They influence our decisions without us knowing it. They numb our senses without us feeling it. They control our lives without us realizing it. They live.
EN
“They Live was a movie I made towards the end of the 80s, and I was reflecting on a lot of the values that I saw around me at the time, mainly inspired by Ronald Reagan's conservative revolution. There was a great deal of obsession with greed and making a lot of money, and some of the values that I grew up with had been pushed aside. So I decided to scream out in the middle of the night and make a statement about that. And They Live is partially a political statement, it's partially a tract on the world that we live in today. And as a matter of fact, right now it's even more true than it was then. We are manipulated by a lot of media around us. We are consumed by consumerism. And as you can see in the recent events in this country, they are still among us. They do live, indeed. The 80s never ended. The regular revolution never ended. Although there is now a pull towards the left. I admit that. The right is, in this country, the right is confused and lost. But they may win. They may win and what they want to do is beyond Reagan. ... And it's really unrestrained capitalism that I'm criticizing. I'm a capitalist. I love capitalism. I love making money. But unrestrained capitalism leads to depressions. It leads to the recession that we had. So the 80s never ended. They're still here. They're still on Earth exploiting us. ... It's still with us.They Live is a documentary about what's going on now.”
John Carpenter1
"We live, so we are told, in a post-ideological society. We are interpolated, that is to say, addressed by social authority not as subjects who should do their duty, sacrifice themselves, but subjects of pleasures. Realise your true potential. Be yourself. Lead a satisfying life. When you put the glasses on you see dictatorship in democracy. It's the invisible order, which sustains your apparent freedom. The explanation for the existence of these strange ideology glasses is the stand-up story of the invasion of the body snatchers. Humanity is already under the control of aliens. [...]
According to our common sense, we think that ideology is something blurring, confusing our straight view. Ideology should be glasses, which distort our view, and the critique of ideology should be the opposite like you take off the glasses so that you can finally see the way things really are. This precisely and here, the pessimism of the film, of They Live, is well justified, this precisely is the ultimate illusion: ideology is not simply imposed on ourselves. Ideology is our spontaneous relation to our social world, how we perceive each meaning and so on and so on. We, in a way, enjoy our ideology."
Slavoj Žižek in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes, 2012)
- 1“They Live in John Carpenter's Own Words,” YouTube, 6 June 2016.
FR
« They Live : ils vivent, nous dormons. La terre est-elle condamnée à être colonisée par des extraterrestres acquis à la cause capitaliste ? À l’inverse de la plupart des œuvres de John Carpenter (où le doute et le pessimisme demeurent quant à la victoire des forces de la raison et de la justice), They Live met en scène la riposte des pauvres et de la masse laborieuse contre l’envahisseur capitaliste, réactivant le thème de la lutte des classes. Le film reprend à son compte l’un des récits les plus puissants du cinéma américain classique, fondé sur la valorisation du héros ordinaire et solitaire : celui qui s’éveille par lui-même et veille sur le monde, en quête de vérité et de justice3, et qui, par sa détermination, réussit à démasquer les mensonges des puissants. On peut ici penser à The Grapes of Wrath de John Steinbeck – adapté au cinéma par John Ford en 1940 – qui décrit l’exil des fermiers contraints de quitter leurs terres après la Grande Dépression et des tempêtes dévastatrices. Expulsée par les grands propriétaires et les banquiers, la famille de Tom Joad part en Californie et apprend à reconstruire, au fil de ses rencontres et de ses passages dans des campements et bidonvilles, un modèle de communauté fondé sur la solidarité et la résistance. Ce qui est en jeu, dans They Live, c’est le retour à la vérité du réel dont les hommes sont constamment tenus éloignés, tenus en lisière, par les faux-semblants d’une réalité habilement « managée ». La dimension citationnelle du cinéma de John Carpenter nous aide ainsi à comprendre le recours au noir et blanc dans le film : parce que celui-ci, justement, appartient « au cinéma d’hier qui éclaire d’un jour nouveau le visage absolument inhumain de l’Amérique de cette fin des années 1980. »
Alice Laguarda1
- 1Alice Laguarda, « L’Internationale hallucinée. À propos de They Live de John Carpenter », Trafic 89, mars 2014.
