I read Jonathan Lethem’s monograph on They Live last night in order to prep for a screening of said film at
the Revue Cinema on May 29. Here are my favourite bits of insight and
observation:
- “One of They Live’s
eccentricities is that we know Nada’s name only because of the end credits. No
one speaks it in the course of the film. Yet his name is hardly incidental –
Nada’s name, with its implication that he’s something of a zero, or null-set,
turns out to come directly from the Ray Nelson short story ‘Eight O’clock,’ They Live’s primary source.
- “The discourse of commerce is a kind of quicker-picker-upper,
superabsorbent of what happens along, even (or especially) that which presents
itself as oppositional to, or critical of, commercial culture. So, much of
Barbara Kruger’s and Holzer’s impact was gently naturalized within advertising
language. This awkward fact cuts against They
Live’s central assertion: that the distance between the ‘lies’ of commercial-ideological
speech and the coercive ‘truths’ smuggled inside it is an extreme one, and
shattering to cross. Really, the two coexist and even mate with appalling ease
… Kruger and Holzer’s non sequitur interventions briefly attained a gallant
purity, but they’d always needed the gallery or museum context as a quarantine
against recontamination.
- One of the mini-chapters is titled “Vertical City
Inhospitable to Horizontal Man”
- “The film’s scenes of routine ghoul intermixing – the
beauty shop, the bank, the grocery store, leading up to this pedestrian work
environment – have migrated through horror, revulsion, and pointed satire to
achieve a kind of drab inevitability: They Live, sure, and so do They schlep,
file paperwork, get stuck on hold, and work fifty weeks for a two-week
vacation.”
- “Long ago, I used to see Ray Nelson at science-fiction
conventions in Berkeley. He was a droll and bright-eyed elf of a man, and known
for wearing a propeller beanie, regarded as a high talisman of fannish
identification, the equivalent of an IT’S A BLACK THING, YOU WOULDN’T
UNDERSTAND T-shirt. I felt in awe of Nelson’s lingering traces of involvement
with Philip K. Dick, my personal hero, and he, Nelson, always struck me as a
figure of absurd dignity, brandishing his two or three secret accomplishments
through an otherwise invisible life – in Berkeley in the 1980s, he didn’t even
rate as eccentric, he was apparently too mild. I was terrified of becoming this
man.”
