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“They Live? They Rules!”
– Franke Vogl
This 1983ish movie made in 1988 stars Roddy
Piper as a chillin’ bluecollar bro with a pragmatic
Buddhist temperament who wanders to and fro, trusting in the
good of the Earth and his fellow Man to provide him food,
shelter, and meaningless labor. Which all changes once he,
like Keanu in The Matrix, puts on a pair of sunglasses
and realizes the world is the fakest fucking thing in the
world. Piper’s reaction to this sudden retroactive fictionalizing
of all reality is to become a fiction himself: no longer chillin’,
he talks mad shit to strangers and shoots policemen in their
damn face in a pre-apocalyptic parody of Raw Deal
era Schwarzenegger.[1]
And like The Matrix, Roddy’s war against
non-human enslavement of humans works on multiple analogous
levels: cultural commentary (our greed and passive consumption
is inhuman and evil), spiritual wisdom (“I was blind
but now I see”[2]),
ontological parable (all embodied reality is the Fake to the
void’s Real), and literal truth (the authoritarian agenda
of all capitalist ‘signs’ are transparent if we
simply apply a close, ‘hip’ reading). That Roddy
comes down hard after an extended bout of sunglass-wearing
alludes to both the strain of seeing reality as it really
is as one navigates an asleep world awake (the obverse of
lucid dreaming — lucid waking?) as well as the after-effects
of chemically-induced altered states of consciousness, most
explicitly with everyone’s favorite gateway drug, marijuana
[Roddy: “Wearing these glasses makes you high”].
One could extend this extratextually by pointing out the incongruity
between the ‘socially acceptable’ consumption
of alcohol and the illegality of marijuana use, even though
alcohol, unlike marijuana, is associated with violent crime:
as if what’s illegal, or ‘socially unacceptable’,
is not the disruption of society (alcohol-induced violence)
but the nullification of it, so that, for society to exist,
what must be outlawed are those moments of epiphanal cackling
laughter at the utter horseshit of one’s childhood,
identity, world, and life itself.
Meanwhile the sober among us hold fast to our
Denial lest we be shattered along with it, as Piper’s
buddy Keith David, knowing full well the perceptual power
of the sunglasses, refuses to don them. What follows is a
fight scene between the two protagonists that goes on for
like forever (over 5 mins), the absurd length of which pauses
the movie as it opens up into a nontemporal space of pure
agon, headlocks, piledrivers, and bodyslams, choreographed
no doubt by Rowdy Roddy Piper himself — as if the artifice
of the late great WWF is the only gesture fake enough to break
our Will to Denial and penetrate the Great Fakeness we all
refer to as Real Life. As if one must fight fake with fake
since “all reality is naught, [and] illusions are, in
this world, the only true and substantial things” (Giacomo
Leopardi). Even Roddy’s character’s name, mentioned
in the credits only, is Nada, the nothingness of the Real
that remains unuttered and offscreen as our characters throw
themselves at each other in a misguided conflation of visceral
and Real (cf. Fight Club), the perhaps unavoidable
human fallacy at the heart of even movies that masturbate
to all things virtual (cf. The Matrix, Tron,
The Thirteenth Floor, et al).
In any case, Roddy’s cinemission is not
to obliterate what’s fake but to make the complexity
of what’s fake obvious to the rest of us. This parallels
Carpenter’s choice of hokiness as his preferred tonal
maneuver, an obvious/complicated approach to fake/real that
he shares with the classier yet more crass Cronenberg of eXistenZ.
What’s both problematic and the point of this kind of
tonal maneuver is that it offers the movie up to dismissal
by non-sunglass-wearing Denialfaces such as Richard Harrington
of the Washington
Post or those who think Crash and
other movies of preposterous seriousness are a $10.75 ticket
to tragic profundity, while also, necessarily, offering itself
up as an entertaining shout-out/treatise/inside-joke for the
more tonally initiated. Roddy’s last bit of dialogue
is the irreducible call-to-revolutionary-arms: “Fuck
it,” he says, gunning down the alien signal (thus unveiling
the absurd depravity of our lives) before being gunned down
himself, after which Carpenter ends with our moment of awakening:
fucking the shit out of some nasty alien, our tits bouncing
for an unseen audience until we open our eyes and hear in
response to our self-reflexive horror, “What’s
wrong, baby?”
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[1]
The most quoted and appropriated (by Dazed and Confused
among others) piece of dialogue is “I have come here
to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum”,
though my personal favorite is “You, you’re ok.
This one, real fuckin’ ugly” in reference to two
women at the supermarket.
[2]
Yet those who can ‘see’ wear sunglasses
like the literally blind, the archetype of which irony is
the blind prophet Tiresias. |