bush’s “voodoo economics”) that is scathing in its clear-sighted bitterness. “The whole deal’s like some kinda crazy game…and the name of the game is ‘make it through life,’ only everyone’s out for themselves and lookin’ to do you in at the same time.”

Rowdy Roddy will have none of it. He begins the movie down on his luck to be sure, but still very much into the system that has obviously done so well by him. “You oughtta have a little more patience in life,” he says to Frank. “I believe in America,” he declares as they look out over the smoggy awfulness of Los Angelis at sunset. He sees these waning years of Regan-Bush as a time to lie in wait for opportunity that will surely one day come. Roddy, then, begins the movie a complete fool. His story is one of quick, bloody education.

Because there is something going on in the church across the street. Men (Gilbert included) come and go in a hatchback station wagon, loading anonymous looking boxes. A police helicopter seems unnaturally interested in circling overhead. And when Roddy decides to do some casual snooping (the door is unlocked, sparing him the need to break and enter) he finds the singing congregation is nothing more than a tape recorder wired to a serviceable sound system. There’s a laboratory set-up in the back room with rows and rows of…sunglasses. Not the biggest moneymaker outside a certain alley in Shanghai I may or may not know about…nevertheless, there is that circling helicopter…and the cryptic ledger on the wall: “They Live, We Sleep.”

And as night falls a (budgetarily constrained, but no less intimidating) army of SWAT cops descends upon the church and its adjoining shanty town, bringing their own brand of old school, ninetieth century justice to Justiceville by special truncheon delivery. Our Hero saves a kid, and that’s something, but what’s a working man to do in the face of cops with bulldozers?

The next day the surviving already-homeless pick through the remains of Justiceville. The church sits scorched and empty, wide open to a snooping Roddy. The lab is gone. The sound system; gone. Everything gone…but a box of sunglasses. No drugs, no money, no guns, just sunglasses. Seemingly on a whim, Roddy stashes the box in an anonymous looking trash can and puts a pair of glasses on.

The literally black-and-white world revealed to him is They Live’s big shock, its central conceit, and the only element of the movie worth rambling on about like this for…god only knows how many words this review will wind up being. Behind the shades, Roddy perceives the world as it well and truly is for the first time in his sorry, hockey-haired life. Through the glasses, colorful vacation billboards read simply, “Obey.” Instead of listing ingredients cans of soup order Roddy to, “Consume.” Posters, cigarette boxes, pages of magazines, and every bit of signage in every advertising space in the bleak, urban dystopia of Los Angelis…perhaps (the movie whispers) the entire world. “Sleep,” “Watch TV,” “Marry and Reproduce,” “Doubt Humanity,” “Do Not Question Authority.” But for Roddy, this isn’t even half the problem.

The rest arrives when a “man” walks up to a newsstand Our Hero just happens to pause at. Roddy raises his eyes from the magazine in his hands (“Surrender,” “Follow,” “No Independent Thought”) and realizes that man is no man at all. Instead he sees a lipless monster with glowing, 1950s-bug eyes, dressed in a suit and tie, conversing with the magazine stand’s proprietor as if it were…one of us.

For that is just the problem. These monsters, these aliens…whatever They are, They seem to be everywhere. They mingle among us, shopping beside us. They are the woman in line at the bank and the teller behind the counter. They are the cop on the beat and the low life pausing on the street corner. They are all around us, from the supermarket to the political podium on the supermarket’s TV screen. “It figures it’d be something like this,” Roddy chuckles in quiet desperation, seeing this. Because it does.

From this point on, They Live becomes an unapologetic sci-fi action flick, paying off all those in the audience patient enough to sit through it’s sedately creeping first half. Because what’s a man to do in a situation such as this? Particularly if is a white, hetero man in an action movie from the late 80s? Obviously, seize the nearest gun and begin to wreak bloody vengeance. At least Roddy is saved from becoming a true action psychopath (see Commando, Rambo, Die Hard…or better, don’t) by virtue of a fact that he communicates later to Frank—that those he killed “weren’t people.”

Indeed, this fact saves the whole movie from becoming anything more than a harmless sci-fi action picture. It’s a nice dig at Reganomics (“Don’t Question Authority”). A cheese sci-fi action relic from the 1980s. (“Sleep”) It’s not even a very good movie by any stretch of the imagination. There are no particular acting jobs of note here, and the movie’s one memorable line (having to do with the absence of bubblegum) was apparently adlibbed, so that tells you about the dialogue. There’s no sweeping, epic story about rings or Forces, save those who control us, They who live while we unhappy apes scurry around, or Sleep, and its certainly not an uplifting, feel good family film. Things do not work out well and there are no easy outs...save one…but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Were I a conquering alien race bent on the total subservient control of the human race this is exactly the kind of movie I would make. It paints a picture of the invading They as simultaneously all-powerful in their technical sophistication and bumblingly ill-prepared. So ill-prepared, in fact, that their entire operation is stymied by an unemployed wrestler (power of hockey hair or no) and his Gargoyle-voiced black friend. As my roommate, Action, queried: “Why are they using all this crappy human technology?” A better question, one that’s always haunts me whenever I’m faced with a vision of humans-as-slaves. Why are they use us the first place, to say nothing of our technologies? Particularly if we are, as the Scientist of this picture informs us, “like a natural resource to Them. Deplete the planet, move on to another.” I’ve always thought, if draining planets of their resources is your conquering horde’s preferred modus of operandi, to go all Independence Day on our species’ sorry ass, wiping us from the planet in one triumphant go…especially since we make it so easy, hording together in our bright, shinny cities.

This movie is no Independence Day and thank all the gods that don’t exist for that. It is also a true relic in that it would not be made today. For one thing, no one in this movie is even close to movie pretty. In today’s movies even sociopathic monsters like (I’m looking at you, Mr. Edward D. Brock Jr.) are required to look like refugees Gap billboards (“Consume”). For another, everyone knows the world can only be saved by heroes or experts. Certainly not out-of-work construction workers.

The absurdity of it all has contributed mightily to this film’s condemnation, and in this age of CGI malfescence, They Live has been relegated to late night viewings on Ted Turner’s cable channels, where it was regularly broadcast into my head with color commentary from the likes of Joe Bob Briggs (“Watch TV”). It’s even made its way onto DVD, from thence to my shelves, and from thence through another television into my brain. One could say I’ve “consumed” the film and am now spitting it back up for and onto you, like Seth Brundle spitting up on his daily lunch of doughnuts.

I have no hope that the corrosive enzymes of my thoughts will in any shape way or form break down the molecular bonds of your defenses and dissolve you into a compliant pulp, enabling me to convince you of the Truth. It’s a cheap, late-80s sci-fi/action extravaganza, suitable for an afternoon’s enjoyment with friends and relatives who share your (and my) cinematic tastes. There are no great Truths on display in They Live, save this: every frame of this movie is true.

Consider, the warnings of a blind priest early in the film: “They have taken the hearts and minds of our leaders. They have recruited the rich and the powerful and they have blinded us to the truth. The human spirit is corrupted. Why do we worship greed? Because outside of the limit of our sight, feeding off us, perched on top of us from birth to death are our owners, our owners. They have us. They control us. They are our masters. Wake up. They’re all about you, all around you.” Or, later, the words of They Live’s unnamed Scientist: “The poor and the underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent. They have created a repressive society and we are their unwitting accomplices….Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled into a trance. They have made us indifferent, to ourselves, to others. We are focused only on our own gain…Please, understand: they are safe so long as they are not discovered. That is their primary method of survival. Keep us asleep, keep us selfish, keep us sedated…”

Forget the aliens for a moment. They’re an obvious metaphor to begin with and a modicum of thought reveals them as the wish-fulfilling, adolescent projection that they really, really are. John Carpenter wishes (as do I) that it were as “simple” as They Live makes it out to be. He wishes (and I wish) that the virulent, psychopathic, death-mongering destructiveness of modern civilization could be lain at the feet of alien invaders. It would “figure” as Roddy says, and it would make things so much simpler. A computer virus in their mothership, a real virus in their body’s, or a single bullet in just the right place at just the right time and poof; all over and done. The ozone hole would reseal itself, the polar ice caps would re-freeze, and the salmon would return to clog the rivers of my adopted geo-graphic region and the long nightmare of greedwhoring, wage slaving, impending nuclear destruction would end in a flash of revolutionary sabotage.

Much simpler, all that, than the real work of changing our world and making it a better place for ourselves and those unlucky enough to come up after us. Much better than the truth: that there are no aliens among us; only broken, fractured human beings with no conception of the consequences of their action. Don’t let their lack of glowing bug-eyes fool you: They exist, as surely as we do, and while We Sleep, They do indeed Live. They who bow down before greed and view us as little more than chattel slaves. They who really are our owners and our masters. “They want benign indifference, they want us drugged. We could be pets. We could be food. But all we really are is livestock.” Numbers on a ledger. Replaceable parts. There’s no need for them to be aliens unless (like some of us) you require some form of psychological displacement to get your through the day and absolved humanity of any responsibility for the catastrophes we commit against the planet that supposedly nurtures us. In his treatment of the film (a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away) Nathan called this a “guilt displacing fairy tale” and he was only right to do so. If I were a money-mongering bug-eyed monster with (say) a movie studio under my belt, They Live is exactly kind of flick I’d want to recalcitrant young film makers to churn out. It manages to perfectly describe the problems of our modern world while flattening their causes and offering no good solutions. It’s the kind of TV We are meant to watch while We Sleep.

Through this lens They Live is a textbook case of cult success. Its cinematic and storytelling soft spots have kept it off the radar of mainstream audiences; the people who are helping Spider-Man 3 break records. Instead, it’s captured and mollified those of us who recognize it for what it is and are as entranced by what it does right as much as what it does wrong, its successes and its failures. For whatever it is worth, We Think as We Sleep and that continues to give me a rare and special species of hope. I hope that They do not exist, though I’m sure They do, and that They are very human. They manufacture plutonium by the pound and sell depleted uranium by the ton. They release mercury into streams and carbon monoxide into our air. They build damns to destroy any water lucky enough to escape the ground and the toxification there. They are what this movie describes as the “human power elite.” I used to hope that this knowledge would pass from me, like a nightmare before the breaking day, or a bad movie once you’ve ejected the disc. Now I only hope that I will be able to counter Their actions, which are also our actions, our destructiveness, in some positive way, and that I will not have to apologize to my non-existent future children for the poisoned, add-cluttered, acid-rain drenched world that I leave them. I also hope that when the time comes to oppose Them we will be able to do it ourselves, and that We will Wake up, and not need the power of hockey hair to save us.