They Live is one of those unfortunately good movies that cannot be adequately analyzed without betraying the very elements designed to entrance first time viewers and inspire the unfettered love that those of us who’ve seen the movie far too many times still hold. As such, standard Spoiler Warnings apply. All bastards unfortunate enough to have never experience a context-free viewing of this picture are hereby placed On Notice. You’ve been warned. They Live, We Sleep.

The movie also served as my introduction to the oeuvre of one John Carpenter, last seen around these parts when…my god, has it been as long as all that? (Note from behind the fourth wall: I’d meant to examine his sophomore effort, Assault on Precinct 13, neigh on a year ago. Anyone reading this site can properly tell where that little effort went.) Made twelve years after a little bit of paranoid schizophrenia called Assault on Precinct 13 and two years after the apocalyptic, artist vs. studio row over Big Trouble in Little China, They Live presents a portrait of the artist as a not-so-young man, no longer trusting the authoritarian forces that served as Assault‘s protagonists. Here we find Big JC making no bones about his distasteful distrust, not only of the entertainment industry, but the whole of capitalist society. No surprise, really. A decade living and working inside the studio system could do that to anyone…but just imagine doing it in (buh-dun-*cymbal crash*) the ’80s. {More}