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John Carpenter has come here to chew bubblegum and kick Nazi ass, and he’s all out of bubblegum. Last night, the legendary writer, director, and composer took to his Twitter account—the aptly named @TheHorrorMaster—to combat the noxious appropriation of his scathing 1988 anti-capitalist action/sci-fi satire They Live by the continuously metastasizing contingent of online “alt-right” neo-Nazis. To these cretins, the movie—in which an out-of-work everyman played by “Rowdy” Roddy Piper uses special sunglasses to discover the skull-faced aliens who rule the world and the subliminal messages they use to lull the rest of us into complacency—is a metaphor for the supposed control of the globe by Jews. To Carpenter, this idea is garbage.
For fans of the film who aren’t brownshirt wannabes, it is indeed impossible to misconstrue the message. Carpenter has many gifts, but in the case of They Live, subtlety wasn’t one of them.
Nor was it intended to be. Even beyond the famous subliminal messages unmasked by those sunglasses, the hero of the film has slipped though the cracks of the late-capitalist economy, drifting from city to city as a day laborer. He takes up residence in a shantytown full of entire families suffering from the same economic dislocation. His greatest ally in the fight against the conspiracy he stumbles into is a black man (played by Keith David) whose assistance he desires so greatly he’s willing to engage in one of cinema’s all-time greatest fist fights to get him to see the truth.
His alien enemies are all yuppies in suits, rich society doyennes in expensive clothes, and cops, cops, and more cops.
Indeed, the similarities between the cops’ behavior in They Live during their raid on the shantytown and on the streets during Black Lives Matter protests are all but prophetic.
Then there are the subliminal messages, in which the basic tenets of capitalism are boiled down to their essence: CONSUME and OBEY. There’s no place here for neofascism, an ideology based solely on consumption and obedience.
In short, the idea that the aliens and their brainwashing techniques represent not the entire capitalist system, but instead a religious/ethnic group that just so happens to be the same one targeted by authoritarian movements for millennia, is fucking preposterous. Only a ridiculous moron could watch this thing and think otherwise.
But this is the maddening thing about arguing with the Nazi troll hordes who’ve arisen from the swamp. It doesn’t matter how moronic and ridiculous their theories are. They know—and they don’t care. You think any of these dipshits genuinely believe that, for example, John Podesta and his associates used “pizza” as a code for child molestation in their emails? Okay, yeah, some probably are that crazy and stupid. But not the media manipulators at the top of the neo-Nazi food chain, nor the veteran “meme magic” makers who previously twisted Matt Furie’s lovable Pepe the Frog into an amphibian anti-Semite, and who’ve made Twitter as big a cesspool as their various -chan haunts.
No, the goal for these fuckers is to pump as much horseshit as possible into the discourse, simply for the joy of spreading toxicity and driving liberals and the left nuts trying to combat it all. And if a boondoggle like “Pizzagate” inspires some lunatic to show up at a pizzeria with a loaded gun, who cares? Life is cheap, gun sales spike in the aftermath of a massacre, and their role in the violence can always be waved away as a “false flag” planted by the very people targeted by the bullshit in the first place.
My heart goes out to John Carpenter, a thoughtful, talented, humane artist whose contributions to our culture dwarf those of every single one of these wannabe Goebbelses combined. I can’t imagine how infuriating it must be to see your art—let alone a work of outright anti-capitalist agitprop like They Live—twisted into its ideological opposite by bigots and charlatans. I’d almost certainly have spoken out, too.
But I’m not convinced it will do any good. I’m not convinced it won’t outright hurt, in fact. Like Hillary Clinton’s “alt-right” speech during the campaign, this has now elevated the neo-Nazi smears and lies into the realm of debatable topics, the stuff of “meet the dashing new face of the extreme right” puff pieces.
“They Live is about International Jewry” is something that had never occurred to non-piece-of-shit people before this week. Now it’s a sick, sad footnote in the film’s history, a slug in its Wikipedia entry, a scratch on the lens of the sunglasses that help us see reality for what it is. That’s the goal of the racists and fascists, after all: Distort our vision until everything is as ugly as they are.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, the Observer, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
