Beware the Growing Evil in
Our Midst
October 29, 2019
“You see them on the street.
You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they’re
people just like you. You’re wrong. Dead wrong.”
We’re living in two worlds,
you and I.
There’s the world we see (or
are made to see) and then there’s the one we sense (and occasionally catch a
glimpse of), the latter of which is a far cry from the propaganda-driven
reality manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors, including
the media.
Indeed, what most Americans
perceive as life in America—privileged, progressive and free—is a far cry from
reality, where economic inequality is growing, real agendas and real power are
buried beneath layers of Orwellian doublespeak and corporate obfuscation, and
“freedom,” such that it is, is meted out in small, legalistic doses by
militarized police armed to the teeth.
All is not as it seems.
This is the premise of John Carpenter’s
film They Live, which was released more than 30 years ago, and remains unnervingly,
chillingly appropriate for our modern age.
Best known for his horror
film Halloween, which assumes that there is a form of evil so dark
that it can’t be killed, Carpenter’s larger body of work is infused with a
strong anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, laconic bent that speaks to the
filmmaker’s concerns about the unraveling of our society, particularly our
government.
Time and again, Carpenter
portrays the government working against its own citizens, a populace out
of touch with reality,
technology run amok, and a future more horrific than any horror film.
In Escape from New
York, Carpenter presents fascism as the future of America.
In The Thing, a
remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic of the same name, Carpenter presupposes that
increasingly we are all becoming dehumanized.
In Christine,
the film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about a demon-possessed car,
technology exhibits a will and consciousness of its own and goes on a murderous
rampage.
In In the Mouth of
Madness, Carpenter notes that evil grows when people lose “the ability to
know the difference between reality and fantasy.”
And then there is
Carpenter’s They Live, in which two migrant workers discover that
the world is not as it seems. In fact, the population is actually being
controlled and exploited by aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic
elite. All the while, the populace—blissfully unaware of the real agenda at
work in their lives—has been lulled into complacency, indoctrinated into
compliance, bombarded with media distractions, and hypnotized by subliminal
messages beamed out of television and various electronic devices, billboards
and the like.
It is only when homeless
drifter John Nada (played to the hilt by the late Roddy
Piper) discovers
a pair of doctored sunglasses—Hoffman lenses—that Nada sees what lies beneath
the elite’s fabricated reality: control and bondage.
When viewed through the lens
of truth, the elite, who appear human until stripped of their disguises, are
shown to be monsters who have enslaved the citizenry in order to prey on them.
Likewise, billboards blare
out hidden, authoritative messages: a bikini-clad woman in one ad is actually ordering
viewers to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” Magazine racks scream “CONSUME” and “OBEY.” A
wad of dollar bills in a vendor’s hand proclaims, “THIS IS YOUR GOD.”
When viewed through Nada’s
Hoffman lenses, some of the other hidden messages being drummed into the
people’s subconscious include: NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, CONFORM, SUBMIT, STAY
ASLEEP, BUY, WATCH TV, NO IMAGINATION, and DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY.
This indoctrination campaign
engineered by the elite in They Live is painfully familiar to
anyone who has studied the decline of American culture.
