John Carpenter’s They Live (1988), starring Roddy Piper—born in Saskatchewan—challenged 1980s capitalism with a $4M budget, debuting at #1 before fading. The film’s sunglasses reveal subliminal ads like "obey" and "conform," mirroring David Icke’s later "lizard people" conspiracy, though Carpenter’s critique of systemic complicity feels diluted by climate hyperbole (e.g., aliens altering CO2). A 2025 elite meeting contrasts with drifters’ exploitation, exposing inequality as a tool of control, urging audiences to reject passive acceptance of dehumanization. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, a podcast that is apparently covering for the sound of Patrick pouring something into a glass in the background.
Hi, Spencer.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just as I hit record, it was this sound.
It was like, is he?
He's not doing that.
This video feed is live.
Yeah.
And trust what you're seeing.
It's not really live.
I'm not going to edit that out, but this isn't going live live.
For you to answer your question right now in this moment.
So Truth Unrestricted podcast that is, what is my tagline?
We are creating and interpreting the language of the disinformation age.
And we are a very serious podcast.
We don't joke around here.
Of course, we're not making jokes about someone possibly peeing just at the moment we're hitting record.
No, of course not.
We're not making that joke.
Very serious podcast right now.
And if anyone has any questions, comments, complaints, concerns about anything they hear on this podcast, send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
Getting right into it.
Patrick, how are you today, sir?
I'm good, Spencer.
It's been a good day.
How are you doing?
Good.
I'm surprisingly well this holiday season.
It's recording this just a couple of days before Christmas.
It will probably air just a little after Christmas.
So this is a Christmas episode.
Good on you wearing that hat.
That's good.
For audio only listeners, he has a Santa hat on because he's much more festive than I am.
That's right.
Dressing it up.
Yeah.
So we want to talk about a movie called They Live and how it relates to conspiracy ideas that are just kind of generally in the atmosphere.
Had you ever watched this movie before I tied you to a chair and pried your eyes open and made you watch this movie, Patrick?
Nope.
This is my first time through it to actually watch it.
I think it's been in the background over the years here and there.
And of course, a couple very famous lines from that movie have filtered into all of our gaming and things like that.
But no, this was the first time I meaningfully took it in.
Actually, it was the first time I had watched it all the way through uninterrupted as well.
Again, same thing.
It had been on at various times when I was maybe, I don't know, at a party somewhere sometime in the 90s or whatever.
People talked about it.
And I only realized when I watched the whole thing through that there was this whole second half of it that almost all of it I had missed and not watched at all, apparently, ever.
So watch it all this time.
Don't worry.
I caught it all and we're here to talk about it.
So this movie famously stars a wrestler.
Now, I need to do a shout out and also give negative points to another podcast right now.
That podcast is a very famous podcast.
It's called Knowledge Fight.
For anyone who's somehow not aware, Knowledge Fight is a podcast where two comedians, much actually much funnier than myself, they go through Alex Jones's media output and they point out the ways in which it's wrong and the ways in which his rhetoric is dangerous.
And they also make a lot of jokes about it and all that stuff.
It's an excellent podcast.
However, I need to give them negative points.
Just a few weeks ago, they had an episode where they went on a five-minute tangent where they were talking about all the wrestlers from the WWE and the WWF that went on to have movie careers and all the movies and that.
And they failed to mention this movie.
Can you imagine?
This was very conspicuous.
This movie is credited with starting that trend of big names in wrestling moving on into movies.
Did not mention it.
But yeah, this movie stars Canadian Saskatchewan boy rowdy Roddy Piper.
Also a thing I did not know until I went into it this time to learn all the things.
I had no idea he was Canadian.
Did you?
Did you know he was Canadian?
No, no.
I guess we just, I wasn't a wrestling fan.
I didn't know.
I don't think his character was Canadian.
Well, his character wasn't.
No.
No, but he's one of ours.
He went there and did the stuff.
And we're obligated to celebrate him for it.
Also, last time when I set this up, I said, maybe undeservedly, that John Carpenter was a maker of films that were low budget.
I do want to apologize a little bit.
I did look it up.
He's middle budget.
He was never making the big budget box office movies, but he was never like true shoestring budget.
This movie made took $4 million to make.
And most of that worked because he didn't have any really big names in it.
The star is a wrestler who was getting paid.
I don't know.
I don't know what he was getting paid in the WWE, but he literally, like Roddy Piper quit working for the WWF.
It was the WWF at the time.
He quit working for them so that he could make this movie.
Whoever it is that is in charge of that, I can't remember his name.
He was not going to give him the time off to do it.
So he just said, screw you, I quit.
I'd rather make the movie.
Yeah.
Did not know that.
He went back afterward.
He was a very big deal after this movie and he got a pay raise going back.
And yeah.
So yeah, good for him.
He took the shot and it worked out for him.
And yeah, this movie debuted at number one of the box office in the first week.
It was around.
And then it, according to John Carpenter, it debuted at number one and then it slipped away and no one ever saw it again.
So neat.
Maybe he's just there.
I don't know.
But getting into this movie, of course, we need to do spoilers.
Spoiler warning for a movie that's doing the quick math 37 years old.
But spoiler warning nonetheless.
Some people might still watch it and want to be surprised by this.
So now's your chance to duck out.
Three, two, one, go.
So the plot of this movie is that humanity has been infiltrated by a race of aliens who can appear identical to humans in every way and have been systematically replacing humans in the economic system so as to gain covertly complete control over society.
It features a group of plucky rebels who have deduced the true nature of their reality and are attempting in vain to tell the world about it.
So this is nearly identical to a lot of conspiracy narratives, but very particularly to the grand conspiracy narrative of a man called David Icke.
Have you ever heard of David Icke, Patrick?
No.
Well, yes, I've heard this name.
I can't say it.
I think I mentioned it to you maybe during the Matrix episode.
Okay.
David Icke is a British former football player, which makes him to us a soccer player, who in 1990 took a weird turn after he stopped playing sort of whatever level of football he played.
His name was well known enough in England for playing sports that he was on talk shows and whatnot.
And when he was on a talk show one night, he just dove into all this crazy stuff, which began his conspiracy narrative.
And now 37 or from 1990, 35 years later, he is still selling books and movies and what he claims are documentaries and this sort of thing that document, in his words,
this conspiracy, which to him is a race of lizard people that he calls the Anunnaki that have shapeshifting technology that have been replacing key individuals and living as society's elite for centuries.
So, yeah, the similarities here to me are stark and clear.
Most people note right away who are paying any attention to this that this movie came out in 1988 and David Icke took his drastic turn to conspiracism in 1990.
But, you know, it's not clear that he would have seen this movie.
This movie was number one in the U.S.
I don't believe it made a big splash anywhere outside the U.S.
And he was notably in Britain and didn't leave there very often before he took his conspiratorial turn and started doing tours and stuff to hawk his wares.
So it's not clear that he would have seen this movie and said, aha, I will use this movie as my, you know, but it's likely that they use similar sources.
There are people who track down this sort of thing, the etymology of conspiracy narratives.
And most of David Icke's are based on old anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish blood libels and that sort of thing, because David Icke's conspiracies don't just have shapeshifting aliens.
Those aliens are sacrificing humans and drinking their blood.
So that's a thing that's different from this movie, particularly, from the plot of this movie.
Yeah, but conspiracists in general do tend to see themselves as plucky rebels who attempt to, in quotes, wake up the rest of the world to the reality of what they see as existence.
Yeah, so what do you think about that so far, Patrick?
Am I off base?
Am I too loud?
What am I doing?
No, I think that's a pretty apt description of it.
And that's a pretty good parallel as well.
You know, the kind of sense of being a rebel in the society where the majority of people or structures seem like they are resistant to your ideas.
Yeah.
Either actively or passively resistant.
But, you know, I saw that as well in this movie that, you know, they parade a lot of those ideas about for the governing alien lizard race or whatever, you know, their secret to survival is staying hidden.
Right.
So it's one of those things that will immediately feed your fear instinct if you have it.
To draw a parallel, not to say that this movie caused other conspiratorial thoughts, but to draw that parallel, when you think that concealment is so critical to the success of something, then it's almost working.
Like every time you don't see evidence of what you're looking to find, that's just the concealment working, right?
It's very disturbing.
That's a thing that I call reality inversion, where you take the evidence of it not happening instead as evidence of it happening.
You look for it and it's not there.
Oh, they are hiding it really, really well, you know, like instead of thinking, well, maybe it's not there.
Yeah.
It's like, no, no, no, it's there.
But it's a sign of how important it is to them that they hide it from us, that they've done all these things to make it look as real as possible.
Where somebody won't be motivated to say, like, how good am I at finding stuff like this if I can't find anything?
Maybe I'm not the one for this job, but that's not going to stop me from taking my ideas to circulate them around.
Right.
So as we discussed when we covered The Matrix, sometimes movies contain metaphors that are not fully understood by their audiences.
And sometimes people take their own meanings from what they see.
And this has happened here with They Live.
Most of David Ike's narratives are thinly veiled anti-Semitic tropes, as I previously said.
Old stories used to promote hatred of Jewish people that have been given a new coat of paint and trotted out like new show ponies for a new grifter to make a buck.
Some people who see this film see those same ideas mostly due to the unfortunate similarities to Ike's conspiracy narrative.
John Carpenter has made public statements attempting to clarify his intentions and to differentiate his metaphor about class struggle and unfettered greed from racist conspiracy notions that are meant to justify harm to Jewish people.
Sadly, only some people have listened.
So we're going to take a look at some of the ideas put forward in the movie to see how this all fits together.
So the big MacGuffin of this film is the sunglasses, right?
And this is the big thing.
Actually, you know what?
I want to take a moment here and mention that this movie is based on unabashedly based on a short story.
It's called, I think it's called Eight O'Clock in the Morning.
It's only six pages long.
I don't know.
Did you have a chance to read it, Patrick?
No.
No?
All right.
That's totally fine.
I mean, I'll dock Mark's from, you know.
I read the end of it, so I know why it's called that.
Yeah.
We're not going to spoil the actual short story, but the apparently it's draw the line at spoiling print.
I searched for it and I found it on a search and it has just a PDF available on a website.
So it doesn't appear to be copyrighted anymore.
So I'm going to include a link to it in the show notes for this podcast.
Anyone who wants to can read that.
It'll only take them, you know, a very short time, even if you don't read fast.
But the glasses aren't in the short story, right?
In the short story, it was actually written in 1963, 25 years before this movie came out.
62 years ago.
This was all about hypnosis.
In the 60s, it was all about hypnosis.
This was the thing that was going to bend people's minds.
The aliens were still there.
They were just hypnotizing people with television.
This was also the thing is that people thought the television was casting a spell of some kind.
This was also a common thing in a lot of literature.
And if you watch very old sci-fi, you'll see this a lot, that the TV might have some powers that TVs don't actually have.
Could you imagine the people that worried about that if they would have saw the Pokemon Go revolution?
Yeah.
So this device, it's a just like a MacGuffin.
A MacGuffin could be basically anything, but this device allows a person to see, quote unquote, the truth, right?
So conspiracists have attempted to adopt the search for an illusory truth that only they can see as the backbone of their flawed ideas.
And so this is sort of this is a direct correlation.
Conspiracists who see this movie will see the idea of just putting on a pair of sunglasses as, you know, now you can suddenly see everything.
Your eyes are opened.
You are awake now.
You know about the nature of the world and that you can't never go back.
And this is a big part of this movie.
So I do have some clips, but first, the first one isn't actually a clip.
It's just an image.
One of the enduring images from this that's been put into a lot of other places, it's influenced a lot of other things is the idea that not only was he, of course, seeing who among us was the aliens when he put the sunglasses on, he was seeing other things as well.
He was seeing that everything that was written down in our world, all the signs in the city in LA where they are, all the signs were actually something else.
They were actually conveying a whole different meaning that he could see when he put the sunglasses on.
So we're just going to throw that up on the stage here.
We'll have a quick look.
For anyone listening, we'll just kind of describe it real quick.
Obviously, he's just looking at a city street and there's signs for hotels and street signs and all this sort of thing, people trying to sell things or whatever on the street in a busy downtown LA.
But the signs now actually read, say other things, of course, things like obey, conform, stay asleep, consume, submit, watch TV, no.
Marry and reproduce.
Yeah, that's a good one.
Marry and reproduce.
Yeah, yeah.
There's a new shout out to a new podcast.
There's a podcast that's about natalism.
It's actually a fairly new podcast.
It's only had, I think, one season.
And it's very, very good.
I'm going to pull up the name of that podcast now because I can't.
Oh, it's called Ill Conceived.
I remember it right now.
So anyone who's interested in understanding the depth of the movement in the United States to produce more children, that's an excellent podcast.
They do individual episodes about all kinds of different aspects of it and very informative on that topic.
But yeah, marry and reproduce.
This was a big idea in the 80s to getting people to make more children for the United States.
And be more stable as a populace.
Well, Because if you put down a routine, if you adopt a routine, you now are predictable.
Yeah, this is an idea that's put forward as among conspiracists as part of the thought jail, the thing that's trapping you in society, right?
And as far as that goes, I mean, we are trapped.
I mean, all of that.
I mean, there's predictability, but what's the mechanism of control?
Like, did I choose this routine?
Did I choose to be doing something?
What's more is that, is that influencing some small decisions like me to buy a certain brand of shoes ahead of a different brand of shoes?
Or are they influencing like my decisions to pick a certain wife and not just a wife of a different hair color or something, but like a very specific wife, right?
Like it's not clear that that's happening.
You know what I mean?
Like, no, the big choices in my life appear to still be mine.
Yeah, I do get a lot of Nike and Reebok ads all the same.
But, you know, I'm not necessarily buying those shoes as a matter of course, right?
Like, I don't know.
So, yeah, there are ways in which they try to influence our decisions, but usually it's just to sell stuff.
Usually, I don't know.
Oh, yeah, that's money.
That's the biggest influence of information on me personally anyway.
We have this new stream of disinformation from politics, which we have to deal with.
But yeah, let's not go down that rabbit hole right now.
But a few things to note about when he's looking at these, seeing these new messages instead of the old messages.
So subliminal messages.
To point out, sorry, I was just going to say it might help to point out if anyone saw the image that the real life look down that street, like these are all just the normal billboards that you would see.
Like this shot that we saw is like the revelation of what's underneath.
Yeah, right.
So just if people were subliminal messages were once upon a time a big deal.
They were another thing in the 70s and 80s that was thought to be able to greatly influence what people were going to do in their lives.
Right.
And so, yeah, yeah.
There was there was even episodes.
I remember there was even an episode of Colombo, where this was a plot point where Colombo took a movie and he spliced in subliminal messages that only the murderer would would be triggered by.
And then he waited in the room where that was the room where the murder happened to see who went there.
Wow.
Yeah, yeah.
I remember distinctly, this was one of the plot points of a Colombo episode.
But I think they even tried it at some points to sell more popcorn, but I don't think that it even did that.
So if you can't even sell more popcorn in a movie theater, how good are these subliminal messages, right?
Like they haven't, they haven't caused us to, you know, derail and all form a line when the leader approaches our town kind of thing, right?
Like they don't make us any less rebellious.
It doesn't seem to be.
I think that you have to examine the scope of like the time being examined, right?
So if you don't see popcorn sales increase in a year, that's one thing.
But what if they did it for 30 years, right?
And they looked at how everything else had increased.
Did popcorn increase more than the other?
I don't know.
I can't get really deep into projections.
Sure.
But what you get there is you and I are in the pitch meeting and you just made that pitch.
And then I'm across the table and I'm doing the other side.
I say, okay, but we're looking at a cost versus profit increase ratio here.
We're going to have to work on this for 30 years.
We're going to sell how many more bags of popcorn?
10% more, 20% more?
Like, you know, what's that return on investment on this thing that we're going to put 30 years into?
Wouldn't it be better to like invest in real estate with that money?
You know what I mean?
Like that's going to increase more over 30 years, I think, right?
So this is generally how these things happen.
Maybe it does.
Maybe, maybe you can, except that, you know, it's not worth it.
It's not worth all the effort.
I mean, you could make an elaborate world where you convince one person to like do a series of obscene things, but like the amount of money you'd have to put into faking that world for them, that doesn't seem useful.
Sorry, I kind of bring it up a little bit to say that like it's a hard thing to test, right?
Because it is the sort of thing that when subliminal advertising, the idea of it came up, it was, you know, like there were attempts, but how long could they do it?
How long could they possibly feel moral trying to do it?
Because it was at its nature a subversive thing.
You are trying to basically incept the idea that I want popcorn and make it make you think it was your idea.
It's even more.
I'm just saying buy it.
Yeah.
So it's, I don't know.
It's one of those things where because of the morality, it does become harder to test.
I think it works about as well as hypnosis, which is almost barely any, you know, there's a reason why hypnosis hasn't caused anyone to like, you know, allowed anyone to like take over the world because it doesn't really give anyone control in the way that it was feared that it would.
Which is a suggestion for suggestible people.
Yeah, which sort of allows us neatly to like track from the short story that started us with hypnosis to like where they're worried about subliminal messages to now where we kind of look at both of those ideas as, well, you know, we understand people were worried about them, but those weren't really things to worry about.
But a few other things to note about this with the images.
In the unfiltered world, as in not through the glasses, the words that he sees everywhere are in color and the words are more plentiful and complicated, like in the magazine that he looks at.
You know, there's many words on there, right?
And they're saying many complicated things.
But when he looks at it through the glasses, it's stark black and white.
They're all very, very simple.
And they're all imperative.
Very repetitive.
Right.
And so this is, this is sort of John Carpenter trying to tell us something is that these words and these this world, this sheen that we have over the world is a is an illusion that's just distracting us from things.
That's more or less what he's saying.
And what what is it what it's distracting us from is actually really, really obvious and stark, right?
It's that's the, that's what he's attempting to get across, which, you know, I think we can understand and note.
I think we are, you know, we are bombarded with images and distracted by a lot of things, but like the idea that we were distracted in 1988 by magazines.
I mean, John Carpenter today must look at, you know, Twitter and Facebook and go, wow, man.
Yeah.
Like, whoa, you know, I was way over, you know, I was, I was way ahead of my game on this, you know.
Yeah.
So let's get into the first clip.
So setting up this clip, this is a moment where in the movie, the protagonist's name is George Nada.
Nada, I can't help but think that it's a blatant play on the word of nothing.
Like this is just an ordinary guy.
He's just a nobody.
So Nada has already worn the glasses around town.
He's seen the images.
He's been found out by the aliens and then he's been sort of chased away.
The aliens attempting to capture him to, you know, stop, you know, one of the humans is broken containment and can see us kind of thing.
And he's escaped and he's taken a woman captive at gunpoint, made a getaway, and he's gone to her home to recover.
So this is the clip.
Look, lady, we're in trouble.
The whole world's in trouble.
They're all around us.
We never knew it.
You can only see them with these special glasses.
I swear to you, we're being controlled by these things.
I don't know what they are or where they came from, but we gotta stop them.
All right.
I'll do whatever you want.
Whenever you want.
Just don't hurt me.
Please.
Listen to what I'm saying to you.
Okay.
You're fighting the forces of evil that none of us can see without sunglasses.
Take a look.
If you want me to look through your sunglasses, I'll look through your sunglasses.
If I don't see what you see, I'm going to see it anyway.
Right.
So obviously it's a very intense moment.
He's trying to get her to look and she's resisting.
She's fighting with him.
It's a really weird moment where she's like, listen, if I tell you, I'd just be telling you to trick you.
Like, that's not what I usually talk to say to somebody who's holding a firearm.
Yeah.
Right.
But, but she does make a point there in that you can't force anyone to see the reality of the situation.
Right.
And so, I mean, this, this is an interesting.
We encounter that again later in the movie, don't we?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't have a clip of that, but we can, we can talk about it real quick.
But this, this is the idea of the sunglasses, and he has only one pair at this point, right?
The idea of the sunglasses represents the kaleidoscope reality problem.
So only one person can look through them at a time and can claim to see to be seeing any number of things while doing so.
And one has to rely on the mechanism of viewing reality as common to everyone before one can use one's own subjective view of reality as a reliable measure of what other people understand about the world.
So you ever had a kaleidoscope as a kid?
Yeah.
Right.
And of course, you, you know, you'd hold it up and you'd see things.
And then every once in a while, some kid would say that they saw something incredible in there.
Like, you know, I saw a bear fighting a dragon, right?
And then you look through it and you don't see that.
It's neat, which you see.
It's interesting, sort of, right?
There's shapes in there and they move around.
this, you know, there's little mirrors in there that, you know, make things look like a, I don't know, colorful snowflake kind of whatever.
And, you know, you're not going to see the same thing that they claim to see.
And so you have this, this, you know, break where you have to sort of figure out whether you trust them that they really saw that thing that you can't in any way confirm.
You also can't deny.
There's no way to have any proof of what they did or didn't see.
Well, to a degree, it's almost, I would say it's almost a little bit more like cloud watching, right?
Well, if I, if I tell you what you'll see and you put the glasses on and you actually do confirm that, it'd be kind of like me saying, oh, that looks like a hot dog and you looking up and saying, yeah, I could see how that looks like a hot dog.
Yeah.
You know it's giving them interpretation in advance.
Yeah.
Right.
But of course, I mean, that's not really the case here.
No.
Because, you know, he could hold up, I don't know, find a magazine in her house or something and say, look, look at this.
You will see something different when you put these on than you did before you put them on, before you had them on.
And you'll know.
I mean, and we can, you know, you could write down the word you see and then I could put them on and I could write down the word I see.
And then we could come to some common shared reality about what it is that this magazine is attempting to tell us according to the filter we get when we look through the sunglasses.
Right.
Right.
And that's, but of course, we also get the aspect that she's resisting looking through the sunglasses.
Right.
And of course, as you mentioned, we get this later on too, where we get his, his friend made by, played by the amazing Keith David, who's been in a lot of other films, also excellent.
But he wasn't a really big actor at this time.
I think he was fairly not well known at this time.
And they have a five-minute knockdown drag out fight in an alley.
It's amazing.
So this fight, we're not going to, we're not, I don't have a clip, but the fight alone, I think, is worth watching just because it's gotten the most painful depiction of being speed in the groin over and over.
It has a story.
It has a story.
No kidding.
So according to when I looked up information about this, John Carpenter had a scene, a fight scene that was going to be like a minute long.
And, you know, the two his two lead actors were looking through the script and they saw this and they, you know, they looked at the shooting schedule and said, okay, that's going to be then.
And so they spent two months in their off time rehearsing and just the two of them choreographing their own fight scene.
And of course, one of them is a professional wrestler.
So he is good at fight choreography, right?
Yeah.
Like legitimately good at it.
Usually does it in front of a live audience.
So yeah, he's good.
And so he's teaching Keith David all the things about this.
And of course, it's a lot easier when you get to choose the camera angle from which you look at it and all of those things, right?
So, so, but he legit does this.
And then on the day when it's happening, they tell John Carpenter, relax.
We got this, right?
Like, like, and they just do it.
And John Carpenter loves it so much, he puts the whole fight scene in there.
He leaves it all in.
And it's five minutes long, like legit from first punch to last punch.
It's something like 10 seconds short of five minutes long.
It's just brutal.
Yeah, amazing.
Worth, worth watching just for that.
It's, I mean, if you like fight scenes, but yeah, it's, it's pretty legendary.
Um, and of course, it's something you get extra when you hire a professional wrestler as the lead actor in your movie, right?
I mean, it, I also thought it put a real visceral feel on the challenge.
I imagine, you know, whether somebody is, you know, engaging in conspiracy thinking or theorizing or whether they actually know about something that they're trying to bring to light, like a whistleblower or whatever, you know, it, it, uh, it frames the, uh, the challenge of trying to convince somebody to just take that first look.
Um, I think sometimes, you know, like I would want to look at myself and say, do I ever put that challenge in front of myself?
Am I refusing to take the first look at something because of my own complacency or comfort level or because I can already sense that the implications of what I look at this is true means that now I have to commit to being part of some sort of solution or something.
And I think that that's, you know, there's a, there's a lot of apathy, you know, and whether a person is just normal rational thinking or whether they're completely off the deep end with the conspiracy, there doesn't seem to be a lot of will for people to take on more, right?
So just first look, yeah.
Yeah.
Especially, you know, the ebb and flow of this five-minute fight scene where it's just like, is it over?
It's over.
It's not over.
He's not stopping until he gets those.
And you think, oh, man, like, if I could have just answered your question in 10 seconds by putting the glasses on my face and going, no, you're a loony, wouldn't that have been easier than being punched in the face 20 times?
Right.
But that's not, that's not how it usually goes.
So.
Yeah.
I mean, you sort of, you can, you can kind of game it out, right?
You'd be like, if I look, will I have to change everything about my life and how I'm living it?
Will my life become like less comfortable?
Will I have to, as a good person in the world, change how I interact with the world such that I'm now forced to do the right thing for everybody else, right?
Like, does this put this burden on me?
And this is the sort of question that people ask themselves with like atrocities or human rights violations that are committed by other countries and that sort of thing, like these things that other nations do that might be a nation that we have, our nation has relations with, right?
Like friendly relations with.
So like how much of that comes back on us?
Sometimes some of the nations sell weapons to each other.
Sometimes those weapons are used as part of those human rights violations.
And then we do, does this make me complicit, right?
And far too often the answer is, I can solve this by simply not acknowledging the problem.
And so this was sort of what Carpenter, I think, was going for this like, should I or shouldn't I, you know, question in this, which, you know, if you look at the actual problems related to like capitalism, will you then be forced to accept a less comfortable life in order to be part of the solution to the problems posed by capitalism, right?
Can you bypass that dilemma by simply not looking in this case, like through the glasses?
And I think that's part of what he's going for.
But the other thing that he's going for that's not, he probably just didn't want to have to make it explicit is that he's, he's dealing with George Nada is approaching people in the woman, I can't remember her name in the film, but and then his friend, Keith David's character.
These are people who have been bombarded by these messages their whole lives.
obey, don't question, conform, right?
I mean, this is, so this is, that's more of, I think, what John Carpenter is going for is that you have to break past that restrictive barrier that, you know, this programming you have, but that doesn't come across very well, I think, in the way that the story is told.
So I don't know.
I think that's a little bit of a miss, but certainly conspiracists would understand that because they think that the, they tell themselves that the other people in their lives, their family members sometimes or friends or whatever, who don't get on board, that's because they're so indoctrinated.
They're so trained.
They're so programmed to not question the reality or whatever, right?
Like, and that's, that's how they see it, right?
That's exactly how they see it.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
All right.
I've been trying to not be as energetic as I have been in previous episodes because my wife sits in the other room watching television to the room I'm in, and it's not even close to soundproof.
So, you know, I'm trying to not, you know, she's worried about who I'm arguing with on the internet or whatever.
I'm not arguing with anyone, just myself.
But I don't know if I'm doing that very well because I really like this stuff.
So let's move into another clip.
So this is a clip that I call the Rebel Meeting.
So our main character and his sidekick are attending a meeting of the plucky rebels as they prepare for war against the aliens.
Well, the city's crowned with cops looking for us.
Most of the cops are human.
They've been told that we're commies trying to bring down the government.
And some of them are being recruited.
Creatures are trading wealth, power.
You mean people are joining up with them?
Most of us just sell out right away.
Then all of a sudden we get promoted.
Our bank accounts get bigger.
We start buying new houses, cars.
Perfect, isn't it?
We'll do anything to be rich.
Look around the environment we live in.
Carbon dioxide, fluorocarbons, and methane have increased since 1958.
Earth is being acclimatized.
They are turning our atmosphere into their atmosphere.
What do these things want?
Why are they here?
It's in their best interest.
They're free enterprisers.
The Earth is just another developing planet.
They're a third world.
We are like a natural resource to them.
Deplete the planet, move on to another.
They want benign indifference.
They want us drugged.
We could be pets.
We could be food.
But all we really are is livestock.
So that's pretty stark.
That's pretty, that's pretty dark, right?
All we really are is livestock.
It's also not, I mean, even in the film, it's not really true.
It's more like a, I don't know.
I mean, if you're going to call it something, it's more like a slave situation, I guess.
Because what's the point of being rich unless you're richer than someone else, right?
So you kind of have to have people who are poor in order to be richer than, you know, I mean, it doesn't make any sense to have $40 million if no one's left alive to like, you know, pay them to do stuff for you, right?
Like, so the idea that they're going to eat all the people as livestock is not really true.
That seems like hyperbole.
But what did you think of that moment?
Well, it's, you know, using the term livestock like that might not necessarily be tied to food, but just subjugation, right?
You exist in the conditions and limits that we place on you, and you're not allowed to exceed or move beyond that envelope.
Yeah, in that way, it harkens right back to the matrix, right?
Where we, we at first sort of, it appears as though the people in the matrix are living more free lives because they have more opportunities, but they aren't really the arbiters of their own fate.
And so we see their wealth of decisions as having no value.
And the same thing would be true here, right?
Exactly true for the exact same reasons.
We also trace the nature of dependency, right?
And so when we say that when we start to spot dependencies, we also are sometimes instinctively looking at that like a vulnerability because a dependency is something that if one side of the dependency isn't satisfied, then the other side that depended on it is now in a, you know, a lessened state.
And so it's, it's really easy for us to, you know, almost apply a sinister coding to any time where we see a concentration of dependencies, right?
So we do have a lot of dependencies on our government to provide, you know, the electricity, the internet, the water, the, the, the things that the medical and law enforcement, all this stuff.
So when people look at government and if they're conspiratorially inclined, you know, it's easy to then liken that dependency to either a precursor or just an early stage of slavery, I think.
Yeah, well, that's, that's why we came up with democracy because we wanted them to also be dependent upon us for, and also like, I think increasingly in our capitalist hierarchies and also our political hierarchies, we should look less at the people who are sort of like above us on a on a hierarchical scale,
like the manager at work or whatever, less as like a better person than just a person with a different job.
That's a person whose job is to organize the effort.
It's and yeah, as such, they need to tell people what to do, but they're not telling people what to do because the people who that they're telling to do are subservient.
Like I worked in the oil field, go tell anyone who works on the shop floor anywhere that they're subservient to their manager.
Oh my God.
Like not a chance, right?
Because that's not how anyone should see this, right?
And that's definitely not how they see it.
A boss in the oil field that tells someone else who works for them to go wash their own truck is a boss that will get zero respect from the people under them.
Like, you know, yeah, I work for you, but my job isn't to wash your fucking vehicle.
Like my job, I see what you mean.
Get the equipment working that I'm going to take to the field or whatever, right?
Like wash your own damn truck.
Yeah.
And if you can't, then I don't know why I work for you.
You can't even wash a truck.
Yeah.
What makes me think you're qualified to do anything if you can't even wash a truck?
Yeah.
And I've rarely, ever, rarely, rarely ever seen a boss get other people to wash their vehicle for them in the oil field.
It's so incredibly rare.
And I think that's a sign that I think other people need to look at that, that same situation.
The people who, even the people who own companies, they own the company.
Yeah, sure.
But they're just organizing the effort, that's all.
Yeah, they might even choose whether you work there or not, but you can work somewhere else, like go, in fact, if you think that there's any chance that they might do that, you should just go anyway, you should just go right, like no one should think that at all, as slaves to the grind, but not slaves to the next manager above them.
Yeah, but then they they, the grind has to be personified by something.
It's hard to hate a system that has no face.
Well, I mean, you can personify it really generally and call it the man.
Well yeah yeah, that's that's usually how it goes.
Yeah yeah, but uh, I do want to throw a little bit of criticism directly at John Carpenter for this scene.
Um, I think he extended his metaphor a little too far here with the, the man on the television, you know, telling the uh uh broadcasting, attempting to broadcast, sort of like, the truth in their fictional world.
The truth um, so this these, these ideas that he's throwing out.
I mean he's he's uh, he literally says that they're changing the climate to have it better suit the aliens, and that is definitely something that comes up in conspiratorial language.
That um, which is weird, but uh yeah, that that this the the, this happens this way.
So first of all, I like to say that the metaphor that John Carpenter is going for, which is capitalism and trickle-down economics, is creating a bigger class divide and the in the class divide they are um, dehumanizing the people on the bottom to enrich the people at the top.
And in his movie he then flips that around by literally dehumanizing the people at the top, literally making them aliens, so that it's okay that you, you don't have to feel guilt when you shoot them right, like that's literally what he's saying, eat the rich, literally shoot the rich.
Um, but he doesn't need you know the climate to be, you know changing, to acclimate itself to the aliens in order to make that it's.
It doesn't fit with his metaphor, but it does fit with the conspiratorial metaphor that he would rather avoid.
So I think this was sort of like a mistake and I think he you know, I I don't want to put a great deal of shade on him, I don't, I don't.
I've heard other interviews from John Carpenter about this movie and and other movies.
He's a very famous director.
I don't think that he did this like to subvertly put in conspiratorial notions.
He's never shown any sign to me to be, you know, leaning that way in any other other spot, even in his you know, older years uh, and so I think it's just a product.
You know, he probably just did a bunch of reading on a bunch of different stuff related to this stuff and then he went, oh you know, these are just ideas to throw in there, and he threw a bunch of things in there.
You know what I mean.
But again, this one isn't needed for his metaphor, but it does fit the metaphor he's trying to avoid associating with, and he probably didn't really think about the need to differentiate himself from that set of bad ideas, because in 1988 they weren't a big set of ideas yet.
But you know, I think, I think this is uh, this is a a thing where he just kind of slipped and and put in the wrong bit from a uh, you know, conspiratorial magazine that he read somewhere or whatever right um, and for that matter, to talk about the way that conspiracists use this uh piece to fit into a larger narrative.
They'll say things like aliens are coming and they are changing the climate to acclimate themselves to for it for their own self and not for ours, which is actually something David Icke says, by the way, that this is a thing that the lizard people, the Adenaki, are doing, warming up the earth because the lizards would like that better.
This is weird because in almost every other context, they'll also say that the climate either isn't changing or there's no way to change it by human action.
And it seems like this should be some kind of a problem, except that we also see people who are sort of conspiracy-minded look at things like COVID and in two separate sentences that follow one after the other, say things like that, that COVID isn't real, but that it was made in a laboratory by the Chinese to negatively affect our economy, right?
So if it's not real, how could it be made in a laboratory, right?
Like these two ideas are directly contradictory and mutually exclusive.
And yet you'll hear them from the same person like one after another.
And this doesn't bother them at all.
Because what is a more accurate description of conspiratorial thinking is that any answer except reality will do.
So this doesn't cause any problem for them at all because they're okay with either one of them.
So they'll throw them both out there because they're both not reality and they just want it to be anything but reality.
And that, so it's interesting.
And this one, you know, the way conspiratorial people look at this is interesting to understand that they see no contradiction here.
They see there is no hypocritical thinking in throwing out both of those ideas at the same time because they're not looking to make a cohesive, well-thought out, well-structured worldview.
It's just anything but reality will do.
Yeah.
One thing I would say about that, the aliens being present and toxifying the atmosphere and whatnot is that as a plot device, it serves to introduce like what the final, you know, the ultimate consequence is, right?
Like our planet becomes unlivable because there's always going to be the conformists or the conformist-minded who looks at it and says, well, life goes on, right?
Sure, you see these people are conforming and obeying, but what's the harm in it?
And by having that plot device, it means that you cannot continue like this forever in this, what would almost be called like a toxic equilibrium or a toxic symbiosis of sorts.
But this clearly makes the role of the aliens to become parasitic, right?
Like they're not just taking stuff they need, they're making our planet unlivable for us, the natural humans.
Yeah, except that in the statement that came just before that from the sort of rebel leader, for lack of a better term, who's not the man on the television saying a lot of the things, he says that the aliens are just basically venture capitalists.
They just show up, they make a bunch of money, and then they leave in the shambles and they destroy it and they leave, right?
Like it's so in that way, you know, his version is directly contradicting the one that's even on the television right after him, Which is definitely something we hear from conspiratorial people, but it as a, you know, what the first guy says about, yeah, they're just capitalists.
That's like exactly what John Carpenter is going for.
Like he says explicitly in many interviews: no, it's just about trickle-down economics.
It's just about a division of wealth.
It's just about wealth gap.
Like that's what I was going for.
That's that's everything that was in this movie.
It was, it didn't have a bunch of sub-themes.
I just had the one, and that was it.
So, you know, like it just seems like it's a confusing piece that's unneeded.
It doesn't serve that theme.
No, that's for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So just as a plot device, it does kind of add like a more element.
It does add flavor.
There's no escape hatch of just continuance as the norm, right?
Like, you've fixed this problem.
You're never going to outlive the aliens.
You're never going to cower and hide your head and wait for it to be over and then just move on after they're gone because the earth really will be just right.
But yeah, to believe that, you'd have to believe that climate change is going to destroy.
So I don't know.
I don't know what to tell you about that.
But that'll be another episode.
I will say that you can kind of see the an element of what you're saying about the wealth control and whatnot, because we see our main character go from an initial state where he's, you know, he's saying to his friend, oh, you know, like, come on, we all just kind of, there's hard times.
Hard times are going around.
Yeah, yeah, but it'll be waits.
It'll get better at some point.
Yeah, yeah, right.
And then he has the, you know, the curtain ripped back and he and he sees it for what it is, or the veil, if you will.
And now he's this transformed man who no longer believes that, oh, these are just hard times.
I've spent my whole life accepting that, oh, there's just hard times.
Now I see that there's actual someone is authoring this experience.
And that's why, you know, like there's parts of this movie where you see the main character get mad and say, people are going to pay, or like when he walks in the bank with the intent to kick ass and chew bubblegum, right?
Well, here, hold on.
I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I'm all out of bubblegum.
So there's that.
There's that audible gasp.
He's all out of bubblegum.
So he's got nothing else left to do but kick ass.
I don't know.
He's very shorter than the other two.
And one of them's gone already.
Oh, yeah.
So we're going to play our last clip here.
It's what you were saying leads nicely into it.
So setting it up, our hero, I guess heroes, there's two of them at this point.
They have stumbled into a meeting of the quote-unquote human power elite, which I can't help but think was a deliberate attempt at not using any of the conspiratorial words that were already in play in the world at that point.
Like Illuminati was definitely available as a word for this.
He could have called it the Illuminati, but it seems specifically that he wanted to avoid using that term.
Humanity.
He would have ended up getting calls from the Illuminati saying, listen, we didn't sign up for anything.
Yeah, yeah, we did.
We're suing you for watering down our brand.
Yeah.
So he's in the middle of his Rambo-esque rampage, and they stumble into this sort of meeting.
So here it is.
Our projections show that by the year 2025, not only America, but the entire planet will be under the protection and the dominion of this power alliance.
gains have been substantial both for ourselves and for you the human power elite you have given us entree to the resources we need in our ongoing quest for multi-dimensional expansion
And in return, the per capita income of each of you here tonight has grown and this year alone by an average 39% yeah, seems like a lot.
39 in one year.
Wow, that's that's incredible investment.
Yeah, yeah.
You didn't want to have to do commercials about popcorn for 30 years to try to sell enough popcorn to get 39% year over year.
Wow, that's and the year is 2025, he said, right?
Well, he said by the year 2025, it would be completed.
Yeah, it's over.
It's already over.
It's done.
We're part of it.
Well, hold on.
If our hero hadn't done what he did back in 1988, it would have been over by now.
But because he did what he did, he bought us a lot of time.
All right.
It's unclear whether he got all the aliens.
We don't have those glasses anymore.
We can't see them.
But yeah, money and profit are the entire point of this film.
It's what John Carpenter was intending to critique.
And this scene explicitly tells us how that's working out.
Big profits for everyone who helps out with the plan.
So I didn't include it because the clip gets a little long if you do.
But immediately following this speech is the entrance of someone from the that is originally seen in the in the drifter encampment near the start of the film.
So this for me, I had to really look up to find out what was happening here.
But when this guy shows up, he recognizes them and says, oh, wow, I didn't know that you got recruited too, kind of thing.
Like, wow, that's cool.
Okay.
You should really should have dressed up for this now that you can afford it, right?
Like, this is, you know, wow, you know, you're kind of dressed down for this, but good thing we all got in on this deal, right?
Like, and, but it's kind of a miss because I don't think we get enough of him in the drifter encampment to be clear exactly who he is.
No, if you didn't tell me that now, yeah, I knew that there was some sort of, but I was just like, I miss.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, some missed something.
And I think this is sort of a problem with the way that it was made or whatever.
There, I feel like there needs to have been more of a focus on him as a as a person doing something specific, saying a specific thing or something.
I don't know.
But in particular, like I wound back and I looked at it to find him.
And he's dressed so differently.
And of course, he was wearing a hat as a drifter.
And there's a scene earlier in the movie where he is where there's a sort of a chair that's pushed in front of a TV that they're kind of watching.
And they're watching the pirated TV signal attempting to cut through the noise and tell all the people in the city the truth kind of thing, but it's not really working.
And these guys in front of the TV are kind of complaining about the reception and they're not sure why this other channel is coming in, but they don't understand what they're saying.
And they're like, oh, you know, like this kind of sucks.
And I wish our TV was better kind of thing.
And of course, they're kind of living in this, you know, empty lot on the edge of town.
So, you know, they're lucky to have a TV at all.
But what if they got that thing plugged into?
I don't know.
They must have a long extension cord of some kind, right?
But he's the guy sitting in the chair, right?
But that's the only time he speaks before this, right?
So it's not, you know, like it's, it's not really clear who he is.
And of course, he's, he's clean and dressed up in a suit now, like he looks way different.
And so it is not really clear what's happening.
But this is, this is a, this is sort of like the idea of the secret club, right?
So it's difficult to underline just how closely this resembles how conspiracists view the world, right?
Like they're very cynical.
And the idea is that there is a secret club in which everyone's profits are celebrated, right?
These people, the elite, aren't competing with each other.
They're only competing against us.
So in the movie, we see it.
It's a brightly decorated and incredibly clean room that the elite are in.
And it's contrasted directly with how, you know, the people in the encampment at the beginning of the movie were, where it's dirt path and everywhere they go is more dirt and they're kind of living in tents and they're.
They're kind of there is a makeshift shower, but it doesn't always work right and and you have to take turns using it and and uh, yeah.
So again, the idea being presented is the fact that your life hasn't turned out for the better because you're not in some special secret club and that the members of that special secret club are all colluding to make their own lives better at your expense and you're not ever going to be the person at the top, because someone who knows someone gets to be in that spot.
Whenever they need a new person, they go, oh, I know Joe down the street.
He's a good guy yeah, let's get him the gig right.
And the world is entirely made of nepot, nepotistic cronyism at the top and hardworking diligent, honorable people at the bottom, and that's, I mean it's, it's.
When I put it that way, it almost makes what John Carpenter did almost ham-fisted, which I think is also unfair, because it's to me it's not ham-fisted he does.
He does do a nice job of, of making this sort of bookends of the the uh the, the empty dirt lot, where there's a lineup for food at the start and then a um, clean room at the end, with the, with the rich elites at the end right, I mean, this to me fits and it's, it's nicely done, but it is, you know uh, um it.
It is a very simple metaphor.
Let's just put it that way, right?
So what do you think?
Am I off base on this?
No, I just uh, I didn't really give that uh aspect uh, of it any thought.
Yeah, having the same guy, having one guy in the same spot, I think was much of the point for John Carpenter right he's, he's there in the, in the the, the dirt lot, and then he's also there in the the uh um, Human Power elite meeting right um, and this sort of aim was to show somebody had else, had made that trajectory, like you said.
Yeah, kind of failed because he was not notable at all.
Right that's, that's a miss, because it It just wasn't, you know, maybe there was another scene that would have made it notable, but it got cut or something.
Like, it could have just as easily been a complete, total stranger who saw a couple guys that said, oh, you're new here.
I want to show you around.
Yeah.
Just all the exact same stuff would have happened.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
But having it be someone they knew and that they could rely on and be like, hey, could you show us around kind of thing, which is what he does then.
He shows them the transmitter or whatever, right?
Like he leads them into the TV studio.
Yeah.
Which is like.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I mean, there, it felt like there had to be another scene in there somewhere where they gained that mutual trust.
And it, I think it must have been done and just got cut for some reason because I can't imagine John Carpenter just forgetting that point.
You know what I mean?
Like that seems like he's a good enough storyteller that he would have known that would have to be there.
But there must have been some other, you know, you know, problem with having it in there.
I don't know why what would have stopped it.
But these sorts of things do sometimes happen in films and it is unfortunate.
But yeah.
So.
Well, I mean, there was a couple issues with the film itself, right?
Like just in terms of consistency.
There was the one thing I noticed that had me actually laugh out loud was when he's got the glasses on, he's walking along.
Now he sees this transmitter saying, sleep, sleep, sleep.
I'm like, oh, you can hear that now because you have the glasses on?
Yeah.
Okay.
Or why is this dump truck just dropping all of its garbage in the alley and driving away?
Because that's what was needed for him to have the glasses threatened, right?
So, you know, I don't, I don't think he was putting a lot of thought into is this going to have the consistency and the cohesion at the end for stories.
Also, I mean, I'll throw in a little, a little bit of, of, uh, of uh defense for my man Carpenter.
Um, he's uh he's fit this into 90 minutes, which was a little uh uh movies used to be regularly 90 minutes.
Um, and at the time this was starting to not be the case.
It's movies were starting to become longer, uh, but he felt longer.
Well, true.
Um, but he fit this entire thing into 90 minutes, and quite a lot happens, right?
In 90 minutes, you would be hard-pressed to get that today, I think.
And uh, but he, you know, he does it by doing some of the sort of things that you describe, right?
Like by having them dump the garbage in the alley.
That's also the alley where his friend finds him.
And, you know, I mean, the level of coincidence happening here is pretty amazing, right?
LA is a pretty big city.
Which alley are you going to find your friend in?
Why do you, why are you looking in alleys anyway, right?
Like that's, yeah, you know, yeah.
But, you know, as long as we buy those things, it's, it's fine.
I mean, this, this isn't, this isn't meant to be a complete examination of real life, obviously.
And as a metaphor, I think it worked pretty good.
So I have a little bit of a concluding bit here.
All right.
So this movie is about increasing wealth inequality, unabashedly.
It should have a resurgent audience at a time when we're seeing that to an even greater extreme, right?
Much more so now than in the late 80s.
So what's happening in our world now?
Seeing people get displaced from their homes at a much greater rate than ever previously seen in in the Western world, and almost entirely due to economic factors.
People priced out of housing markets by you know happenstance of job churn and you know runaway housing costs.
A growing class of people created by a slow, grinding machinations of a bureaucracy linked to technology.
That's.
That's got no one really at the helm.
It's just mindlessly uncaring for what used to be the few who fell out of it, but an increasing number now who fall out of it.
And this film features images of a group of unlucky and currently unprivileged people who are yet highly motivated and industrious getting literally plowed under.
Like that scene exists in this movie.
I mean, that to me is John Carpenter like really, you know, turning the screw in, you know what I mean?
Like making it very obvious what he's going for here.
The dirt patch on the edge of town where they had come up with, you know, a place where people drifting in from out of town could, you know, find a place to have a shower and a meal without having to have a full hotel or whatever because they can't afford it.
You know, literally plowed under.
And, you know, sadly, we've also had this happen in real life in our real world of these encampments getting plowed under.
And I think that we need to, you know, as a modern day callback, if you will, we need to take films like this that were saying a similar thing from a previous time.
And we need to talk about the actual messages in them and say, like, look, we need to do more, more of something.
And if that more is a difficult thing to do, well, guess what?
We already talked about the people who are like, you know, quote unquote in charge.
They just have a different job than we do.
Their job is to organize these bigger efforts.
So fucking organize it already, right?
Like earn your keep.
Like you're going to be an elected person in the world now.
Then why don't we tell those elected people that part of their job now is to organize an effort to find a better way for this than what's happening now, which is, it seems to be just like everyone wants to squish the air bubble out of their own town into someone else's town and it just, you know, can become someone else's problem.
But humans aren't garbage.
And that's if I want to take one of the points in this movie and like shove it in people's faces, that's what I want to say.
Humans aren't garbage to be swept away.
Like at some point, we have to find a way to do this where, you know, people who are unhoused and can't afford their lives, we either find a way for them to afford those lives or we find another way to have them exist so that they don't have to be, you know, living the way they do, which is going to lead to much worse outcomes for them.
I mean, you know, try to keep yourself clean enough to keep, you know, diseases away when you're living on the street.
It's not great.
So yeah, that's what I would put in the world right now as an ending note.
What do you have to say for yourself, Patrick?
Well, kicking ass is exhausting.
So I've got to find myself some bubblegum.
Yeah, yeah.
Put more things on the list ahead of that.
You know, don't cross them off so easy.
There were a couple, there's another really great line.
Like, so I will say the bubblegum line, by the way, written by Rowdy Roddy Piper himself.
Oh, yeah.
And yeah, he had a notebook of things to say ad hoc when he's doing wrestling stuff.
Like a full notebook full.
And he pulled that one out of there that he'd never used before.
And they threw that in the movie.
But I think this one was not written by him, but I'm going to play it now.
Life's a bitch.
She's back in heat.
Life's a bitch, and she's back in heat.
Yeah.
So, I mean, it does sound like kind of a line that someone like this, this guy might kind of throw out there, which is neat.
But I think that one was written by John Carpenter.
Yeah.
No, that's a good one, too.
Yeah.
So that's They Live.
I do have a couple other scenes that didn't make the cut.
I got no feedback from the last one yet.
So I'm not going to produce any extra material on that unless anyone says that they're interested in what I had to say about Inception.
Additional things I had to say about Inception.
And if you feel like you want to, you know, interested in the extra things I had to say about They Live, you're going to have to ask me for it.
I'm going to dangle that carrot and make you, you know, the horse got to walk forward to get it.
I'd just be really interested to hear like any of those kind of, you know, like our process here discussing it is a kind of percolation that comes out with a type of coffee, but there's got to be something where people are watching it and they're having a thought and we're not speaking that thought.
That's the kind of feedback, the kind of, oh, did you think of it this way or could you see it this way?
That's, that's where I think it would be get, it would get really engaging.
If we missed something, absolutely.
Send that.
Send that in.
Truthunrestrated at gmail.com.
Or if you know me.
Challenge interpretations.
Just contact me on Facebook.
Or if you go to Twitter, Spencer G. Watson at Twitter.
I have only one person blocked.
Very, very few people blocked.
Yeah.
So yeah.
All right.
All right.
We'll talk.
Okay.
Until next time.
See ya.
Whoa, I bet you thought this was over.
Yeah, it's not really over.
We forgot to do a critical thing.
We forgot to mention what movie we're going to do next.
I almost didn't bother to do this because last time I did mention doing Manchurian Candidate and we are definitely going to do Manchurian Candidate.
And I'm going to insist that we I pull scenes from both movies and compare them because that's the way it's going to go.
It's an interesting arc because again, like this one had a short story in the 60s and then it had a movie in the 80s and how the plot points developed.
This has the same, the two movies had the same sort of feature.
So we're going to do those and compare them to each other and look at that.
So Manchurian Candidate.
One of them was made in 1963, two, 62.
Yeah, 62, definitely 1962.
The other one was made in 2004.
So yeah, for anyone who wants to watch those to refresh themselves on the plot of Manchurian Canada, I find almost no one has watched this.
And I actually hadn't watched it until I had to do this.