They Live
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| They Live | |
 Theatrical release poster. |
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| Directed by | John Carpenter |
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| Produced by | Larry J. Franco |
| Written by | Short Story: Ray Nelson Screenplay: Frank Armitage |
| Starring | Roddy Piper Keith David Meg Foster Raymond St. Jacques Peter Jason Sy Richardson George 'Buck' Flower |
| Music by | John Carpenter Alan Howarth |
| Cinematography | Gary B. Kibbe |
| Editing by | Gib Jaffe Frank E. Jimenez |
| Distributed by | Universal Studios (USA) Carolco Pictures (non-USA) |
| Release date(s) |  November 4, 1988 |
| Running time | 93 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $3,000,000 (estimated) |
They Live is a 1988 film directed by John Carpenter, who also wrote the screenplay under the pseudonym "Frank Armitage." The movie is based on Ray Nelson's 1963 short story "Eight O’Clock in the Morning."
Part science fiction thriller and part black comedy, the film echoed contemporary fears of a declining economy, within a culture of greed and conspicuous consumption common among Americans in the 1980s. In They Live, the ruling class within the monied elite are in fact aliens managing human social affairs through the use of subliminal media advertising and the control of economic opportunity.
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[edit] Plot
John Nada (Roddy Piper) is a homeless laborer who finds work on a Los Angeles construction site. One of the workers, Frank Armitage (Keith David), takes him to a local shantytown. After eating at the soup kitchen and spending the night, he notices odd behavior at the small church across the street. Investigating, he discovers that the church's soup kitchen is a front: inside, the loud "choir practice" is a recording, scientific apparatus fills a back room, and cardboard boxes are stacked everywhere, including some in a secret compartment he stumbles into.
That night, the police surround the church, forcing the inhabitants to flee. The police then turn on the shantytown, destroying it with bulldozers and beating the blind minister of the church. Nada returns to the site the next day and investigates the church again, which has been emptied. He takes one of the boxes from the secret compartment and opens it in an alleyway, finding it full of sunglasses. He keeps one pair and leaves the rest in a garbage can.
When Nada later dons the glasses for the first time, the world appears in shades of grey, with significant differences. He notices that a billboard now simply displays the word "Obey"; without them it advertises that Control Data is "creating a transparent computing environment." Another billboard (normally displaying "Come to the Caribbean" written above a lovely woman lying on a beach) now displays the text "Marry and Reproduce." He also sees that paper money bears the words "This is your God." All printed matter around him contains subliminal advertising.
Additionally, he soon discovers that many people are actually aliens, who are human-looking except for skull-like faces. When the aliens realize he can see them for what they truly are, the police suddenly arrive. Nada escapes and steals a police shotgun; he eventually stumbles into a local bank filled with aliens. Upon entering he proclaims, "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass.. and I'm all out of bubblegum." A shooting spree ensues and after killing many of them, one of the aliens sees him and disappears after twisting a dial on his wristwatch. Fleeing the bank, he forces a woman at gunpoint to take him to her house in the Hollywood Hills. Taking off the glasses to rest, he remarks "these glasses are like a drug... but when you take them off, you come down hard." Holly (the woman) tricks Nada and pushes him through her window, nearly killing him. He leaves behind his pair of sunglasses, however.
After recovering, Nada returns to the construction site to talk over with Frank what he discovered. Seeing Nada as a wanted man for the shooting spree, Frank is initially uninterested in his story. The two engage in a long fight as Nada attempts to convince and then force Frank to put on the sunglasses. When Frank finally puts on the glasses, he sees the aliens around him as well. Frank joins Nada as they get in contact with the group from the church. They learn that a meeting is being held at a local community center later that evening. The community group listens to a seminar in the background introducing radical ideas. For example, the aliens are blamed for carbon dioxide and methane emissions--"they are turning our atmosphere into their atmosphere"--and quickly using up the planet's resources. Holly returns, claiming to now believe John, and delivers some information to the rebels.
At the meeting, they learn that the aliens' primary method of control is a signal being sent out on television, which is why the general public cannot see the aliens for what they are. An unknown but brilliant inventor has created a lens (it is called a Hoffman lens, perhaps named after Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD; this is not explained in the movie). The lens shows the world as it really is. The sunglasses, which are also available as contact lenses, interfere with the aliens' hypnotic signal. The meeting is raided by the police, who shoot to kill. Nada and Frank escape with the help of one of the wrist devices. They find themselves in a network of underground passages that link hidden parts of the alien society including a port for space travel. Through the passages they find the aliens are throwing a party for their human collaborators.
Further passages lead to the basement of a local TV station, Cable 54, and the source of the aliens' signal. Holly, who works at the station, is found by Frank and Nada and they take her with them to the roof. Nada runs up to the roof expecting that Holly and Frank are behind him. Holly pulls out a gun, presses it against Frank's temple, and kills Frank. Through the special lenses Nada notices the broadcasting antenna. Holly gets to the roof, then takes aim at Nada. Nada uses a hidden sleeve pistol and kills Holly. Nada then turns his attention back to the broadcasting antenna. Nada is shot and fatally wounded by the aliens, but manages to destroy the broadcasting antenna in the process. As a last dying act, Nada gives the aliens the finger. With the signal now destroyed, people around L.A. are surprised to discover aliens in their midst--chatting with them at the bar, meeting with them at the office, and even having sex with them.
[edit] Production
The idea for They Live came from two sources: a short story called "Eight O'Clock in the Morning" by Ray Nelson, originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the 1960s, involving an alien invasion in the tradition of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and a story called "Nada" from the Alien Encounters comic book.[1] John Carpenter describes Nelson's story as "a D.O.A. type of story, in which a man is put in a trance by a stage hypnotist. When he awakens, he realizes that the entire human race has been hypnotized, and that alien creatures are controlling humanity. He has only until eight o'clock in the morning to solve the problem."[1] Carpenter acquired the film rights to both the comic book and short story and wrote the screenplay using Nelson's story as a basis for the film's structure.
The more political elements of the film are derived from Carpenter's growing distaste with the ever-increasing commercialization of 1980s popular culture and politics. He remarked, "I began watching TV again. I quickly realized that everything we see is designed to sell us something... It's all about wanting us to buy something. The only thing they want to do is take our money."[1] To this end, Carpenter thought of sunglasses as being the tool to seeing the truth, which "is seen in black and white. It's as if the aliens have colorized us. That means, of course, that Ted Turner is really a monster from outer space."[1] (Turner had received some bad press in the 1980s for colorizing old black-and-white movies often considered classics, and airing them on his television networks.) The director commented on the alien threat in an interview, "They want to own all our businesses. A Universal executive asked me, 'Where's the threat in that? We all sell out every day.' I ended up using that line in the film."[1]
After a budget of approximately three million dollars was raised, Carpenter began casting the film. For the crucial role of Nada, the filmmaker cast professional wrestler Roddy Piper, whom he met at WrestleMania III earlier in 1987. For Carpenter it was an easy choice: "Unlike most Hollywood actors, Roddy has life written all over him."[1] Carpenter was impressed with Keith David's performance in The Thing and needed someone "who wouldn't be a traditional sidekick, but could hold his own."[1] To this end, Carpenter wrote the role of Frank specifically for the actor. Because the screenplay was the product of so many sources: a short story, a comic book, and input from cast and crew, Carpenter decided to use the pseudonym "Frank Armitage," an allusion to one of the filmmaker's favorite writers, H.P. Lovecraft (Frank Armitage is a character in Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror).[1] Carpenter has always felt a close kinship with Lovecraft's worldview and according to the director, "Lovecraft wrote about the hidden world, the world underneath. His stories were about gods who are repressed, who were once on Earth and are now coming back. The world underneath has a great deal to do with They Live."[1]They Live was shot in eight weeks during March and April 1988, principally on location in downtown L.A. with a budget only slightly larger than $3,000,000.[1]
The sociocultural critique within the film was picked up by other artists and cultural commentators, such as street artist Shepard Fairey, who added the word "Obey" to his world famous image of André the Giant after seeing the film, and conspiracy theorist/author David Icke[citation needed].
One of the highlights of the film is a five-and-half minute alley fight between David and Piper over a pair of the special sunglasses. Carpenter recalls that the fight took three weeks to rehearse: "It was an incredibly brutal and funny fight, along the lines of the slugfest between John Wayne and Victor McLaglen in The Quiet Man."
The aliens were deliberately made to look like ghouls according to Carpenter who said, "The creatures are corrupting us, so they, themselves, are corruptions of human beings."[1]
The communicators used by the aliens are the same prop that was used as the PKE Meter in both Ghostbusters features.[citation needed]
[edit] Reception
Although not an immediate commercial success, the film developed a cult following, reflected by a "Rotten Tomatoes" rating of 89%, although it was as high as 96% at one point.[2] Carpenter is on record as attributing the film's initial commercial failure to result from an audience "...who go to the movies in vast numbers these days [who] don't want to be enlightened."[1]
The film was also ranked #18 on Entertainment Weekly magazine's "The Cult 25: The Essential Left-Field Movie Hits Since '83" list.[3]
[edit] In popular culture
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This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources (ideally, using inline citations). Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (February 2009) |
The fight scene in They Live was reproduced nearly shot for shot in the South Park episode "Cripple Fight."
The first track on the Good Riddance album A Comprehensive Guide to Moderne Rebellion starts with a clip from They Live in which a politician is giving a speech about a "new morning in America."
Street artist Shepard Fairey has stated repeatedly that his infamous OBEY campaign was inspired by the film.[citation needed]
Minnesota deathrock band THEY LIVE draw their name and overall theme from this movie.
The line "I have come to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum" was referenced in Duke Nukem 3D with the line "It's time to kick ass and chew bubblegum. And I'm all out of gum".
Welle:Erdball uses displays with the slogans "Kaufen" ("buy"), "Konsumiere" ("consume") and "Vermehre dich" ("reproduce") in live performances.
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The video for the Armand Van Helden song Into Your Eyes is an almost shot for shot remake of the scene where Nada dons the glasses for the first time, with dance related commands on billboards and bikini clad women in place of aliens.[4]
[edit] References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Swires, Steve (November 1988). "John Carpenter and the Invasion of the Yuppie Snatchers". Starlog. pp. 37-40; 43.
- ^ They Live Movie Reviews, Pictures--Rotten Tomatoes
- ^ "The Cult 25: The Essential Left-Field Movie Hits Since '83". Entertainment Weekly. September 3, 2008. http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20221982_7,00.html. Retrieved on 2008-09-04.
- ^ http://www.poormojo.org/pmjadaily/archives/003727.php
[edit] External links
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: They Live |
- They Live John Carpenter Official Movie Site
- They Live at Rotten Tomatoes
- They Live at the Internet Movie Database
- They Live at Allmovie
- Review at scifilm.org
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