They Live (Film Review)

Ronald Reagan on Film

The very last thing people expected after Richard Nixon was Ronald Reagan. Republican ideas, it seemed, were dealt a mortal blow by the excesses of the Nixon Administration, and with The Civil Rights Act, expansion of women’s reproductive health, and the ending of the Vietnam War, liberals and moderates celebrated their conversion to America. And then came Ronald Reagan.

Some thought the problem was that people just didn’t understand what Reagan was really all about, so they turned to art to explain it, and for some reason, they turned more often than not to Science Fiction.

The first one I noticed was a skit on Saturday Night Live in 1980 called “The Brain Snatchers,” in which people who had been Liberals and Moderates were being replaced by Republican aliens, as in the movie “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” which had a big-budget remake three years before.

In 1983, the first episodes of the Italian comic RanXerox began appearing in Heavy Metal Magazine. RanXerox was a Frankenstein cyborg creation made of parts from abandoned copy machines and a brutal, cutting essay on how Americans saw Ronald Reagan and our hero culture.

Edward Neumeier began working on the idea of “RoboCop (1987)” while making “Bladerunner (1982).” Around the time that RanXerox was having its first run in Italian, Neumeier and Paul Verhoeven began talking about the idea of the “corporatization” of America and the changing of American Values as reflected by the popularity of Ronald Reagan. Not done with the idea, the pair would try again with “Star Ship Troopers (1997),” eight years after Reagan’s death.

John Carpenter’s first film was the zero-budget “Dark Star (1974)", a parody of several science films, but primarily “2001”. In 1976, he produced the low-budget “Assault on Precinct 13” which gained him enough acclaim to make his next film, “Halloween (1978)” which is credited with creating the “slasher” genre of films and making Carpenter a force to be dealt with.

His next seven films were successful enough to keep him employed but not huge. One of them, a remake of the 1951 film, “The Thing From Another World,” dealt with concepts of hidden malignancy and people not being what they seem.

By 1986, Carpenter was growing increasingly dissatisfied with Ronald Reagan’s America. Being an artist, he did the most logical thing: he began writing. Carpenter loved the schlock style of 1950’s cinema, so for his next project, he chose the title “They Live.”

I’m sure “They Live” had a theatrical run, but I missed it. The first time I saw it was on HBO. Having heard nothing about the film, the appearance of Roddy Piper, the professional wrestler, caught my eye. It was an unusual move to cast a wrestler in a movie, but if it’s an action film and there aren’t many long speeches, it works out. Wrestlers are actors, after all.

The first part of “They Live” follows a man working at a construction site but living in a homeless camp. Having worked with my mother in the creation of the Stewpot in Jackson, I’d been aware of the idea of the working poor. The idea that a man could hold a job but still not be able to house himself was a growing concern in the eighties and an anathema to the Republican idea that work will set you free. I use the phrase “work will set you free” intentionally here. In German, the phrase Arbeit macht frei was evident at most of the nazi concentration camps.

Accidentally finding sunglasses that enable Piper’s character to see things as they actually are, he sees that the advertisements that infest his world actually say things like “OBEY,” “CONSUME,” and “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” He then sees that, when he wears the glasses, some people aren’t humans at all. Some people, particularly economically blessed people, look like ghouls with the flesh flayed off their bodies. (Prosthetic Makeup effects were realized by Michael Mills.)

Piper’s character is known as “Nada” in the script but never given a name in the film. He soon discovers that Earth has been invaded by a corporate species of aliens who are here to exploit us, much like America exploits third-world countries. He also learns that some people are still very much human but willingly cooperate with the aliens to advance their careers.

Meg Foster is the female lead here. Foster has remarkably angular facial features and piercing azure blue eyes. She often plays characters where it’s difficult to tell if they’re evil or good. She doesn’t have many lines in the script, but her primary role is making Nada worry that she’s a collaborator. The audience never finds out if she is or isn’t until the film's end.

Why hire a professional wrestler if you don’t have a fight scene? Roddy Piper worked with his co-star Keith David to choreograph one of the longest fight scenes I ever saw. Featuring every move you ever saw in a professional wrestling match, it goes on for minute after minute. Miraculously, neither character seems terribly affected by it the next day.

Carpenter had a problem for a while when white nationalists from the internet tried to say his film was about Jews secretly taking over the world, but he dispatched them pretty quickly. Part of his problem was that most internet trolls weren’t born when Reagan was president.

“They Live” isn’t a hard film to find. Enter it in the search function on your smart TV, and it will return five or six sources. I want to say that the themes Carpenter bases his film on are artifacts of the past, but watching “They Live” last night, I was struck by how little any of that has changed. Reagan might be long dead, but his impact on America lives on. Maybe it never was Reagan in the first place. Maybe we did this to ourselves, and he just rode that cultural wave.