No Thought: They Live and Anti-Capitalism

The dumb, camp humour of They Live makes it easy to forget what a sharp piece of satire it is. For a movie whose most famous scene involves Rowdy Roddy Piper sticking up a bank saying “I’m here to chew bubblegum and kick ass... and I’m all out of bubblegum” (who goes to the bank to chew bubblegum?), its ideas and iconography have stuck with and informed me when considering the social and political issues of today. They Live is a movie that just gets more and more relevant.

The Meeting of the Goddess in John Nada’s monomyth is when he finds a pair of sunglasses that reveal the subliminal messages behind all media. Advertisements for holidays and start-up companies when viewed through the shades reveal stark, blunt directives like “Obey” and “No Thought”. He can also see that that many of the people walking around him do not appear human, but alien humanoids with faces that look like a cross between Skeletor and the melting Nazi from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Nada works it out immediately: there has been a takeover, but we haven’t realised because we have been kept asleep. He finds a woman who appears human through the sunglasses, but he learns the hard way that some people are complicit in the takeover because when they work with the aliens, they can profit.

As with all great horror movie monsters, the They Live aliens are a stand-in for a very real and present horror in the real world - in this case, capitalism. I like that there is no main villain; rather, Nada and Frank are up against a sprawling, covert system of exploitation and pacification. There’s no ‘event’, no mysterious Marvel Universe alien cube MacGuffin, no big loud invasion of earth filled with explosions and burning buildings, but it’s an invasion that is stumbled upon, and that you can only see if you know how and where to look.

Like the destructive, harmful consequences of capitalism, this knowledge is not just denied by people with access but violently rejected. This is apparent in the infamous six minute fight scene between Nada and Frank. Though appearing silly out of context, the altercation is a perfect microcosm of the struggle to get people to listen to a truth that is inconvenient to them, and how far people will go to protect a status quo in which they are comfortable, even if the status quo is dangerous and unsustainable. Frank from the beginning of the movie suspects something, but he consciously averts his eyes from whatever it is - his repeated refrain is “I have a wife and kids” - but when Nada leaves him with no choice but to look through the sunglasses, Frank reacts with brutal, messy violence. The scene is so captivating because of how much power is behind the response to his cognitive dissonance, coupled with Nada’s desperation in finding an ally to fight for the truth. Of course, the truth becomes so apparent that Frank has no choice but to join Nada’s side.

The bad guys, the aliens, look and talk just like us. Anyone walking down the street could be the enemy. But, though the film does not make this explicit, you notice that the aliens are usually people in authority with the power to preserve the system - yuppies, cops, TV presenters. John Carpenter clearly knew in 1988 what in the past year more and more people are coming around to. The real enemies of White America aren’t Russia, or China, or undocumented immigrants. These are the enemies that you have been conditioned to hate and fear, not unlike the mind control techniques the aliens use to manipulate the ‘real’ people to worship money and consume products. Your real enemies are the ones in power who uphold the system. They look just like you, and will not do anything to explicitly threaten you, they may even claim to keep you informed or safe.

I’ve never understood the criticisms of the Black Lives Matter/Abolish the Police movement that their fuss is just for ‘a few bad apples’. Have they never seen the effect of one rotten apple on the other apples in a bunch? With this in mind, I think it’s far more powerful that not all of the yuppies and cops appear as aliens when wears the sunglasses. Though they aren’t ‘bad apples’ as such, they still whether consciously or unconsciously work to uphold the aliens’ exploitation of the human race. And as the ending of the movie makes clear, some are far more conscious of it than others.

They Live is in many ways very much a product of its time. Only in the 1980s would a filmmaker dare to use studio money to make something this kitsch and silly. Watching it as just a movie where a Kurt Russell stand-in shoots a bunch of aliens with an Ithaca 37, it’s perfectly enjoyable. But you would do well to follow John Nada’s lead and look a little closer for a deeper message.