“I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass”
And I’m all outta bubblegum
(Housekeeping note: I realized my scheduled programming was moving too fast. Time to slow it down and build on the first level: What is reality? What isn’t it? )
Let’s kick it off with an oldie but goodie, “They Live” (John Carpenter, circa 1988). Man, was that a good year!
I haven’t seen these movies in years. Actually, I fell off the whole cinemaphile thing after moving rural. Living in nature has that effect on you. Guess it wasn’t too hard, since it’s a wasteland of creativity out there now.
“They Live” stars Roddy Piper. Hunks like that just don’t exist anymore (and I live rural). (Please enlighten me: do you see bodies like this outside of, say, maybe the enlisted? I haven’t seen an outlaw biker under 40 in a long time, so are they hiding out there?)
Roddy plays a drifter, George Nada (last name means “Nothing” in Spanish (not sure if that’s intended) who lives on day labor, increasingly harder to find. He gets a construction gig, (gotta see the shirtless scenes!) and crashes at a nearby church sponsored outside mission, with a makeshift campsite nearby. As he passes by a couple of men watching tv, the signal is hacked and a man interrupts the scheduled programming, warning that humans have been taken over and are being brainwashed and enslaved. Later George sees strange activity at the church itself, and shortly after, the church is raided. It’s then that he finds a pair of sunglasses that allow him to see the real reality. Aliens have, in fact, taken over the human race and they walk among him, protected by a frequency that alters what you can see and perceive.
He discovers the source of their ability to scramble human perception is a signal beamed through the TV. The signal renders you blind to the aliens in your midst, and the subliminal orders blasted continuously, through billboard and newspapers, like “Obey”! “Don’t question authority.” Humans are like livestock, and the aliens have bribed enough Judas humans to facilitate the deception.
No shit- after watching this again in 2022, it sounds like one of the most rational explanations I have heard yet for our predicament.
After George digests what he sees, he delivers my favorite lines:
An alien security guard, who George has not blown away, YET, uses his watch phone to call him in to ‘alien 911’: “ We got one that can see!”
My next favorite scene:
George escapes getting rounded up by alien cops and a Judas one, then tries to get his coworker to try out the glasses. Frank, played by Keith David, isn’t exactly receptive.
What follows is some epic ass whooping, 6 minutes that would impress Mike Tyson. That scene couldn’t be a better metaphor for what it feels like going up against the, “You ain’t showing me nuthin’!” crowd nowadays.
I won’t give the rest away. Go watch it. Its worth it alone as a travel back into time when the alien control wasn’t as cemented. They didn’t have the surveillance state yet. Now they got your attention 24/7 with portable programming.
(A pox on all you people who defended the Patriot Act, “Well, if you don ‘t have anything to hide…”, during the Bush/Cheney years, (aka Obama, the Sequel). Ed Snowden deserves much more than a medal.
“They Live” is available on Amazon Prime, and everywhere else. Just go look it up. Tell me if this movie isn’t telegraphing the Zombiefication of the US of A. And as a theory, tell me it isn’t the most parsimonious explanation. 1 point for the Alien theory under the Occam’s Razor scoreboard.
Next up: Dark City, in case you want to watch it first.