They live?
Recent comment in an older post:
Hey brother. You may want to check out the movie "They Live" - I've been recommending it to folks on my blog circuit of late and its a wonderful distopia movie. Alphaville is another good one.
Well, I have seen They Live - I didn't realise it was as late as 1988 - anyway.
It is a profoundly disturbing film - the protagonist discovers that when he wears a pair of special glasses that certain nice white middle class types are in fact evil aliens trying to take over the world...
Shade of anti-semitic paranoia anyone? Certainly, the film then revolves around the exquisite pleasure of eradicating these interloping alien scum by our beautiful muscle bound aryan.
OK, so Carpenter may have been being ironic, his films though do tend to revolve around grounds of Zombies and nightmares of collectivism - but given Escape from New York and Escape from LA I am inclined to an Ironic view - I mean, invasion by Cuba?
That said, you have to see the irony, failure of irony can lead to bad things.
posted by Bill at 11:30
1 Comments:
Bill! The aliens are not a "race" as you have interpreted it, but are the invisible force of capital operating in our everyday world. The glasses do not just allow folks to see the aliens for what they are, but also they can see the hidden messages behind all media. In addition, the analogy to colonization I think is quite apt. Under capital our very lives are colonized by some force we cannot detect but we know it is there.
As for the race card, I guess I didn't see that at all considering that the Rowdy Piper and Lou Gossett Jr are the heros (Irish and Black).
Note also that the movie was made as a comment on Reganomics and is very apt today of course. I love the scenes of the shantytowns in LA and the attitude of the establishment towards them. It is something that people in the US don't seem to realize exists all over the 3rd World.
I think I will have to do a review on the movie on my blog now to properly set expectations for folks :D. Sorry you didn't like it.
Cheers,
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