Put on the Glasses (Editorial, NYRSF 323)

We didn’t quite hit our end-of-month deadline this time around, but as promised we came a lot closer. Slightly better organization on my part would have made all the difference. Next time for sure! [Falls out of window, landing on improbably convenient couch. Couch explodes.]

One of the effects of the issue being so late is that I get to write about the death of Rowdy Roddy Piper. Or, more precisely, to take the occasion of his death to remind people about what a wonderful film They Live is.

In 1988, Phil Dick was only barely starting to become the cottage industry he is today, and it’s fitting that the earliest film to really capture his sensibility was not based on one of his own stories, but on one by his friend and collaborator Ray Nelson. It’s a simple narrative about a rootless drifter who discovers both the conspiracy that rules the world and a counterconspiracy to liberate it, which follows common horror and burly action storytelling lines but is carried past them by the sheer power of the revelation of the nature and extent of the conspiracy. The pivotal scene, of John Nada (Piper) putting on a pair of sciento-magical Ray-Bans and seeing the world stripped of all color and artifice, is perfect from the simplicity of the message to the visual impact of plain black letters in a monochrome world that we all understand is more real than reality. How viscerally terrifying it is to have all of your worst fears about the world set in front of you in simple black and white. OBEY. CONSUME.

(Although Nada’s first experience with the sunglasses is a pure distillation of Dick’s most disillusioned and paranoid impulses, it is not actually the most Dickian moment in film. That honor goes to the best scene in the deeply mixed bag that is Total Recall [the 1990 version]: the confrontation with the psychiatrist in the hotel room. Impeccable.)

Piper inhabited his role well. His sheer physicality and personal charm filled the screen and he blended violence and compassion to make his hero both effective and necessary.

It is possible to overstate the emotional impact of They Live. As I said, the film falls into familiar ruts, and it’s hard to defend the extended fistfight between Piper and Keith David, even though the following scene does an excellent job of tying the fight back to the larger themes of the film. But a major film studio released, at the height of the Reagan Revolution, a science fiction thriller about how American capitalism is a con game in which we are all the stooges, and it was exhilarating.

One of the topics I return to is that science fiction doesn’t actually have to make sense to help make sense of the world. They Live is built on handwaves, bogonite, and explosions. But together they work: They speak, they teach. They live.

—Kevin J. Maroney
and the editors