John Carpenter’s ‘They Live’ was supposed to be a warning
theringer.com
theringer.com
It's a pretty corny movie, but it's quite good.
And regarding warnings, I can't help but feel Idiocracy is also one we're not paying attention to.
[0] I own a t-shirt with futurama's hypnotoad, and I love it
Shepard often cites They Live as inspiration for his art, with his Andre the Giant Has A Posse campaign starting in 1989.
As an aside - one of my favorite works of his is Greetings From Iraq[0], from 2005. It satirizes a classic Yellowstone National Park postcard from the 1930s[1], in a criticism of the Iraq War.
[0]https://www.icaboston.org/sites/default/files/styles/origina...
[1]https://www.discovernw.org/mm5/graphics/00000001/DYNW_PLU106...
In particular I found the ~15 minute one-on-one fight scene to be tedious after five minutes, and the pacing seemed really uneven, like it felt like they really took their time for the first hour, and then tried to shove all the rest of the plot into the last thirty minutes.
Clever idea and some great imagery with the messages, though. I'm glad I saw it for that.
Max Headroom and Brazil were a couple of other 80's scifi films which were uncannily prescient.
The article is also weak. They Live works because it's so stripped down, almost a fable. But as a serious look at modernity, there's not much there. The idea that "the rich are aliens" is creepy. It mainly serves to make their murder morally permissible.
Most definitely and I think he'd agree.
> There's not a lot of substance in his many (is he at 100 yet?) books.
Which books specifically of his are you speaking about?
> It's ironic that someone who rails against capitalism publishes at such a frenetic rate while covering the same ground.
He himself has said that he makes a good slave, he just needs to know who his master is.
How many of his ~70 books am I required to read before forming an opinion? I've read one and a half, the one being one of his "philosophical" books and the half being a more accessible political one. I'm confident that no one who has anyhting to say writes like that.
Give me Chomsky, give me Butler, give me Rorty. I don't have to agree to appreciate a thinker but I have to be convinced there's thinking going on.
> He himself has said that he makes a good slave, he just needs to know who his master is.
This clowning bullshit is a good reason not to take him seriously. Bad jokes are perhaps Zizek's greatest sin. I can forgive anyone almost anything if they're funny. But no, it's dud after dud.
I like to follow the rule that I only talk about things which I know about. I think it's a pretty good rule. So I personally wouldn't talk about an entire person's collection from such a limited introduction because it would feel a tad bit hasty to me. Instead, I would talk about the works that I had read--this might prove difficult if you can't recall the names.
> This clowning bullshit is a good reason not to take him seriously.
It's a dad-joke that he told at a talk. Heaven forbid the man try and add some levity to situations.
> It's a dad-joke that he told at a talk. Heaven forbid the man try and add some levity to situations.
It's not funny. Anyway, like I said, it's a performance. The fact that you (and he) would agree with that judgement doesn't make it any less damning. I watched part of a lecture he did on youtube. Absolutely unwatchable. If he has a point he's unable to communicate it. But the real point is mystifying the audience, creating the impression that they're witnessing a genius thinking out loud, and the terrible jokes don't help.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHP1OwivAL0 if anyone is "interested". Notice Avital Ronell (sex offender and NYU professor) introducing him. It's bizarre how Zizek bullies her through the starting of the lecture while playing it off as a joke between friends.
You can do whatever you want. But commenting on the entire bibliography when you have read less than 2.5% of it seems premature. Just say that everything you've read of him lacks substance rather than everything he wrote?
By all means, form an opinion that the man and his book and a half that you went through aren't for you, but I just think it's deeply anti-intellectual to discredit the entire collection of work he's put out. You're discrediting books that you likely don't have the requisite knowledge to review which is the problem that I take with it.
> The fact that you (and he) would agree with that judgement doesn't make it any less damning.
What's damning about it? I really don't get this part.
Or read John Gray on Zizek: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/07/12/violent-visions-...
It's not like these critiques are uncommon or hard to find.
What I find more "curious" is the backlash you get for criticizing Zizek. Somehow I don't think I'd get any backlash for forming a positive opinion after reading only "2.5% of his books" but apparently it's "anti-intellectual" to form a negative one.
When he engages the public, or whatever you find on youtube which is what I suspect you've seen of him based on your impression, he does indeed joke around a lot. But this has to do with his inherent distaste for 'preaching'. He's no fan of climbing on a pedestal and pretending to speak from a position of authority, he's said himself he's always considered that authoritarian.
Well respected by some and not others. Lacan as a philosopher has boosters and detractors...much like Zizek (and every other philosopher). I'm with the detractors.
I've read 1.5 of his books (not the one you mentioned) and I tried to watch an academic lecture on youtube. I've read various secondary sources (which are mostly highly critical and I found convincing).
Your argument comes down to "anyone who doesn't think highly of Zizek is dumb/hasn't read him/doesn't understand him". It's so low effort.
> When he engages the public, or whatever you find on youtube which is what I suspect you've seen of him based on your impression, he does indeed joke around a lot. But this has to do with his inherent distaste for 'preaching'.
I have no problem with intellectuals making jokes. Zizek isn't funny.
> But this has to do with his inherent distaste for 'preaching'. He's no fan of climbing on a pedestal and pretending to speak from a position of authority, he's said himself he's always considered that authoritarian.
Most people who "don't like to preach" end up, you know, not preaching.
One hopes you can muster this ardent sympathy for the millions of people killed in wars that the rich started and by healthcare deficiencies that the rich have arranged over the last several decades.
Rich people are, in fact, human. They are drawn from the general population.
That the proletariat must rise up and overthrow the bourgeois
Marx's argument is "structural". The contradictions of a capitalist economy and society are the problem. The bourgeois are a symptom of that, not the cause. Killing all the bourgeois wouldn't solve the problem in itself, a radical restructuring of society is required.
It ain't poor people buying politicians, starting wars and pushing propaganda though the media.
I love it but then again I am a borderline paranoid old fart
There are people who say "2001: A Space Odyssey" is unwatchable because it has low pace. They just don't have patience to watch a movie like that and they take out their phone to do something during the scene.
There's no easy way to encourage receptivity. The best thing you can do is to just be accessible when it happens and be ready to discuss.
- The all-macho, no-internal-monologue protagonist is really dull and dated. The one liners are lame, most of his problems are solved via fist or gun. The kind of unaware character parodied by Duke Nukem.
- The concept of waking up and seeing through lies of the media is banal, and now associated with teenagers and stoners. Everyone knows that advertising and the news are run by agendas.
- The media has changed. When we think of someone being brainwashed by the media we think of the all-encompassing internet, not billboards and newspapers. A billboard being revealed to say CONSUME and OBEY has the subtlety of an overly-labelled-political-comic. The specific imagery has been appropriated by fashion brands, advertisers, and artists like Banksy endlessly. I remember OBEY sweatshirts and hats being everywhere in middle school.
- The specific plot, 'a guy discovers the media is run by a conspiracy of aliens so he teams up with a friend to shoot up a tv station', is today more reminiscent of a number of mass shootings and anti-semitic conspiracies than anti-capitalist revolution.
I have friends that like the movie for what it is, but I wouldn't expect the average young person to be enamored with it without a lot of historical context (yuppies, Reaganism, the role of the red scare in classic sci-fi, Edward Bernays, analog synthesizers, etc).
I really want to emphasise this point. The reason They Live might not resonate with younger audiences is they've already internalised its message. Ironically, mass culture has been the greatest disseminator of the ideas the film has about mass culture.
In the end, I felt this way about cowboy movies because I couldn't relate to the time/age depicted. It felt like a long long time ago that I didn't understand or want to. I believe today's kids feel the same way. No smartphone? No computers? Ancient tube TVs? People meeting up and talking instead of using discord or whatever? I can see why today's kids just don't enjoy the movies of 30+ years ago. The time presented in the movies is completely foreign to them despite it being no so long ago but in reality, culturally, it was long ago.
So, it's important not to fear the actual deficiencies in democracy and self-rule that majorities of people in many nations recognize, but it's totally rational to fear the fear of those actual problems. "Meta-narrative", indeed.
> self-ruleThe central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
I have fond memories of playing Duke Nukem 3D modem to modem and hearing him say those words.
⇐ Thoreau (Walden)
Except that in They Live ideology is imposed by the aliens.
"In the movie's most notorious scene, Nada tries to impose this truth on another person, brawling with Armitage for several minutes in order to force him to put on the glasses. This endless fight scene, possibly the longest in cinema history, is a metaphor for the struggle to achieve enlightenment. "To step out of ideology ... you must force yourself to do it," Zizek concludes. "Freedom hurts.""
But Piper's character didn't have to force himself to put on the glasses. There was no struggle and it didn't hurt.
Zizek is amusing and I agree with many of his left-wing sentiments, but a lot of what he says is pure bullshit, concocted to sound profound with zero substance to it if you think about it for half a second.
He thinks that ideology is good so for him the glasses are ideology, not the cut-through-ideology tool.
But Piper's character didn't have to force himself to put on the glasses. There was no struggle and it didn't hurt.
Using the glasses did cause headaches, but in the real world it's just the same. Once you rebel against bullshit your life becomes very uncomfortable real soon.
But he's deluded. Regardless of his beliefs, the aliens have in fact imposed an illusion (or "ideology" in Zizek jargon) on him, and the glasses do in fact let you see through that (as he himself does later). He can think whatever he wants, but that doesn't change these facts.
"Once you rebel against bullshit your life becomes very uncomfortable real soon."
So, contrary to Zizek's contention, it's not his "enlightenment" that causes problems, but his trying to fight against those with power. A lesser man might have thrown away the glasses after seeing the truth, or perhaps consciously and deliberately started cooperating with the aliens, as various traitor characters did in The Matrix and V, for example.
He has nothing to lose, for everybody else:
I'm more interested in what the movie tells me than in the message the author was trying to convey. If you look at it from the rulers perspective, it will depende on whichever the rulers are. I prefer to look from the perspective of the individual and how propaganda and the need to conform affects my ideas, conscience and behaviour.
Zizek does it too, but he is entertainer-philosopher. Some of his readers take him too seriously too.
I like Zizek, but you should not try to value him as a analytic philosopher who thinks things carefully trough. He has the ability to take unique and insightful viewpoints.
If that's not enough, the buffet also includes the tired trope of associating right wingers with anti-semitism. Somehow Trump is mixed into the smorgasbord.
There's some irony in him missing the broader point of the film while arriving at a conclusion about ideological blinders.
Hehe. I think you’ve got it backwards.
You have Rowdy Roddy lined up to do a film. You come up with a campy corny idea of him fighting about sunglasses.
After that, you come up with some off-the-shelf ‘theme’ to sugar coat the campiness.
Real honestly, I would have watched 2 hours of that sunglass fight. That WAS the movie. Best damn fight ever. Wish it had lasted two hours.