The following, in five parts, is a detailed look at John Carpenter's timeless satire, They Live, through my personal experience with the film and the effect it had on me — and thousands of others — worldwide in the 30 years since then.
PROLOGUE: NADA
You see them on the street. You watch them on TV.
You may even vote for one this fall.
You think they're people just like you.
You're wrong. Dead wrong.
Remember that tagline when you head to the polls on Tuesday. For early voters like me, surely you remembered, too.
Thirty years ago today, John Carpenter's They Live came to theaters. The beloved cult sci-fi opened at #1 with $4.8 million. Sure, that did nothing to raise enthusiasm for Michael Dukakis, but its $13 million final gross covered its low budget.
The director had had it with Reagan. Not since the 1950s had widespread conformity among Americans been as prevalent. Carpenter, however, had grown tired of the Great Communicator's plain-sight disregard of progress in the '80s.
He'd even, as evidenced in a November 1988 Starlog interview, become unnerved by the opulence and consumerism of the decade. He called the beginning of the Iran-Contra scandal "the most fun I've had in a long time," but nevertheless avoided his television.
They Live was adapted by Carpenter (under the pseudonym Frank Armitage) from Ray Faraday Nelson's 1963 short story Eight O'Clock in the Morning. Piper plays Nada, a drifter that enters Los Angeles to chew bubble gum and kick ass … and find a job. Compensating for his lack of bubble gum, he finds mysterious sunglasses on a construction job. The sunglasses' lenses expose yuppies as hideous, power-tripping aliens trying to colonize America through satellite television and subliminal advertising.
Piper's performance is a star-maker, one that I'm annoyed only led to mostly TV guest spots and direct-to-video efforts. As a wrestler, Piper's charisma made him the shit-heel to end all shit-heels, a provocateur who just wanted to troll the good guys into submission.
Piper crossed paths with Carpenter at WrestleMania III in Pontiac, Michigan in March of 1987. When he got to writing the screenplay, he never bothered to seek out any other actor. Even Kurt Russell, as IMDb's trivia page might lead you to believe, was bypassed. Rather, Carpenter was stricken by Piper's "rugged" quality.
"Unlike most Hollywood actors, Roddy has life written all over him," Carpenter said of Piper at the time. Piper, a lifelong troublemaker, sustained numerous attacks and injuries and wore a stab-proof leather jacket (which his sons passed on to Hot Rod superfan Ronda Rousey for her WWE run). Discussing his decision to cast Piper as Nada, Carpenter said he was "definitely not a pretty boy. He's the toughest guy I've ever met."
For that, Piper's role is infinitely charismatic and daring, shooting and smashing social norms as he figures out the aliens' conspiracy. Paired up against Seagal, Van Damme, even the Planet Hollywood boys on a bad day, Piper is a more dominating presence.
Without Carpenter's bold move to cast Piper in the lead, the intersection of pro wrestling and Hollywood would have never prospered. Granted, it took a while, but this little movie made it possible. All these years on, Dwayne Johnson, another charismatic performer in the WWF and WWE, has become the world's highest paid actor.
PART I: THIS IS MY GOD
This is the truth, my truth, about They Live. I do not own props for this movie, but I am probably the biggest fan of it that anyone who knows me knows. I asked for some of my friends to describe my love of They Live.
The word "unconditional" came up multiple times.
"It is an obsessive passion … almost lustful" was another descriptor.
"As much as the Cenobites love pain and showing people such sights," joked my longtime friend, Alex Rosen, a New Jersey musician who I introduced to multiple Carpenter films. Alex became swept away by They Live when I introduced it to him over a decade ago.
In 2015, I was Nada for Halloween. I don't even quote the big line. I'm more privy to zingers like "Mama don't like tattletales!" or "Your face looks like it fell in the cheese dip back in 1957!"
I first became aware of They Live back in the '90s. I had seen the iconic cover of Piper lowering his Ray-Ban Drifters, palm trees and alien reflected in the left lens, in the sci-fi section of the video store, a place I treaded carefully in case the box for one of the Child's Play movies creeped up to scare me.
It wasn't until 2003, when Entertainment Weekly cited it as one of the 50 Best Cult Films Ever Made, that I got interested. At that point, I'd seen enough Carpenter to know the man, but not enough to claim him an idol. Upon renting that ancient Image DVD from the local Hollywood Video, the film grabbed me. About a half hour later, Nada, regaled in sunglasses and the weaponry of police officers he just killed in an alleyway, steps into a bank to do some business.
I knew I'd heard "I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass … and I'm all out of bubble gum" before, but I'd never heard it the way Piper so perfectly deadpans the words.
I was mesmerized throughout, albeit with occasionally huge laughs at the proceedings. That bit where Holly (Meg Foster) shoves Nada out her apartment and sends him falling like Homer Simpson down the gorge always gets a laugh. That's not to mention its calling card: one of the greatest fight scenes in film history.
PART II: PUT ON THE GLASSES
I'm pretty sure that They Live is responsible for my political views and affiliation with the Democratic Party. Two months before I rented it, invading Iraq got the greenlight amid tepid support. I guess the media played me because I thought it was right, but then again, we were a long ways' out from the truth.
I don't know what happened, and more importantly when. Somewhere in my fandom, They Live made me woke, as the kids say. Some time after that first viewing, I went from ambivalent to Antichrist in my views on Bush.
As time went on, watching the movie with friends was almost always boiled down to getting a reaction during the infamous six-minute fight between Nada and his boss, Frank (Keith David) over whether he should put on the glasses (or start eating that trash can). Watching They Live was, often, more entertaining than watching most comedies, due to the intentionally sluggish pace of that fight.
The fight lasts six minutes out of roughly 90 minutes with credits, approximately 6.67 percent of the film. Two grown men beating each other senseless over clairvoyant sunglasses should not be this good. Miraculously, Piper and David's commitment to the scene make it a classic. In fact, when they finally have their truce, there's a sense of disappointment.
Few action films in the decade get close to They Live. Certainly, much of it has to do with the action genre's evolution as the '80s went on. Schwarzenegger was in the heat of the mainstream. Stallone fatigue set in, allowing for "every man" actors like Bruce Willis, Patrick Swayze and Mel Gibson to lock and load.
With that — and Reagan's later years hobbled by scandals and declining health — a sea of forward-thinking, transgressive shoot-'em-ups came along. Aliens saw James Cameron turning his first draft of Rambo: First Blood Part II into a deep-space pressure cooker where human bureaucracy has worse intentions than the aliens. Cameron furthered genre innovation when the smartest men in the room lacked the smarts of Ellen Ripley. In Lethal Weapon, two Vietnam veterans make battle with antipathic, white-collar mercenaries profiting off the War on Drugs. And of course, everything from DVD's to robotic prostheses to Fox News Alerts to the bankruptcy of Detroit was predicted in RoboCop.
Of those films, only RoboCop is able to stand next to They Live as truly timeless — and, over time, ubiquitous.
PART III: WAKE UP
When the 2012 presidential election and Obama's second term rolled around, I had a lot on my mind about the movie. Anti-Obama folk making themselves known, plus the exponential delusions of Fox News, were making the film age like a fine wine. The more the government obstructed Obama, the more social injustices that happened, it felt real. The Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements were effectively predicted in They Live by the underground but vulnerable network trying to expose the aliens.
As the 2016 election cycle loomed without end, I started thinking more about it. Watching Donald Trump bulldoze his bully rhetoric and media manipulation throughout brought the film to mind, albeit unnervingly. Trump, in his gruesome political form, feels like a prophecy from Carpenter.
Trump's election, ironically, vindicated They Live as something more profound than I expected. They Live is a film I never mocked nor used words like "cheesy" or "campy" to describe. However, there is a self-awareness that gets you laughing. When Trump got elected, it wasn't just a favorite Carpenter anymore. It was a rally cry.
In 1988, Trump had his hotels, casinos, The Art of the Deal and even his own board game. Back then, he was precisely the kind of capitalist swine that Nada would shoot on sight.
At an airtight 94 minutes, Carpenter, untethered from studio bureaucracy (although Universal released the film domestically), composed a ruthless statement about authoritarianism and the American Dream. The latter is certainly valid: Nada was just looking for a job, found magic sunglasses and became a revolutionary. It's a Sergio Leone-directed Invasion of the Body Snatchers, complete with allegorical right-wing aliens.
They Live's depiction of a homeless epidemic has become a sobering reality in Los Angeles three decades on. Seeing unfortunate men and women without shelter, on the street or standing at freeway exits for just a little bit of your money, is heartbreaking and realistic. Eerier is the idea of aliens manifesting themselves as the wealthy to exploit the poor. Remember how Congress rushed questionable and potentially calamitous tax reform to law last year? This movie is a retroactive allegory for that.
EPILOGUE: ALL ABOUT YOU, ALL AROUND YOU
They Live is often considered the end of a golden age that began with 1976's Assault on Precinct 13. Carpenter did not direct another film until 1992's Chevy Chase misfire Memoirs of an Invisible Man. 1995's In the Mouth of Madness remains a minor masterpiece. The vicious satire of Escape from L.A. is as much a companion piece to They Live as Snake Plissken's first adventure. After that, well … I mean, I like Vampires.
Thanks to artist Shepard Fairey, you have likely seen "OBEY" on a T-shirt or stuck on a traffic light post somewhere. The fight scene was famously recreated in the 2001 South Park episode "Cripple Fight," a striking homage that opened the film to a new generation (and generations, with reruns). While unconfirmed, 2003's Entertainment Weekly accolade made the film more fashionable for the Netflix generation of cinephiles.
In 2016, cosplayers roamed convention halls in Drumpf and Hillary masks featuring the candidates' hair on top of the film's ghoulish blue-and-purple aliens.
30 years later, They Live is more relevant than it ever was, and with each year, Nada's quest becomes more cathartic. As history has grown longer and darker, the film has become rightfully considered one of Carpenter's best films. Said clout can be supported by the T-shirts and official memorabilia licensed by Universal in recent years.
Shout Factory released a loaded Blu-ray on Election Day 2012. Among the extras are Piper's final on-camera interviews about the film before his untimely passing in 2015. Just this past week, a 4K restoration came to Ultra HD and standard Blu-ray in Europe. In recent years, Carpenter found himself fighting a group of alt-right Reddit users over the film's social commentary. Said Redditors worshiped Nada as a neo-Nazi ridding the world of a Zionist new world order. Perhaps these were the same Russian bots that were tasked with tampering the fan response to The Last Jedi.
Carpenter bombs like The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China were vindicated by video and pay cable. They Live needed a world gone mad to push it to the forefront of the director's oeuvre. In essence, it was a time-delayed dead man's switch for Carpenter.
Like Dr. Strangelove or Network, They Live is untouchable as a satire and a time capsule. Its age will show, but its message remains pristine. In a time of overstimulating social media and a 24-second news cycle, They Live is as alive as ever. Happy 30th, and here's looking at you, Nada.
