It's an unlikely subject for serious criticism: a deliberately low-budget feature about two drifters, one of them played by a second-rate pro wrestler from Saskatoon, who take on an alien invasion force of ghouls.
But John Carpenter's They Live, a 1988 mixture of horror and science fiction from the man who brought you Halloween, The Thing and Escape from New York, has transcended its narrow cult appeal and become a scholarly favourite. Slavoj Zizek, the man for whom no piece of cultural flotsam is too trivial, has used it at least three times as a metaphor for the way late-capitalist media and politics self-entwine.
Jonathan Lethem has a lighter touch. The American novelist, best known for Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, but also an adept of science fiction (see especially his first novel, Gun, With Occasional Music, a masterly Philip Dick homage), is an easy master of genre and brow. He can quote Zizek and Roland Barthes but can also acknowledge the "lively incoherence" of Carpenter's movie. "No offence," he announces on page seven of this little book, "but They Live is probably the stupidest film ever to take ideology as its explicit subject. It's also probably the most fun."
True, and true. The occasion for Lethem's playful reading is a new series, Deep Focus, which hopes to do for films what the 33⅓ books have done for music albums. The second instalment, a smoothly persuasive rehabilitation of the Charles Bronson vigilante flick Death Wish (1974), by Christopher Sorrentino, has also just appeared. Like Lethem's They Live, it mixes casual erudition with deep cultural immersion and wry humour.
They Live is a very weird piece of work, part political art film and part buddy movie, that resists sensible summary. The main character, a nameless itinerant construction worker (he is called Nada - "nothing" - in the credits), arrives in Los Angeles and joins a small off-grid community. He is played with stilted, buffoonish grace by "Rowdy" Roddy Piper.
Through a series of odd events, Nada acquires a pair of sunglasses, Ray-Ban Wayfarer knock-offs, that expose the black-and-white truth of his world. Alien ghouls have conquered the Earth and now maintain control of the human population with advertising whose lustrous surface conceals the true imperative messages: CONSUME, OBEY, WATCH TV, MARRY AND REPRODUCE, SLEEP, SURRENDER.
Nada enlists the aid of another worker, played by journeyman Keith David, after an absurdly prolonged alley fistfight. This notorious sequence, which lasts for six minutes, is They Live's obvious deal-breaker. But don't be a hater: The fight is the dramatized pain of having your ideological illusions shattered. It hurts to put those sunglasses on and see the desert of the real!
The rest of the movie is an action-sequence assault on the alien control centre, a television studio, which ends with both rebels dead but the mind-controlling alien signal temporarily obliterated. Presumably the sheep-like population, seeing reality, will rise up.
Well, maybe. Lethem's nuanced reading takes the film's neo-Marxist message seriously even while leavening his temporal tour with references to Hitchcock thrillers, John Ford westerns, surrealist fiction and, especially, graffiti-inflected art. He notes how easily the "subversive" work of Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger or Shepard Fairey is naturalized by the pervasive language of advertising, nullifying any distance between ideological "lie" and liberating "truth."
"This awkward fact cuts against They Live's central assertion," he notes. "Kruger and Holzer's non sequitur interventions briefly attained a gallant purity, but they'd always need the gallery or museum context as a quarantine against recontamination."
They Live is itself a series of non sequiturs, some gallant and some silly. Lethem's clever appreciation can't quite rescue Carpenter's work from incoherence, but it does make you see the film through smart new glasses.
Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto and the author, most recently, of Glenn Gould in Penguin's Extraordinary Canadians series.