Outside Counsel

For some reason I've been watching John Carpenter movies lately. I was never interested in his work before, and as a general rule avoid the horror genre-- it, uh, lacks subtlety as a rule, and seems like a sort of Grand Guignol gross-out spectacle to make rather obvious social points. Carpenter, however, is better than that, or at least truer to the tradition, and is also a remarkably solid technical filmmaker. Over the weekend, while A and CLA were out at a polka party I watched "They Live" and found myself marveling over how well it fits into our Occupy Wall Street moment. Check out Jonathan Lethem's thoughts on it, or better yet watch it. “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, rocking the most amazing mullet I have ever seen, discovers that LA has been taken over by a race of aliens who have numbed the human population into a state of passivity through the use of subliminal images. The gimmick-- the MacGuffin, if you will, is that the true appearance of the aliens and the world is revealed when Piper puts on a pair of special sunglasses. The shades, called "Hoffman lenses" turn the world into a black-and-white tableaux, where billboards advertising Caribbean vacations are revealed to actually say "OBEY", and currency bears the words, "THIS IS YOUR GOD". Piper is an unemployed worker who has come to town seeking work; he finds refuge in a tent city that looks like the tent cities OWS protesters are setting up all over the country. I love the idea of BW revealing the truth-- it is sort of the cinematic version of blank verse vs. prose. Magic spectacles also have an esteemed place in genre fiction-- the green-tinted glasses that the Wizard requires everyone entering Oz to wear, Mrs. Who's glasses in "A Wrinkle in Time"....

One of the things that is notable about the movie is that it keeps setting up cliched moments that turn out differently than we expect them to. Surprise is a horror staple, but Carpenter goes it one better-- the movie is frightening, not startling. It keeps us off balance by avoiding genre cliches. Carpenter doesn't avoid cliche altogether-- there is a long fight scene (apparently he claims it is the longest in movie history) which seems to be there as much to take advantage of Piper's principle calling as anything else.

It is an effective piece of work, a Reagan-era bit of social commentary disguised as pop culture, and actually more effective as commentary today than it ever was.