They Live is a 1988 American science fiction-horror film directed by John Carpenter, who also wrote the screenplay under the pseudonym Frank Armitage (this is also the name of one of the characters in the movie). Part science fiction horror and part dark comedy, the film echoed contemporary fears of a declining economy, within a culture of greed and conspicuous consumption common among Americans.

The film follows a nameless drifter referred to as "Nada", who discovers the ruling class within the moneyed elite are in fact aliens managing human social affairs through the use of a signal on top of the TV broadcast, concealing their appearance and subliminal messages in mass media.

Plot[link]

A nameless unemployed drifter, referred to as "Nada" (Roddy Piper), finds construction work in Los Angeles. Fellow worker Frank Armitage (Keith David) takes him to a local shantytown for food and rest, where Nada notices odd behavior; a blind preacher urges people to take action outside a local church with shantytown member Gilbert (Peter Jason), a police helicopter scouts overhead and a homeless drifter (George Buck Flower) complains as a bearded man interrupts the TV signal, urging action against those in power. Nada investigates and finds the church is a front; the choir is actually an audio recording and scientific apparatus and cardboard boxes fill the room. Nada sees a wall compartment hiding another box but escapes when the preacher catches him. At night, police bulldoze the shantytown and attack its fleeing inhabitants. In the morning, Nada finds the church empty, but procures the hidden box. At an alleyway, he stashes it, finding it full of black sunglasses and taking a pair.

Looking through them, Nada discovers the reality of the bleak world. The media and advertising actually contain totalitarian commands of obedience and conformity in consumerism, to control an unwitting human population. Many with authority and wealth are actually humanoid aliens with skull-like faces. Nada confronts an alien woman at a store, who then speaks into a wristwatch notifying the others about him. Two alien police officers apprehend Nada but he kills them, taking their guns and going on a shooting spree against aliens in a bank, while one vanishes using his wristwatch. Nada escapes, destroying an alien flying camera and taking Cable 54 assistant director Holly Thompson (Meg Foster) hostage. At her hill-top home, Nada tries to convince her of the truth while suffering a headache from the glasses. Instead, Holly knocks him through her window and calls the police. Nada tumbles down and escapes, leaving his belongings behind.

Nada returns to the alleyway, saving the sunglasses box from a garbage truck. He tries convincing Frank to put on another pair, but Frank wishes no involvement as Nada is now a wanted man. The two engage in a fistfight as Nada forces the glasses onto Frank, who then sees the truth as well. They rent a hotel to discuss their predicament before Gilbert contacts them, notifying of a secret meeting with others against the aliens. There, Nada and Frank are given updated contact lenses to replace their glasses and learn more from the bearded man's transmission. The aliens control Earth as their third world, causing global warming as they deplete its resources before moving onto other planets. Frank is given an alien wristwatch, a complex radio and teleportation device. The aliens primarily use a signal to disguise themselves and destroying its source will make everyone on Earth see them. Holly appears, apparently joining the cause and apologises to Nada. However the police attack the meeting, killing anyone in sight, while Nada and Frank are cornered fighting their way out. Frank accidentaly opens a temporary portal by throwing the watch, through which the two jump into a network of underground passages.

The two find the aliens in a grand hall celebrating with their elite human collaborators. The homeless drifter from earlier, now a well-dressed collaborator, believes the two to be collaborators as well. He takes them on a tour of the passages, revealed to link the alien society, including a space travel port. A further passage leads to the basement of Cable 54 station and the source of the signal. The collaborator escapes by teleporting as the two attack their way through the building to find the broadcaster on the roof, finding Holly and taking her along. As Nada climbs to the signal broadcaster, disguised as a satellite dish, Holly kills Frank. Revealed to be a collaborator, she takes aim at Nada along with an alien police helicopter, persuading him to stop. Nada drops his gun, but then retrieves a hidden pistol from his sleeve and kills Holly. He then shoots and destroys the broadcaster but is killed by the alien police, giving them the finger as his last act. With the signal destroyed, humans discover the aliens in their midst.

Cast[link]

• Roddy Piper as John Nada
• Keith David as Frank Armitage
• Meg Foster as Holly Thompson
• George 'Buck' Flower as The Drifter
• Peter Jason as Gilbert
• Susan Barnes as Brown Haired Woman
• Sy Richardson as Black Revolutionary
• Susan Blanchard as Ingenue
• Norman Alden as Foreman

Production[link]

Development[link]

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." 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." (Turner had received some bad press in the 1980s for colorizing old black-and-white movies.) 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." 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]

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]

Casting[link]

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.

Filming[link]

They Live was shot in eight weeks during March and April 1988, principally on location in downtown L.A. with a budget only slightly greater than $3,000,000.^[1] 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."^[1]

Viewers may also recognize the sensor/communicator devices used by some of the alien troops as the PKE meter (Ghost Tracker) prop from the Ghostbusters films.

Themes[link]

Capitalism[link]

When Frank takes Nada to a local shantytown for food and rest, the duo discuss their lives in the system.

Reception[link]

Critical response[link]

Although not an immediate commercial success, the critical consensus according to Rotten Tomatoes was that critics thought of the movie as "A politically subversive blend of horror and sci fi" and went on to call it "an underrated genre film from John Carpenter." Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a rating of 88%.^[2] Metacritic, an aggregator of film critics ratings and reviews, gave the film's rating average of 50 out of 100.^[3]

In his review for the Boston Globe, Jay Carr wrote, "But once Carpenter delivers his throwback-to-the-'50s visuals, complete with plump little B-movie flying saucers, and makes his point that the rich are fascist fiends, They Live starts running low on imagination and inventiveness", but felt that "as sci-fi horror comedy, They Live, with its wake-up call to the world, is in a class with Terminator and RoboCop, even though its hero doesn't sport bionic biceps".^[4] In his review for the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, "Carpenter's wit and storytelling craft make this fun and watchable, although the script takes a number of unfortunate shortcuts, and the possibilities inherent in the movie's central conceit are explored only cursorily".^[5] Rick Groen, in his review for the Globe and Mail, wrote, "the movie never gets beyond the pop Orwell premise. The social commentary wipes clean with a dry towelette - it's not intrusive and not pedantic, just lighter-than-air".^[6] Allmovie contributor, Paul Brenner gave the film three and a half out of five stars.^[7] In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "Since Mr. Carpenter seems to be trying to make a real point here, the flatness of They Live is doubly disappointing. So is its crazy inconsistency, since the film stops trying to abide even by its own game plan after a while".^[8] Richard Harrington, in his review for the Washington Post wrote, "it's just John Carpenter as usual, trying to dig deep with a toy shovel. The plot for "They Live" is full of black holes, the acting is wretched, the effects are second-rate. In fact, the whole thing is so preposterous it makes V look like Masterpiece Theatre".^[9]

Box office[link]

The film opened on November 4, 1988 debuted at #1 at the Box office and remained #1 for 3 Weeks grossing $4,827,000 (USA) during its opening weekend, ahead of such films as the U2 documentary Rattle and Hum.^[10][11] The film had a total domestic gross of $13,008,928 (USA) on an estimated $3-4 million budget.^[10] Carpenter is on record as attributing the film's initial commercial failure to result from an audience "[those] who go to the movies in vast numbers these days don't want to be enlightened".^[1]

Legacy[link]

The film was ranked #18 on Entertainment Weekly magazine's "The Cult 25: The Essential Left-Field Movie Hits Since '83" list.^[12] Rotten Tomatoes ranked the fight scene between Roddy Piper's character, John Nada, and Keith David's character, Frank Armitage, seventh on their list of the "The 20 Greatest Fights Scenes Ever".^[13]

When Nada enters the bank, he proclaims, "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass...and I'm all out of bubblegum." The line has become embedded in popular culture and is referenced regularly in the Duke Nukem series of video games by the main protagonist, a parody of 80s macho action heros.

Shepard Fairey also credits the movie as a major source of inspiration, sharing a similar logo to his "OBEY" campaign. “They Live was … the basis for my use of the word ‘obey,’” Fairey said in a statement. “The movie has a very strong message about the power of commercialism and the way that people are manipulated by advertising.”^[14]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: They Live

• They Live at John Carpenter's official movie site
• They Live at the Internet Movie Database
• They Live at Rotten Tomatoes