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Revisiting the Dystopian L.A. of Sci-Fi Classic They Live, 30 Years Later:
In November of 1988, four days before George H.W. Bush was elected president of the United States, Universal Pictures released They Live, the story of covert alien suppression over the masses. The movie is, arguably, the most topical film of Carpenter’s four-decade career, which includes box-office hits and cult classics like Halloween (1978), Escape from New York (1981), The Thing (1982), and Big Trouble in Little China (1986). Thirty years later, They Live is particularly significant in America’s current social and political climates.
The sci-fi action film is based on Ray Nelson’s short story, “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” (1963), and Bill Wray’s subsequent comic adaption, “Nada” (1986). In Nelson’s story, George Nada awakes from being hypnotized and can suddenly see people transform into alien beings that are unsuspectingly controlling the human race.
In 1978, John Carpenter wrote and directed a movie about a mysterious, hulking loner who comes to town and slays innocent victims. Ten years later, he made another movie about a mysterious, hulking loner who comes to town, only this guy waited to kick ass until he was all out of bubblegum.
There are other obvious differences between Halloween and They Live,two of the most beloved films by one of the all-time great genre auteurs. But here’s the one that matters most: Halloween became a popular horror franchise that now includes 11 films released over the course of 40 years, including the forthcoming reboot due October 19.
They Live, meanwhile, sort of became reality.
Drones in the sky, conspiracies in our heads, militarized police in the streets, economic inequality in every corner of society, media that seeks to control our minds: The terror of They Live is more tangible and primal in 2018 than a slasher movie could ever be. Is that an overly grandiose way of describing a cheesy, semi-self-aware ’80s action flick? Am I projecting outsize cultural importance onto a cult classic starring a professional wrestler who utters awesome one-liners like, “Brother, life’s a bitch ... and she’s back in heat”? Have I been wearing these magical sunglasses for too long?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23 2018, @02:41AM (21 children)
We had Ronnie Raygun in a nuclear standoff with Gorby. We had higher - MUCH higher - poverty levels. South Africa was still under white government, Berlin was still split by the wall, the average standard of living was lower, Mugabe was still in charge of Zimbabwe despite the Gukurahundi genocide, and the usual carnival barkers were trying to sell the idea that it would all be so much better if only we'd all wise up and turn into socialists.
Well, at least the carnival barkers are around, now assisted by their faithful bucketcrab followers who shake their fists at the billionaires. Those bastards, how dare they be rich when the rate of poverty has dropped so precipitously? It's almost as if society at large has been uplifted. Damn them all.
This is the kind of ignorant crap that you get from modern-day feminists who talk about how we're no better off than in the '50s. Then you talk to women who were actually alive in the '50s and watch them roll their eyes.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23 2018, @02:53AM (7 children)
After white rule collapsed in South Africa, their economy went down, they became the HIV capital of Africa, and have world-leading rates of violent rape and murder. I can’t say it’s been an improvement. Oh, and just now they’ve decided to steal the farms of the white farmers who haven’t left yet to give them to blacks. That should fix everything.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday November 23 2018, @03:17AM (5 children)
-hteous.
Those white farmers made good money while the indigenous south africans did not have the right to vote, and were forbidden to ride first class in passenger trains.
Mohandas K. Gandhi was at first a well-to-do attorney, but while riding first class himself, he got thrown off the train by the conductor who permitted only whites to ride there.
Gandhi developed his philosophy of Satyagraha - non-violent action whose non-literal translation is "the force that is generated through adherence to Truth" in South Africa. The whites grew so weary of Gandhi as his people's civil disobedience that they threw every single Indian out of the country.
That Was A Crime Against Humanity, but Gandhi went on the apply Satyagraha to liberate India from the British Empire.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23 2018, @04:40AM (1 child)
I don't know where you got your information, but you should double-check.
"Indigenous" is a tricky term. The afrikaner farmers have ancestors that have been there for hundreds of years. Roughly the same kind of time since the Plymouth Rock landing, in fact. Are you advocating something similar for the US of A? Yes? OK. You first.
As for the productivity of the farmers: one of the key findings has been that even when they did transfer farms, unless the recipient were an educated, knowledgeable farmer, the farm turned into a dead loss. A white elephant. So, yeah, that's not a great plan either.
True, Gandhi did fall foul of the local racial laws, but he didn't result in all the indians getting thrown out of SA. Really, he didn't. Even when they had their shameful tricameral system, one of the houses of their parliament was reserved for indians. Oh, and indian communities are alive and well there, and have been since Gandhi's time.
Whoever told you that crap is either very deluded, or has some weird agenda. I wouldn't take their word for anything.
(Score: 3, Funny) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday November 23 2018, @07:03AM
Yes, yes I really do feel we should gave the land back to the Native Americans.
I've read that as many as one hundred million of them were killed by the French, the British and the Spanish, as well as by American settlers and the US Army.
Giving their land back would be the least we could do considering what the White Man has done to them.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23 2018, @06:33AM (1 child)
I used to ride first class on trains in England back in the 90's. Maybe it was the routes, but I didn't notice a significant difference between first and other classes.
While better than amtrack, it wasn't anything special. Unlike the difference in first class of airline service.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday November 23 2018, @10:55AM
> I didn't notice a significant difference
Free cups of tea!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Pax on Friday November 23 2018, @06:08PM
Ghandi was a bit racist himself.....
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-34265882 [bbc.co.uk]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23 2018, @07:47PM
Why was my post modded "Troll"? Every single thing I said is an easily verified fact that counters the implication from D. Crawford that South Africa is obviously better off now than under white rule. Crawford doesn't know anything about South Africa, obviously.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23 2018, @03:02AM (12 children)
And yours is the type of blatantly dishonest shit from assholes just like you who declare full employment when you know for a fact that employment statistics will prove you wrong.
People who were alive in 1988 just like me know very well that you are flat out lying about standard of living because we know that wages have not even been stagnant since the 80s; wages have been outright declining.
As for poverty, how about you step outside your white collar whitey white neighborhood and see the poor people. Don't take your wallet with you because I promise you one of the poor people will steal it. You give them no other choice when you vote with your wallet for the billionaires every time you shop at Amazon and destroy local businesses that employed all those poor people.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday November 23 2018, @03:40AM (5 children)
Some Soylentils, not naming names, have been alive for many more years than just that one. What was your point, unemployed looser AC?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23 2018, @04:16AM (4 children)
My point is AC #765397 is lying. You should know that by my use of "dishonest" and "lying" which are words that you should be familiar with since you are a liar.
Some of us aren't lying about our age and pretending to be 2328 years old either. And yet I can easily believe you're a retired old fuck sitting on an unearned pension. What the fuck is your point, you fucking worthless old troll?
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday November 23 2018, @04:33AM (2 children)
My point, you insufferable AC, is that you have no idea who I am, and I find your accusation that I am lying about my age to be laughable. You accuse your fellow soylentils of lying, with no evidence other than your shiny ass? This will not end well for you. I also suspect that my trolling has drawn you out to the point that you could have your head cut off, if you would be so kind as to enter a Saudi embassy. Pensions! Ha! Contracts entered into by the free will of both parties, and now one side, the selfish business side, realizes that they could do better by reneging on a perfectly cromulant contract? I think you may be the liar. Not saying for sure. Just more than likely. And when it comes to the trustworthiness of ACs, that usually is enough.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23 2018, @04:41AM (1 child)
You have lost your mind, RealAristarcusTrump. Your troll personas are bleeding together like so much wet ink.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday November 23 2018, @05:15AM
And your AC personas, like the persistence of cotton candy in the rain, are draining into a sinkhole of insanity. aristarchus is a Greek philosopher and astronomer. Trump is a fake real estate (sorry for the redunancy!) developer and New Yorker. We could not be more different. Unless you would be interested in some investment opportunities in the Isle of Samos? Given the tensions between Turkey and the House of Saud, it is a good investment! Unfortunately, being a philosopher, I have no property to sell you! So, fake! You will die with nothing to your credit, nothing that will promote you in the annals of the history of humanity! You will be a used car dealer on the pimple of the universe that is Earth! And then you will die, you worthless AC. Give me another, you deplorable AC! C'mon! Make it stick! Make it burn? Show how progressive values and policies are in fact only attempts to stick to the wealthy class! Show how the workers are just stupid alcoholics who have too much sex! Or, you could just admit that you are wrong, in facts, and in theory. You would not be the first.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 23 2018, @05:15AM
Yea, he has to be at least 2335 years old! Always trying to appear younger, those lying liars!
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23 2018, @04:33AM (5 children)
Wow, OK, this is a bundle. But let's start from the top.
Full employment is a somewhat nebulous concept. Technically, unless every infant and centenarian is slaving away, you don't have full employment. So we don't generally measure it that way. As it happens, with retiring baby boomers and silent and greatest generation folk living longer than ever, there's a huge slice of the country that isn't going to be in employment. To make sense of this, you kind of have to look at it the other way: what percentage of the people that actually want jobs, have them? So many, it turns out, that employers are having a very hard time finding people, wages are rising and unemployment claims are low. 100% employment? No, but very high. "Full"? As most economists define it, actually yes.
As for wages: they've actually risen. I know, this is very hard for you to swallow, but the actual measure of income, relative to the poverty level, has shown steady increase for decades and decades now. (Public data, check the census bureau.) While the Gini coefficient has been drifting off again, the actual median per capita income is strong. Also, entire classes of jobs, industries and products exist now that were pipe dreams in the '80s.
Oh, and as for theft and other crimes: crime's been on a steady decrease.
But don't feel obliged to stop banging the drum about how horrible things are. Someone's bound to want to agree with you for political reasons. I'm selling orange monkey plushies. Would you like one?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23 2018, @04:21PM (2 children)
In an absolute sense, yes. When compared to inflation, no [pewresearch.org]. Wages haven't risen significantly for decades. Every economist will tell you that when unemployment goes down, wages should go up, but that hasn't been happening. The big corporate tax cuts were supposed to free up tons of money that would feed wage growth, but that didn't happen. Companies made capital expenditures with it, bought back stock, or just diverted it to the corporate board. Saying that the fact that a line cook gets paid more than a line cook did 30 years ago and claiming that is because of economic-induced wage growth is either being ignorant of basic economics (or rather, only being aware of the most simplistic economic ideas) or being deliberately disingenious.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23 2018, @10:56PM
Hasn't government revenue as a percentage of gdp remained relatively constant in relation to gdp regardless of the tax rate over the lat 70 years? ~17%+/-1%
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=government+revenue+as+a+percentage+of+gdp&t=ffcm&iax=images&ia=images [duckduckgo.com]
How does that work out mathematically?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 24 2018, @02:42AM
The wages for given jobs may not have risen (actually, this is industry-dependent, in areas where there are shortages they have) but in terms of median income, they most emphatically have. We quite simply have a smaller proportion of the US population in the low income brackets. You can't have that if:
a) Wages haven't risen
b) People are in the same jobs
So obviously, if the wages haven't risen, people are, on average, getting better-paying jobs.
Again, verifiable with publically available information, corrected for inflation.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday November 25 2018, @12:13PM (1 child)
Just now you sent me eyeballs first into a wikipedian maze of twisty passages all alike.
It was dark there. I might have been eaten by a grue.
The last time someone so cruelly hurled me headlong into Wikipedia, I spent seven solid hours reading nutrition articles all over G-d's Creation, ultimately to conclude that I've been suffering quite a serious l-Tryptophan deficiency for the last eight years. I explain in detail in an article that I will post to warp life dot com in a day or two
That Am also anemic requires me to eat more iron and vitamin B12, as b12 if I understand correctly is require to interpret DNA so as to build the proteins that DNA specifies. I at first thought that b12 was only found in red meat and fungus but some Soylentil corrected me by explaining that B12 is secreted by soil bacteria that flourish in just one of a cows four stomachs
A Facebook friend then explained to me that while there is no strictly vegan source of b12,it is secreted by at least a few different species of bacteria and so is abundant in several kinds of cultured milk products such as yogurt and cheese, so just today I purchased a quart of unflavored yogurt to keep in the fridge at work
Also today for iron I bought a three ounce dark chocolate bar; tomorrow I'll buy a large bag of spinach, divide it into several small bags then freeze them
For l-Tryptofan I bought a pint of plain hummus and a one pound bag of extra-firm and so high-protein tofu. Over the next few days I'll dig up a source of Spirulina, a monocellular Cyanobacteria or Blue-Green Algae. _That_ righteous bug glows in the dark when exposed to abundant oxygen. My first experience of it had my convinced I was _hallucinating_ because whenever I took a step in some wet sand at the beach there was a short, bright blue-green flash all around my shoe!
My vegan cousin doesn't want to me to eat meat so I never tell him that every day I eat one or two Hebrew National All-Beef Kosher Hot Dogs and have a multitude of hamhock toncook with dried beans as well as a three pound corned beef brisket to cook with cabbage, potatoes, celery, onions and carrots and when I do buy that large bag of spinach, that as well
A few years ago I got the idea that drinking lots of whole milk would compensate for my otherwise poor diet, but milk alone is woefully inadequate so now I drink lots of V8 Vegetable Cocktail as well. V8 isn't just tomato juice rather it's got the juice of seven other vegetables
It's four in the morning as I write this. The trains will start running soon so I need to determine whether I should work at the office yet another day, or whether I should go home to Vancouver that that I might Sleep Like The Dead while blasting Head-Banging Rock And Roll the whole time I'm asleep with the volume turned all the wY up to 11: Mutually Assured Destruction that my entire neighborhood may enjoy the dulcet harmonies of that twelve hours of Head-Banging Rock And Roll as well
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 25 2018, @04:17PM
Sorry, dude. Economics is big, complex and chaotic.
Easier: google for the census department's numbers on economic brackets. You'll find that the lower third, economically speaking, corrected for inflation, has shrunk. The middle class has swollen, and the upper class has swollen.
Middle class wages may have stagnated, but more and more people are getting them, and more and more people have moved up to the wealthy bracket.
That's an unsexy but huge economic success story.