• Directed by John Carpenter
  Written by “Frank Armitage” (John Carpenter), based on the short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” by Ray Nelson
• Starring
  • Roddy Piper
  • Keith David
  • Meg Foster

Every movie needs one great scene, something that sticks in your mind and never lets go. They Live has such a scene, and it’s what everyone remembers. Unfortunately, it happens well before the halfway mark, and things go downhill from there.

Roddy Piper stars as, well, a guy. He’s never mentioned by name (the closing credits list him as “Nada”), just as the protagonist in the original short story is never named. I’m gonna go ahead and call him Roddy. He’s down on his luck, having just hitchhiked to LA from Colorado where he was out of work, but things aren’t much better around here. The Job Service lady is brusque and disinterested, the police are spending their time rousting blind street preachers, and all the while TV commercials taunt with depictions of “the good life” — luxury and disposable goods.

His luck turns when he finds a construction site that can use someone bringing his own tools and –

WOW! Sorry, Roddy just took off his shirt, and guess what — he’s got body hair! Sure, it’s not much, but compared the the baby-smooth torso he’s displayed in most of his movies, it took me by surprise. Sorry.

Anyway. Roddy falls in with Frank (Keith David), a young black man who leads him to kind of a homeless commune, an empty lot where squatters have set up their own neighborhood, complete with a food-kitchen line. It’s not a terrible life — if it weren’t for the television (using pirated electricity, no doubt), which still insists on contrasting their life with the ideal.

Then late at night the TV shows something else — a brek-in signal of a bearded man, explaining fervently but academically about “their signal” which engenders “an artificially induced state of consciousness.” It’s a bad signal, and it breaks up frequently, but it’s enough to interest Roddy — especially when the blind preacher he saw in the park (Raymond St. Jacques) is standing at the bus stop in front of the small church opposite the shantytown, quoting the text of the discourse word-for-word.

So next day, Roddy investigates the church and discovers a small chemical lab, some lenses, and a hidden panel containing tape-up boxes. Alas, he gets no further in his investigations then — and it seems he won’t, as about a bazillion cops in riot gear then descend upon the place, not to mention the squatter community as well, literally bulldozing it to the ground.

It’s during the cleanup next day that Roddy gets ahold of one of the secreted boxes and takes it to an alleyway to stash it, but it turns out to be — sunglasses. Puzzled, he hies the box, walks out of the alley, absently puts on the sunglasses…

…Ready? Here’s the good scene.

The world seen through the sunglasses is black and white. And every single damned sign on the street, be it a business logo or a vacation billboard, says something other than what it “normally” does. Big black letters: OBEY. CONSUME. MARRY AND REPRODUCE. STAY ASLEEP.

He wanders by a magazine rack, stunned to see magazine after magazine which is nothing but these subliminal messages — and finds his second big shock: A distinguished-looking man with silvered executive hair is actually, when seen through the glasses, a hideous corpse-like thing with bulging eyes.

That scene is incredibly cool. Adding to what I’ve just described, Carpenter wisely decided to let the whole scene go without any musical score whatsoever. It’s stark, it’s disquieting, and it is, in fact, the high point to which I referred earlier. Unfortunately, we’re what, thirty minutes into the film? Forty? (I didn’t note the time. Sue me.) And we’ve just seen the high water mark.

See, Roddy then stumbles around some more, watching the Uglies, (the closing credits calls them “ghouls”) mixed in with normal people, always seeming well-to-do. And then, he picks a fight with one of them, insulting what, to everyone else, is a well-off matriarch. And they all start speaking into their wristwatches: “I’ve got one that can see.”

Now, the question is, why did he do that? I know it seems strange to complain that an act is “out of character” for a character with no name and no history, but Roddy has to this point acted out of cautious curiosity, not thoughtless impetuosity that can bring the weight of the Uglies down on him. It’s a clear case of “It’s In The Script,” and it will be echoed throughout the remainder of the running time.

Ugly cops come after him, and thanks to his fighting prowess, he ends up with a goodly stock of firearms. He then (Out of Character Moment #2) ventures into a bank and gives the movie’s most quoted line: “I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass — and I’m all out of bubble gum.” And then it’s open season on Uglies.

His eventual escape comes when he takes Holly (Meg Foster) hostage. A digression: If there’s anyone in the world I wouldn’t trust as my hostage, or even to hold the door for me while my hands were full, it’d be Meg Foster. Call me easily spooked, but those damned Geordi eyes of hers creep me right out. Best role I ever saw her in was as the android deputy in Oblivion — it took absolutely no makeup to convince viewers that, yup, she’s an android. So when she manages to knock him out a window and down a hill, my only reaction is, “Serves you right, Roddy, for taking the first hostage that comes along.”

At this point, you may be hoping that the movie will regain that high water mark and continue at that level. It’s right about here that those hopes can be dashed. Roddy finds Frank at the construction site, and despite the fact that Roddy has reportedly killed half a dozen “people,” he gives him some money to tide him over, but wants to be rid of him. Roddy, though, insists that Frank try on the sunglasses. Frank doesn’t want to. And so, to make him, Roddy starts fighting him. And fighting. And fighting. And fighting. For five whole minutes. I timed it. (Yeah, I couldn’t be bothered to keep track of the time for the one good scene, but I timed this one.) Now, you may have seen long action sequences before, but they invariably have some variety to them — the combatants, the weapons, the settings. This is just Roddy and Frank having a mutual asskicking party in a back alley for five straight minutes. Finally, having bludgeoned Frank into complacency (and thanks to the last five minutes, we all know how that feels), Roddy slaps the glasses on him, and suddenly Frank’s a convert.

From here, it’s almost as if Carpenter got bored and hit the “AutoFiller” command on his screenwriting software. Roddy and Frank run into and join the resistance movement (you know, those guys who were hanging out in the church with the sunglasses in the first place), they elude a raid on their meeting and gain entrance to the Uglies’ base by the most tenuous of circumstances, are instantly mistaken for human collaborators by another collaborator from the shantytown, and pretty much manage to save the world. Of course, that only comes about because the Uglies are so stupid that their entire brain-dominating transmission center is run from a single location, with a single satellite dish — no backups or redundant systems here. And it quickly becomes apparent why the Uglies keep humans around for grunt work, especially in policing them; the Uglies, despite their protuberant eyes, can’t shoot worth a damn.

Now. In documenting where this movie went south, let’s go back to that scene. The good one. I mentioned what a showstopper it is, playing on all of our prerational fears. That’s great, but you ever get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and suddenly you see what you swear is a person lurking in your entryway? That, too, is a showstopper (and a heartstopper), playing on your prerational fears. Half a second later, your cerebrum catches up to your medulla oblongata and informs your heart to stop racing — it’s only the coatrack. In a similar fashion, that scene — and with it, the entire premise — works well for a short period of time, before our brains catch up to our paranoid impulses. And unfortunately, there plenty of time left in the movie from that point out for your brain to do that catching up.

To wit:

These Uglies are intimated to be an extra-dimensional version of capitalism, treating Earth like we treat the Third World. Odd, I don’t remember our exploitation of the Third World involving native disguises. And if they’re slowly terraforming our environment into theirs with pollution, isn’t that something they could accomplish more quickly with other means? What do they need us to do that for? Hell, wipe out humans, set some designer microbes to work, and they’ll have exactly the world they want in a couple of years. And how have they managed to stay hidden for so long, when two construction workers can bring down their entire organization in a matter of days? Why do they bother taking on these leisurely societal roles — why don’t they just run things at a distance, Charlie’s Angels-style? I mean, is it really part of their master plan that they have to run out to newsstands for magazines and convenience stores for liquor?

Also troubling is how all of the insightful subtext stops short after that one great scene. Before, Carpenter’s well on his way to making statements on how deeply we allow our economic selves to define our real selves, and how much we’ve “bought into” consumer culture. If you think about the messages on the magazines, it’s not that surprising, since those “BUY — CONFORM — CONSUME” messages are all over the contents, even without using special glasses. Frank is an especially potent symbol of “economic identity”; he’s in LA working to support a wife and children in Detroit that he hasn’t seen in six months, and until forced to see the “real” world, he uses his economic responsibility there are justification not to get involved or see anything he’s not meant to see. (The fact that it’s specifically an economic responsibility is demonstrated by the fact that he thinks he’s doing the right thing to be an absentee parent and spouse in order to provide money.) And yet his family completely disappears as soon as Roddy shows him “the truth.” There’s not even an off-handed mention of how he doesn’t want his kids growing up in a world dominated by the Uglies (which would have been simple — all it would take is a single line of dialogue). Nope, he goes from dutiful provider to unattached revolutionary between camera cuts.

There’s also a message in there about the continuum between capitalism and fascism, and how they’re really not different beasts. All of that poofs away as soon as Roddy and Frank do their little two-fisted dance.

What could have been a nifty statement on collaboration — that anyone who endorses the capitalist structure and chases the capitalist dream is an effective quisling — dissolves as soon as we concentrate on the “official” collaborators, those who knowingly side with the Uglies for monetary reward. And while the Uglies’ grand design could have been shown as “nature red in tooth and claw,” instead we get the speech given at the collaborators’ ball, which Roddy and Frank crash — a speech that’s only a hair away from the knowing satire of Bad Taste.

What finally defeats the movie, though, is the fact that it’s central premise is actually a guilt-negating fairy tale. Oh, we humans would never be so cruel and inhumane to our fellow man — it’s the aliens that have been making us this way! Carpenter here provides a nefarious enemy that’s also a scapegoat for the foibles that have always been with human society. (Or is he positing that the Uglies have been among us since the Stone Age — on an extremely long-range plan? Is that how they please the stockholders in parallel dimensions?) It’s the ultimate victimhood defense — everything I have or don’t have, everything I’ve done or haven’t done, can be blamed on the Uglies; I’m not responsible for human evil, not even my share of it. we are thereby absolved of solving any of our real problems, by pointing out the “true” sources of evil lurking in our midst. Comparisons to Nazi Germany may be excessive, but certainly not unimaginable.

It’s a great scene. That’s undeniable. And it may not carry the rest of the movie — but I suppose if a “dumb” movie can prompt so much thought, even to disagree with its premise, then it’s time well spent watching “bad” movies.

(And the final impertinent comment: Yes, I understand the symbolism of being “screwed” by the Uglies in the final shot — but what director in his right mind saves the sole gratuitous breast shot for the final four seconds of a movie?)

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 41
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 5
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek:
  • Meg Foster (Holly) played “Onaya” in the DS9 episode “The Muse”
  • Thelma Lee (the rich matriarch) played “Kahlest” in the TNG episode “Sins of the Father”
  • Greg Barnett (security guard #1) was Leonard Nimoy’s stunt double in Star Trek 5
  • Jimmy Nickerson (security guard #2) did stuntwork in Star Trek: First Contact
  • Jeff Imada (“male ghoul”) did stuntwork in Star Trek 6 (are we sensing a trend?)