Premium Episode 111: They Live (Movie Night) feat Will Menaker (Sample)
We discuss John Carpenter's 1988 cult classic about a secret alien television signal that hijacks human minds and enforces their submission to the wealthy elites & ghoul overlords.
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Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 111 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the They Live movie night episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky and Julian Field.
This week, we'll be discussing John Carpenter's classic 1988 film, They Live.
That's right, Jake.
And I'm putting on the glasses right now and I can see it.
You're a ghoul.
No, no, you're the ghoul.
No, you're the ghoul, Jake.
We both have glasses on.
Our guns are out.
This is going to be one of the most relaxed episodes.
I warn you, I will feel free to, you know, go on tangents.
Jake will feel free to be wrong in everything he says.
Stuff like that.
If you have not yet watched the film, I highly recommend watching it because we have a very special guest today.
Joining us from the Chapo Trap House podcast is fellow movie expert Will Medeker.
Broadcasting live from Channel 54 here in downtown Los Angeles.
How's it going, fellas?
I'm really ashamed because I'm not American and I came late to Carpenter, mostly because I think all the stuff that today I find fascinating, like all the kitsch and stuff like that, threw me off when I was too young to dig that kind of stuff.
But this movie, for example, I did not know that the kick ass and chew bubblegum line came from this movie at all.
I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass.
And I'm all out of bubble gum.
Which is the only thing we'll be discussing.
One-liners.
There's no social critique in this movie.
There's nothing deeper beneath the surface here.
Yeah, a lot of people read too much into this movie.
And in fact, They Live is just about an alien invasion in sunglasses that lets you fight them.
And I'm sick of people reading politics into movies that are just fun.
We join Carpenter in believing this because after, I think, much badgering over the course of, like, 30 or 40 years.
In 2015, he finally said, listen, this is an interview, listen, I'm a very happy capitalist.
I love my country.
I love the system that we're in, but not without some restraints on it.
The mentality that the 80s bred is really alive and well.
I just think the interesting thing about about watching They Live in 2021 is that like, I mean, it was way ahead of its time when it came out in the 80s.
It was like one of the only movies that was like, you know, a very pretty savage attack on like on Reagan's America.
And also like a very canny distillation of how ideology works in our society.
But I think the funny thing watching in 2021 is that like it says like all the satire remains like brutally true, but like there are no sunglasses needed in American society at all anymore.
Like, there's no coded messages.
You don't need to put on the sunglasses to see the messages that our alien overlords are brainwashing us with.
They just tell you.
They just tell you, like, obey.
Sleep.
I open up my Instagram account, which is a graveyard.
Why would you have one of those?
It's literally just ads now.
Like, my friends are making ads, and there are other companies that are making ads, and acquaintances that I don't know that well, you know, spouses and husbands of acquaintances are, everybody's just making ads.
Yeah.
Well, we have control of our own bodies, and by selling them, by becoming the ad men for our own selves, in a way we've won.
This war on them.
But I think that is interesting what you're saying, Will.
My wife, at the end of it, she's like, this is exactly, uh, this, she had read, like, kind of further into the metaphor, because at the end, of course, uh, they break the, the signal, we'll get to that, uh, and by the way, we're definitely going to spoil They Live, so don't, you know, whatever, that's just gonna happen.
But at the end, they fuck with the signal, the signal goes off, and everyone can see the, like, aliens.
But at least on screen, they don't do anything about it.
So my wife was like, oh, it's exactly like now.
Like, we know it all.
We can see the ghouls.
And we're still like, well, I guess I'll just keep having my fucking meal.
What am I supposed to do?
I guess I'll keep fucking this guy still.
Fucking this alien.
I guess I'll keep getting this pipe.
I mean, I think that if the alien signal has evolved at all over the previous three decades or so, it's such that even if you're not a formaldehyde face alien reptile overlord, I think the signal is such that the programming that it gives people is not just direct commands to go to sleep and obey.
I think the signal now, especially with social media rather than Channel 54, is that it allows everyone to become a ghoul and a formaldehyde face themselves, even if they're not actually an alien.
Everyone can now sort of take part in that kind of yuppie lifestyle or at least like just sort of imitation of it via the alien signal that is infecting our brains and heating the planet.
Like, look how fascinating my ghoulish image is.
Like, you're looking at- inside the phone and it's you capturing yourself.
And, if you know those fucking new, like, emoji faces that will, like, you speak and they'll move with you or whatever?
I mean, I guess there was a big kitten thing recently.
But, like, it's essentially that.
It's like, it's- you're not being told to obey by anybody except the ghoul version of yourself that you fucking captured and is repeating it back to you through the screen.
Yeah, and it's interesting, in the 80s it's this image of a literal signal being broadcast from a building that's going out from the top down and brainwashing everyone.
And now I think it's just the democratization of Channel 54 and the alien signal is that everyone It doesn't need to be broadcast from the evil cable company or the evil aliens.
It's just that everybody is now taking part in it themselves.
Everybody is broadcasting and enjoying having their brains melted and planet overheated by the alien brainwashing signal.
That's it.
It's decentralized.
BitTorrent for the signal.
I think I saw today that Bitcoin, just the production and mining of Bitcoin, now uses more electricity than the entire country of Argentina.
Yeah.
And then, like, it uses more electricity than, like, many countries on the planet in terms of, like, the carbon it's putting into the atmosphere to use the electricity to, like, I don't know, like they said, solve Sudoku puzzles where you can buy heroin.
It doesn't seem like the best No, yeah, that logic, I think, has long fallen away.
Let's, I guess, get into the beats, because the beats actually reveal, I think, a lot of these discussions in a natural way.
Plus, I want to get to the part where wrestling happens.
Professional wrestling happens in this movie.
There's a series of suplexes.
Oh yeah, there's a lot of wrestling, a lot of Easter egg wrestling moves thrown in there for the fans.
When I was a kid in France, like, Piper was, you know, the heel that was part of, like, there was a group of heels, it was like Undertaker and shit, and they would do very, like, kind of Christian versus demonic stuff, and for some reason the Irish guy, I never understood it, but very confusing to think of the Irish as just part of, like, the demonic horde in our country that's, like, trying to crush Protestants and Catholics.
Really quick, going back to something Will said earlier, because I've been thinking about this a lot.
In the 1980s, it was tough to get on TV.
It was tough to get your image or video out to a general public.
Of course.
You had to be an actor.
Public access.
Be somebody on the news.
And the pool was so much smaller, it was very difficult to achieve that level of success.
But now, in 2021, it's like everybody has a window.
Like, everybody has a transponder on their phone and it's just like, the content is ultimately shittier because there's less of a gate.
A big part of the movie is that the rebels are trying to have their pirate broadcasts of the bearded man who's trying to wake people up and explain to them what's going on and what's being done to you or whatever.
Like I said, everyone can participate in the alien colonization of our planet or fight back against it, but it's really all kind of the same thing.
It's like everyone is the bearded man now, just sort of screaming their thoughts.
Wake up, people!
I mean, this is QAnon.
This is the same phenomenon going on, but we are ultimately all still asleep.
So, the film is They Live.
It was directed by John Carpenter and written by him as well under the alias Frank Armitage.
Because I was like, Frank Armitage?
What else did he write?
Wait, he wrote under the name of the black character in it?
Highly problematic.
It's also a nod to a character in Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror.
Oh, okay.
Armitage, the name Armitage.
The movie's based on a 1963 short story titled 8 O'Clock in the Morning, which was written by Ray Nelson.
Yeah.
It cost about $3 million to make, stars Keith David, Roddy Roddy Piper, and Meg Foster, and it did fairly well when it came out in 1988.
It was like, you know, number one when it premiered, and then was in the top ten for a couple weeks.
But critically, it was a...
Yeah, critically it was not received so well, but it has since become sort of a, you know, a cult movie on the left, and in some neo-Nazi circles who believe that the aliens are representative of Jews in the film.
We'll get to that, because Carpenter had to tweet about that, I guess, in 2017.
Yeah, he did have to weigh in on that.
I know that pissed off Carpenter so much because he hates talking about his movies and he hates people analyzing his movies or taking them too seriously.
He just wants to play Xbox and just hang out.
He just wants to play Valhalla.
That's why the end of his movies are just corridor shooters.
By the way, do we think this episode has a chance at getting us his gamer tag so we can get some late night sessions in?
I would love nothing more than to play video games with him.
Listen, the latest music he put out was really cool.
I genuinely liked it, and if you want to let me soundtrack an episode with that, John, I would love that.
He wrote the music in this movie, too, with a partner.
Yeah.
So the movie opens with this nameless drifter who doesn't ever really get a name in the film.
He does.
His name is Nada.
Nada.
That's how he's credited.
John Nada.
John Nobody.
John Nothing.
John Nothing.
My name is Nobody.
He's Mr. Nobody.
So he shows up in LA.
He's looking for work.
He snags a gig on a construction site where he's invited home.
Snags a gig?
Did you write this?
Snacks.
He does!
It rocks because it opens with the most depressing.
It's just like LA as it is today.
Nothing's changed.
It opens and it's like there's a there's even like a PA message like he's in like a social center and it's just like we've canceled all food stamps.
It's just shit like that which is he's very direct.
Yeah, but he does what you can't do nowadays, where he basically shows up at the place of employment and is like, hey, I'm looking for work.
Got anything?
And the guy's like, you got tools?
Because I guess he's just been walking around the country, this is something you did, you walked around the country with just tools in your backpack and hoped that somebody would let you build or fix something.
I mean, if you're familiar with our migrant workforce, that's who took over.
But yeah, it used to be only the Irish with incredible chest.
The first time he takes out the jackhammer and has to pretend to do construction work with his wrestler body, fucking rocks.
It's like up there with the best Arnold stuff.
He's jacked, he's good at manual labor, and the John Notta character is a stand-in.
He's nameless because he is this everyman for the white, manual-labored working class.
He's been cut adrift in the Reagan's America in a neoliberal turn.
There's no need for him.
There's no work for him anymore in our society.
There's no unions anymore in which someone with his skills and brawn and his brawny balls and can-do attitude can have any kind of security or purchase in the economy in our society.
And as such, he's a drifter.
He shows up basically hopping a freight car to L.A.
And all he has to sell is his muscles, is his body.
And that, like, basically he is working for food at the beginning of the movie.
I mean, it's part of like some sort of job.
Yeah, it's like a soup kitchen, basically, where you do a day's work
and then you get a place to sleep and eat at the end of the day.
It's like very turn of the century.
London comes to America in the 1980s.
But yeah, like and then like.
And then the Keith David character, I think it's a very interesting multi-racial class solidarity here.
The fact that it's a white guy and a black guy.
And they both find that their conditions in life are now exactly the same.
They're exactly as unneeded in this kind of yuppie-ified American society where manual labor is undercut in every way.
It's just impossible.
To be a skilled manual laborer, to be able to work on a construction site, means that you are basically homeless.
And his foreman at the end of the first day of work says, like, don't even think of sleeping here.
Because he sees him with the backpack.
And then that's where he meets his friend, who reaches out in solidarity and says, I know a place, like, if you need, like, food and, like, a shower.
And at first, I love, he doesn't say anything.
He's too proud.
And the guy walks off.
He's like, ah, whatever, then.
Fuck you.
And then he follows him quietly.
It's a pretty good moment and it establishes him as essentially like a better realized version of Stallone in First Blood, right?
Like the kind of, the drifter.
There's almost like a veteran quality to him.
Yeah, but also like he's not, he never articulates a kind of a political point of view until he starts, you know, shooting people at a bank and killing cops.
Yes.
The violent break when his illusions, or he sees reality as it truly exists, our economy and our democratic system for what truly is underneath it all, I mean, yeah, that's when he snaps and goes paddock mode.
But it's the Frank character who is the one who is already politicized.
He has a kind of... And honestly, in Keith David and in Carpenter's words, Probably the closest to, like, any, like, real articulation of, like, any kind of genuine American, like, working-class consciousness and solidarity.
Yeah.
Because, you know, he sort of, like, he hips John to the way it is, and he says here, there's a line where he says, uh... Steel mills were laying people off left and right.
They finally went under.
We gave the steel companies a break when they needed it.
Know what they gave themselves?
Raises.
He tells John this metaphor about like basically describing capitalism and he says... The whole deal is like some kind of crazy game.
They put you at the starting line.
The name of the game is make it through life.
Only everyone's out for themselves and looking to do you in at the same time.
And this idea is like, they put you in a starting line, but the starting line for everyone else is different than it is for you.
So, like, Frank's character has a political consciousness, and there's even like a, you know, this is a real thing that happened in Los Angeles of that area.
Like, Los Angeles used to be, like, a major manufacturing city, and particularly had, like, a black middle class because of things like the Goodyear, uh, like a tire factory in South Central or elsewhere.
That, of course, all went under.
We're all offshored in the 80s or late 70s, 80s, I believe.
