Revolutionary Horror: John Carpenter's "They Live"

John Carpenter's 1988 pulpfest "They Live" is by far the easiest (and most fun) way to learn dense leftist media theory

Pro tip: If you want to subliminally embed a subversive idea into America’s collective unconscious, do it while having Roddy Piper and Keith David beat the ever loving shit out of each other for a full 7 minutes.

It does not get much more pulpy than John Carpenter’s 1988 movie They Live. The movie is based off a 1963 short story by Ray Nelson called “Eight O’Clock in the Morning,” in which the main character accidentally wakes up “all the way” after a hypnotist’s performance. Now awake, he realizes that humanity has been brainwashed by an alien species he calls “the Fascinators.” The Fascinators are using mass media and mind-control to convince humans to reproduce and consume and obey their every command so they can exploit the earth for all it’s worth.

The story was originally published in The Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy, and you can read it here. It is not particularly well-written, but the idea underneath it is cool, so Nelson had it adapted into a comic in 1986, which is where Carpenter first came across it. You can also read the comic online, but I’ll give you just a taste of the, uh, quality of it here:

Source

Carpenter optioned the comic and the short story to make They Live. He used the film to express his discontent with the rampant consumerism of Ronald Reagan’s America. Which makes it sound loftier than it is — the movie is full-blown pulp. The movie is the source of the famous quote, “I’m here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.” And for a solid 7 minutes of the movie — a huge chunk of its 94 minute run time — the hero, Roddy Piper, absolutely wails on his friend Keith David while trying to get him to put on the pair of sunglasses that will allow him to see the aliens (that was Carpenter’s main change from the comic, other than removing most of the full-blown horniness).

Carpenter is a master of delivering high concept ideas in extremely lowbrow packages, but what’s surprising is just how high concept the ideas are. They appear to pull heavily from the Guy Debord’s radical tract The Society of the Spectacle, which, to the average person, is virtually unreadable.

The Situationists, the Spectacle, and Instagram

Debord was the most influential member of a group of radical libertarian Marxist intellectuals known as the Situationists. While they are not widely known to most Americans, the influence of their work is: Malcolm McLaren drew heavily on their ideas while creating the Sex Pistols, and as such, punk rock is indebted to the Situationists. The modern street art movement — particularly the work of artists like Banksy or Shepard Fairey¹ — is also heavily indebted to the Situationist idea of détournement, which advocates vandalizing capitalist advertisements and images as a way of subverting the capitalist system².

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The Society of the Spectacle was Debord’s attempt to explain how capitalism had eroded how we view really basic things like personal fulfillment. Before capitalism, humans defined success and fulfillment as being a certain type of person. The first stage of capitalism shifted us to where we defined success and fulfillment by having certain things. And now, in the later stage of capitalism, Debord said, we don’t even care about having things — we just want to appear to have things.

When this happens, we start having relationships that aren’t with humans, but with the images humans project of themselves. What matters in these sorts of relationships isn’t so much the humans underneath the images, but the things that the humans have centered their lives around, whether that’s around certain possessions, around a certain lifestyle, around a certain ideology, around the way they present their families and their romantic relationships. We’re always, in Debord’s degraded vision of the world, just selling ourselves to others, like we are commodities rather than people.

(This was written in 1967, by the way, a full 43 years before the invention of Instagram, and long before the idea of “parasocial relationships” ever entered our public consciousness.)

Going even further, Debord suggested that in this world, humans would stop being creatures that do things, and would start being creatures that merely consumed things. Mass media — with all of its commercials and suggestions of how people should behave³ — would come to absorb more and more of our lives, capturing our attention with constant, wild, outrageous spectacles that would only serve to distract us from the disempowered drudgery of our own lives.

Manufacturing Consent (and Content)

As I write this, I am coming off of a month of “rebranding” exercises that I undertook to try and make this site into something that is a little more coherent so I can actually make a living as a writer. I have resisted this sort of exercise for a long time because I’ve been loath to turn myself into a product to sell. Branding has become a ubiquitous exercise in the modern economy, but we regularly forget that the root of the word comes from the act of burning symbols into animals or humans to mark them not as autonomous creatures, but as property.

What’s made me more uneasy is that writers are no longer just writers — they are influencers and content creators, and are expected to plumb their lives and often the lives of their children or significant others for personal profit, all in order to project a certain image to people who are not so much followers as they are consumers.

Real life depiction of “followers” “consuming” “influencer” “content.”

For the most part, if we wish to make a living off of our craft, we must resign ourselves to the fact that it’s not our writing, our abilities, or our art that this economy finds valuable, but rather it’s our influence in being able to cash in on the trust we’ve built with our followers to sell meaningless products.

Worse still: the fact that we all have to sell something in order to survive in this economy means that we’re all not only complicit in it, but are financially dependent on the system that’s supporting us. Post about revolution on TikTok or Facebook all you want — if you do it well enough, you’ll make those platforms a ton of money by capturing all that attention and putting so many eyes onto ads. If you do anything that actually threatens the system, you can expect to lose the platform and the livelihood⁴.

As a result, we’re all likely to end up saying the same things. Our algorithmic bubbles turn into giant echo chambers where everyone agrees, and money is slowly funneled out of our pockets and into the offshore bank accounts of the immensely rich and powerful.

CONFORM

If you suddenly realized that all of this was true, wouldn’t it feel like you’d just put on a pair of sunglasses that showed you that your entire world was a lie? And wouldn’t you be willing to do anything — including whupping the ass of national treasure Keith David — to get other people to wake up?

Carpenter may or may not have read The Society of the Spectacle, but he’s long been open about his leftism, and in 2017, when neo-Nazis were trying to argue that They Live was about a cabal of Jewish puppetmasters running the world, he pushed back:

A core problem with the writings of Debord and the other Situationists is that they are dense in the way that only French Marxist critical theory can be. This doesn’t mean they weren’t influential: in May 1968, the year after the publication of The Society of the Spectacle, there was a mass left wing uprising against the government of Charles De Gaulle. This uprising was spearheaded by students, who graffiti’d Situationist manifestos on the walls of Paris. After they were brutally repressed by police, trade unions joined in on the uprising and France was virtually shut down by wildcat general strikes that included 22% of the total population. It looked for a brief second as if it would be an actual revolution, and Charles De Gaulle fled the country.

By the skin of its teeth, the government managed to stay in power, and De Gaulle remained in power for a few more years. Part of this was because the government was able to suck the wind out of the movement’s sails by giving large wage increases to the working class (which, to be fair, makes it an extremely effective strike). In the end, only the radicals and the students remained, and they were not sufficient for mounting an actual revolution.

The question facing people who want to see a sea change in how we live in this world is — how do you make the theory easy to understand for people who don’t read political theory for fun? Which is, you know, the vast majority of people upon whom your revolution will depend?

The answer, I think is obvious: You do it by giving the Sex Pistols instruments they barely know how to play. Or by giving radicalized hooligans a can of spray paint and a city full of billboards. Or by giving John Carpenter an extremely small budget to make a movie.

1. The work Fairey is best known for — the Andre the Giant OBEY sticker — is actually a riff on a poster from They Live.

Fairey’s famous OBEY sticker.

2. The Situationists are also the creators of the concept of psychogeography, which I’ve written about extensively:

3. I have a totally untestable hypothesis on this topic: the United States is completely drunk on patriotism in part because it is legal, even encouraged, to use patriotic images — whether that be military veterans, bald eagles, or the waving American flag — to sell people beers, trucks, and insurance. I can barely watch an NFL game anymore because of the sheer amount of America being sold.

4. Not saying deplatforming is always a bad thing, because fuck Donald Trump.