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ceri This 1988 film doesn't get enough respect, and I will make a brief pitch for its virtues.
People talk about it, when they talk about it, mostly to refer to two things: the humor, and the Outer Limits-ish revelation and payoff. And these are good things to talk about. "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I'm all out of bubblegum" is a funny line. The scene where the two lead guys fight over whether one can make the other try on the secret-revealing spectacles is a great bit of satire, taking the conventions of macho action that extra step into the absurd. Lots of good stuff. Likewise, the idea that all our mass media and commercial environment is an alien plot is one of those things that really works at the emotional level. The world of manipulated markets is weird and sometimes alienating, and it's helpful sometimes to run with that.
But it's also true that John Carpenter is both a good observer of the world around him and a genuinely decent human being in a subculture that doesn't make that a reliably rewarding way to live. They Live was made at a time when the official line was that we were well into a wonderful long economic boom and everything would be great now that America was shedding itself of more and more of that silly old liberal safety net stuff, and Carpenter not only noticed that this wasn't true, he put it at the heart of his story. His characters are doing everything right according to American mythology: working hard, not looking for handouts, keeping themselves as clean and respectable as they can, being respectful to authorities, the whole deal. They can't get work because, in the end, aliens don't care about them, and don't need to because there's plenty of money to be made by milking those not yet run dry.
It turns out that we're all still waiting for the right guy to show up and kick some ass, with or without the bubblegum.
People talk about it, when they talk about it, mostly to refer to two things: the humor, and the Outer Limits-ish revelation and payoff. And these are good things to talk about. "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I'm all out of bubblegum" is a funny line. The scene where the two lead guys fight over whether one can make the other try on the secret-revealing spectacles is a great bit of satire, taking the conventions of macho action that extra step into the absurd. Lots of good stuff. Likewise, the idea that all our mass media and commercial environment is an alien plot is one of those things that really works at the emotional level. The world of manipulated markets is weird and sometimes alienating, and it's helpful sometimes to run with that.
But it's also true that John Carpenter is both a good observer of the world around him and a genuinely decent human being in a subculture that doesn't make that a reliably rewarding way to live. They Live was made at a time when the official line was that we were well into a wonderful long economic boom and everything would be great now that America was shedding itself of more and more of that silly old liberal safety net stuff, and Carpenter not only noticed that this wasn't true, he put it at the heart of his story. His characters are doing everything right according to American mythology: working hard, not looking for handouts, keeping themselves as clean and respectable as they can, being respectful to authorities, the whole deal. They can't get work because, in the end, aliens don't care about them, and don't need to because there's plenty of money to be made by milking those not yet run dry.
It turns out that we're all still waiting for the right guy to show up and kick some ass, with or without the bubblegum.