First release home video
Our first task is to enable people to stop identifying with their surroundings and with model patterns of behaviour.1
Imagine a film: screenplay by Guy Debord and Steve Martin, directed by George Romero circa 1977. Ridiculous. Hilarious. Astounding. Riveting. Inspiring. And downright patently weird. A film which is simultaneously entertaining in its showmanship and challenging and stimulating in its renunciation of accepted modes of filmmaking. Of course, such a film will never be made.
But somebody made a mistake. The film did get made, not by the luminaries listed above but by John Carpenter, who has in the past excelled as a maker of entertaining and accomplished films, but films which have consistently denied themselves a socio-political consciousness. Films which often constructed "good" and "evil" in a supernatural way without seeking to contextualize these terms materially - always technically proficient but lacking any real sense of enquiry or analysis.
But John Carpenter has radically altered his approach to film making since he said “... Movies are not intellectual, they are not ideas ...”.2 His most recent work still grips your knotted intestines in the ball of ~s fist and tries to drag you over the edge of your seat, but ~s a whole lot more than some spectacular hyper-adrenalin rush. They Live resumes the situationist project in its revolutionary intervention into a cultural sphere more readily typified by affirmation of the dominant values of our society.
At a time when you feel like defenestrating the next academic elitist foolhardy to mention "postmodernism", here it is, the human face of conspiracy theory! Los Angeles. Sometime in the future(?). Everyone conditioned into a state of complacent passivity by rituals of