In my last post I wrapped up my interview with Alex Cox by talking a bit about John Carpenter’s They Live (1988). Alex said: “They Live holds up for the first 45 minutes, and then there’s this long wrestling match between Roddy Piper and Keith David, and it never recovers. But those first 45 minutes are amazing. Pretty much the only good science fiction film I’ve seen post 2001: A Space Odyssey.” When I heard that, I thought for sure there would be a long tussle of words in the comment section to rival what John Carpenter claimed was “the longest fight scene in movie history.” To my surprise, only two people chimed in, both in support of the film in general. Where were the cries of bloody murder from the fans of THX 1138, Brazil, Videodrome, RoboCop, A Clockwork Orange, Tetsuo, Inception, Alien, and so on? There are plenty of bones to fight over here, but I’ll stick to They Live for the purpose of this post. As to the long fight scene, I’ve gotten into my own fights with people who dismiss it as ridiculous. Agreeing to some extent with Alex Cox is author and music journalist Greil Marcus who says of They Live that it is “a fabulous movie (except for the endless fight behind the building).” Again, I strongly disagree.

I’m not alone in thinking the fight scene in They Live is essential to the film. Its absurdity is not beside the point, but part of the point – and memorable for a variety of reasons. It even resurfaced in popular culture, as South Park fans already know, in the “Cripple Fight!” (Season 5, episode 2) which was very much an homage to They Live:

We actually animated to that soundtrack, so, for a while, before we put our own sounds in it, it was, like, Jimmy and Timmy fighting, but it was the sounds, the grunts from Roddy Piper, from They Live, with the music and all that… It was actually pretty funny that way, and I think it ended up on the Internet that way or something… The original version… it’s a great fight sequence in They Live… They Live is a… could have been a… it’s a pretty great movie, uh…” (Trey Parker and Matt Stone, commentary track for South Park “Cripple Fight!” episode.)

Although South Park exploits the camp value, the extended fight scene in They Live endures for very cerebral reasons too:

The violence staged here, this violence of the two of them fighting, is a positive violence, a condition of liberation. The lesson is that our liberation from ideology is not a spontaneous act, an act of discovering our true self. And that’s what I find convincing in this simple scene… just think how it totally turns around the usual new age idea of critique of ideology, which would be: “in everyday life we have ideological glasses, learn to put down, take off, the glasses, and see with your own eyes reality the way it is.” No, unfortunately, it doesn’t work like this. Liberation hurts. You have to be forced to put your glasses on.” (Slavoj Žižek, They Live! Hollywood as an Ideological Machine)

I cribbed both of the quotes above from author Jonathan Lethem’s Deep Focus edition on They Live (released by Soft Skull Press). His own take is one of grudging respect:

If either of them stepped outside their entrenched positions to frame this absurdity (“You’d really rather keep at this than wear these glasses?” “You really want me to wear those glasses so badly you’re going to take this endless beating?”) the air of abjection and embarrassment would be hugely relieved, but the deadly serious joke lessened: here’s another instance of Carpenter’s willingness to lose your respect in order to consolidate your amazement and discomfort. If you hate the fight scene, you blame the director. If you love it, you credit yourself. (Jonathan Lethem, Deep Focus: They Live)

The fight scene, which Carpenter says “was an incredibly brutal and funny fight, along the lines of the slugfest between John Wayne and Victor McLaglen in The Quiet Man” is essential to me for three reasons. The first is that Carpenter’s choice to make a wrestler, Roddy Piper, his leading man was purposefully ideological. Carpenter, himself a wrestling fan who’d met Piper at WrestleMania III earlier in 1987, considers it the working man’s sport and They Live is a film about the war being waged on the working class, the blue collar workers, the under-employed, or the unemployed. For the purpose of this film, they are all in the underclass.

As They Live isn’t just about the underclass but very much for the underclass, the extended fight scene sneaks in some wrestling where you wouldn’t expect it: a science-fiction movie. (Well… an American science-fiction movie. Had it been a Mexican science-fiction movie, or fantasy, or horror film, romance, etc., a big protracted wrestling scene would not be such an anomaly, especially given how huge a folk icon the professional wrestler El Santo is in Mexico. In fact, Carpenter missed a nice opportunity to include Latinos into the underclass he represents in They Live – doubly strange given its Los Angeles setting – an omission that will surely be redressed in any remake.)

The second reason the fight scene is essential to me, also ideological, is much more important: it illustrates how hard it is to make anyone change their perception of the world – even when you have hard proof. (Current topical events to file into this category include climate-change and evolution. Talk about ridiculously extended fight sequences! The latter topic alone has been going on for well over a hundred years.)

The third reason I think the fight sequence is essential is summed up nicely by Phil Hardy in his Science Fiction Overlook Film Encyclopedia. It’s “an effective political point about the underclass being too busy beating each other up to start a revolution.” The revolution here, to be clear, being a revolution against the Reagan revolution of the eighties. But if you look at the disparity in wealth between the haves and have-nots over the last few decades, it really doesn’t matter whether you have a Democrat or Republican in office, the gulf continues to grow. Not only that, but the number of new and unique ways in which we are being bombarded with ads that ask us to “consume” this or that have also skyrocketed.

To see the graph below, and then to read Carpenter’s comments from 20 years ago, is to understand that the central warnings within They Live didn’t disappear with the eighties but rather have become even more relevant today than ever before:

I felt that They Live could be an Invasion of the Body Snatchers for today; rather than Communists-under-the-beds, the monsters would be unrestrained capitalists…

In the US, the middle class is slowly disappearing: there are more poor people and more rich. I think They Live will be looked back on as one of the few voices of outrage at a time when everyone wanted two things: to win, and to make money; all other considerations were secondary…

So it’s about seeing the world in two different ways – normally and through the sun-glasses, which show the truth. We shot every scene twice, which was time consuming; dressing a whole street of billboards with subliminal messages was a pain in the ass. Strangely, though, most people didn’t notice, which was also frightening. Especially the newsstand display, where the magazine covers were plastered with slogans, they passed right by without paying any attention at all. (John Carpenter, Cheap thrills and dark glasses, by Sheila Johnson, London Times, June 22, 1989)

The last point made me laugh. My FB sidebar includes six or seven ads that target me geographically and by personal interests using key-word algorithms. My Gmail account does something similar (albeit more discretely). Product placements are ubiquitous (be they in movies, sporting events, video games, TV, etc.) I don’t even notice them anymore. Yet there they are. Everywhere. And that is one of the reasons why I think They Live is so important: the black-and-white scenes alone are a startling reminder of the world we live in and, like Roddy’s glasses themselves, offer a visual inoculation to the dangers of mindless consumption.

The fact is: the time is ripe for a remake by an astute social critic, one that would drop some of the clumsy buddy-film tropes, mullets, cheesy one-liners, and genre clichés toward the end that hamper the original. And while I’m engaged in such wishful thinking, let me add another suggestion: have the protagonists keep their glasses on most of the time – because those black-and-white scenes kick ass.

Speaking of the glasses that clearly reveal the money-grubbers around us to be soulless alien monsters; I have to share a story that Nile Southern (son of Strangelove scribe Terry Southern) told me was passed along to him by acclaimed title-designer Pablo Ferro:

Pablo Ferro told me a great story told to him by John Carpenter – about the marketing plan meeting with the Universal execs – where they said they were going with ‘Plan B’ (instead of wide distribution and advertising) because “we don’t think this film will appeal to the general movie-going public” John takes a deep breath, pulls out the glasses from his jacket pocket, puts them on and surveys them before saying, “I thought as much,” and leaves the room…

http://www.theofficialjohncarpenter.com/pages/themovies/tl/tl.html