This Deep Focus series seems like it wants to be a movie counterpart to the ubiquitous 33&1/3 series of expert treatises on albums from the hipster canon, although maybe, hopefully, in a less Pitchfork-y Serious Person type critical register. Jonathan Lethem’s monograph (and it is a monograph) on John Carpenter’s legendary paranoid dystopian b-movie about a crypto-alien conspiracy beneath the tawdry wrapping of Reagan-era consumer capitalism, is structured like a DVD commentary, with Lethem sketching the action sequence by sequence and riffing on what comes up for him. That’s the effect anyway… by the time you are done, you have read about everything from Roland Barthes on the poetics of professional wrestling, to race relations in America, to the controversial poster art of Shepard Fairey. Interestingly, the major piece of scholarly type writing on They Live apparently comes from Slavoj Zizek, whom Lethem takes up as an interlocutor at times. For my money, Lethem’s is always a mind combusting with ideas!--he says about 10 astounding things on every page. And he is a passionate student of They Live. On the epistemic situation the movie sets up with the cheap sunglasses (“Hoffman lenses”) that allow Rowdy Roddy Piper to see the ghoulish yuppie overlords as they really are, and which he has acquired in a homeless encampment cum clandestine revolutionary headquarters, Lethem generalizes thusly: “Delusion is effortless, routine and stable, while the ‘truth’, acquired in some disreputable street transaction, is grueling, bewildering, and grotesque.” This is surely the best single sentence characterization of They Live’s schlocky genius ever written! Must read. An awesome reading (slash analysis) of one of my favorite genre and/or cult films. Haven't seen this movie in about a year, but really rank the film high up there and this book brought back many good memories. Also one of the best overt attacks on the establishment I've ever seen in cinema; and a film that effortlessly and recklessly switches tones and genres every few minutes. The movie: 5 stars. The book: 4 stars. The smartest thing about the book: it's use of quotations from both literature and literary criticism to accentuate the themes Lethem reads in this film. For fun, a list of other favorite cult-genre films (though none of these satisfy my political angst in the same way, they are all pretty amazing): True Stories, Repo Man, Kiss Me Deadly, Point Break, Zero Effect, Schizopolis, Brazil, Lost Highway if it counts. :)
What do You think about They Live (2010)?
I'd say, skip the movie: reading Lethem's criticism is a better use of 90 or so minutes.
—rina
A fun, intellectual look at a fun, silly movie.
—Ibby
