You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they're people just like you. You're wrong. Dead wrong.
In just about an hour and a half is the TV premiere of the TV movie Saving Jessica Lynch. A militaristic propaganda fantasy film based on an exaggeration of real life events in a war based on reasons of questionable reality. I am debating watching it or not and in order to get myself psyched I watched a DVD or another propaganda fantasy film. Veteran horror film director John Carpenter's 1988 film They Live.
There are a couple truly great paranoid American fantasy films to come out of the 80s. Red Dawn, Die Hard, The Lost Boys and Falling Down (even though it came out in 1993).
Some folks think that The Rock making movies is some new synergy of pro wrestling and Hollywood but Rowdy Roddy Piper stars in this film back in 1988. It starts off with Mr. Piper being an unemployed American blue color worker who is force to look for work in a killer mullet, flannel shirt and blue jeans.
He arrives in LA and lives in a shanty town and does some temporary construction jobs. He finds out that a church that helps the shanty town is actually a front for a mysterious undercover rebel organization. After an Orwellian police raid he is able to find a special pair of dark sun glasses that the rebel organization manufactured.
The special glasses allow him to see hidden brainwashing propaganda messages that is covering all media and signs in the urban environment. Even more disturbing is that the yuppie 80s elite power class are mostly hideous skeletal aliens from another planet that wear expensive clothes, phony hair and fat bank accounts. Yup you heard me right. In this movie most yuppies are evil space aliens and the Republican right of the Reagan era are a pawn in a take over of our planet. The aliens use TV a sedative brainwashing tool and project a mass illusion over the population of their existence.
This sounds like a crazy sci-fi action movie but John Carpenter was making a serious satirical social political statement with this flick. The blue collar worker are sucked into a resistance movement to try and take back the planet from these evil space alien yuppie Reaganites. The Alien President on TV almost directly quotes Reagan's Morning in America speech.
I am not sure if this movie is socialist in nature but one of the underground resistance movement says that the aliens paint their organization as a communist group to the human pawns in the police. The basis of this film is that a paranoid fantasy of a secret society controlling the world and encouraging massive consumerism is real in the context of the film. I have to wonder if you rent this that it sends a red flag to the USA Patriot Act division of the FBI.
Once Roddy Piper uncovers the truth he goes on an ultra violent killing rampage shooting Yuppie Aliens. Later he tries to convince his blue color black friend of the conspiracy and fights him to convince him to try on the magical sun glasses. This is one of the coolest and brutal fist fights ever recorded on film. It goes on for SEVEN WHOLE MINUTES and there are about five times that you think it is over but it still goes on. The creators of South Park copied this fight shot for shot in the South Park episode Cripple Fight.
I guess that critics of John Carpenters horror films said that they were cheesy un-nutritional gory brain candy and had no lasting social reliance so he set out to make a social relevant film. The economic recession in the early 80s and the loss of millions of blue collar jobs combined with the massive tax cuts for the ultra rich created the soil for this anti-establishment 80s paranoid fantasy. I am not going to comment on the social relevance of the film in George W Bush's America.
Yup the 80s are back in style.
Damn I havent seen this movie in years. Saw it when I was ten, back in 88... from what I remember it scared me to the point that I didnt trust anyone that wore a tie. Maybe thats why I hate office jobs.
Good review, but FYI: it detracts from your social commentary to repeatedly misspell the name of the former U.S. President you are attacking.
Do you know how many times I read people spelling Clinton with a K? His name is not in the spell checker of my word processor and I should do more proof reading. I remember when old Gipper gutted the school lunch program in my school and classified catchup as a vegetable.
Perhaps its one of those movies where you can't really analize it, you just have to get lost in the fantasy.
I was referncing They Live in my blog when a Google search turned up your entry. I have has this on DVD for years replacing the VHS copy I had. ALthough it's sort of a hoeky sci-fi flick, I got Carpenter's message loud and clear, it's a great metaphor for soul selling yuppies and their keepers, or the American sheep in general
I do have a number of the 100 most banned by the government books and movies. I know that They Live is on the list as is Falling Down and Stephen King's "Dead Zone"
I tend to avoid the box office smashes that the media push as great, always prefer the dark horses, which usually have a better plot