They Live

Amazingly, given my mom's taste in schlock, I never saw a John Carpenter movie until I went to college. My friend Randall opened my mind in short order. I think the first Carpenter movie we watched was The Thing, though I know we screened most of his (good) oeuvre in short order - and that brilliant movie remains one of my favorites to this day.

Carpenter movies fall into three distinct categories: the simple and assuredly brilliant (The Thing, Assault on Precinct 13, Escape From New York), the terrible but still enjoyable (Village of the Damned, Prince of Darkness, Ghosts of Mars), and the unwatchable (Vampires). 

And, of course, there's They Live. It was sandwiched somewhere in my Carpenter crash course, maybe between Big Trouble in Little China and the terribly unfortunate Vampires. It's an impossibly simple premise - a man finds out that aliens are infiltrating earth, gets a big shotgun, and blows them away until he gets blown away. The burn is almost too slow - a dialogue-less into that leads into at least half an hour of inaction before any actual plot progression. And the star is a pro wrestler - "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, about as good an actor as you'd expect. 

But it all works. What you get is a tonal, atmospheric world, inhabited by the downtrodden but warmhearted, oppressed by the moneygrubs in power. Piper, a strong, silent loner (perhaps strategically silent, to capitalize on Piper's strengths?) is a classic reluctant hero - repeatedly selfish, stubborn, and crude, he is forced by circumstance to save the world and sacrifice his life. He's called Nada - literally nothing - a nobody.

Three good scenes and no bad scenes. Howard Hawks's criteria for a great movie. 

They Live's great scenes:

1. The scene when he first wears the glasses.

One thing that makes this scene great is the revelation that aliens have infiltrated the earth, and the way in which they've done it. Every billboard, advertisement, newspaper, and $20 bill is revealed to be a piece of subliminal messaging, encouraging us to OBEY, SUBMIT, CONSUME. It's a condemnation of consumer culture and an amazing, unforgettable visual feat. The aliens themselves are revealed, under their perfect perms and designer suits, to be glowing, rotting corpses.

Then there's Roddy Piper's performance. He plays the disbelief, the horror, and the humor of the scene perfectly. The simplicity of the sunglasses is perfect - they're never really explained because they don't have to be.

2. The scene at the bank.

Nada has a good heart, but he's kinda dumb. That's why, when he finds out aliens have taken over Earth, he figures the best thing to do is take a shotgun downtown and start blowing them away. It all boils down to one line: "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum."

3. The fight scene.

What was scripted as a 20-second dustup as Nada forces the glasses onto the disbelieving Frank turned into a FIVE MINUTE AND 20 SECOND brutal beating as the two of them smashed car windshields, kicked each other's knees, and practically killed each other. Supposedly, Keith David and Piper choreographed the fight on their own and Carpenter was so impressed that he kept the whole thing. It's a piece of beautiful absurdity and brutality, laced with bits of strange realism - at one point when Nada smashes Frank's car window, he apologizes, horrified, before continuing to beat him up. At another point he bursts out laughing. It's one of the best fights in film history.

Honorable mention: Holly beats Nada.

Nada, on the run from the law/aliens, kidnaps a woman, Holly (Meg Foster, owner of terrifyingly pale eyes). He forces his way into her car and then her apartment. She is terrified, but you sense that she is also intrigued by his story. You sense her warming to him, and you can see where it's going - he's going to win her to his side, she's going to help him, they're going to have a romance.

Then - nope. He stands in the wrong place, and she shoves him through a plate glass window. He falls halfway down a mountain. We don't see her again until she reappears on her own terms. It's a delightful genre-tipping moment, and illustrates one of the things that make Carpenter movies, to me, stand out from all the other small-group, survival-situation movies out there: By and large, Carpenter characters make smart, or at least understandable, decisions. They do what they would do in real life, instead of contorting in strange ways to make the plot work. Sure, some characters do stupid things - see Nada shooting up the bank in broad daylight, or Jack Burton doing any of the things Jack Burton does in Big Trouble in Little China. They do dumb things because they're dumb, though. Not because the plot requires them to be dumb just for a minute. The characters in John Carpenter movies feel like real people.

Roddy Piper, you will be missed. You'll never run out of bubblegum in heaven.