In this edition of Horror Madness we look at two satires in which paranoia is the only rational response, as they really are out to get you.
John Carpenter’s They Live stands in one corner
While Larry Cohen’s The Stuff occupies the other:
See the introduction and full slate here: http://oftenveryvile.ghost.io/introducing-horror-movie-madness/.
The most important thing to remember about conspiracy theories and how they work is that they are optimistic. Regardless of ideology (though some ideologies can push you harder towards them), people who develop and hold to conspiracy theories can never be accused of not caring. They care a lot. They believe, maybe instinctively, that the world is supposed to make sense, and that things happen for a reason. The people in charge, according to these theories, aren’t concerned with our welfare but they are concerned with us. We are at the center of whatever it is they are doing, just not for the reasons they say. Much more threatening, to conspiracists, is the idea that there’s no plan, that those in power aren’t thinking about us at all, that what’s happening has no purpose and no point.
These two films are ones in which conspiracies are real. In each, there is a big lie, one that powerful interests are telling to consolidate their power. Each of these powerful interests are actually aliens who have secretly invaded earth and want to destroy or rule humanity. In one case, there is a secret, true world underneath our own that we only need the correct tool to see. The monsters are right in front of us, and every piece of media we see is designed to keep us pacified and complacent. In the other case, the new food we eat that makes us feel really good is actually poisoning and changing us in ways we wouldn’t like if we knew. The food is itself an alien that wants to take over our bodies and turn them into hosts for itself before leaving us for dead.
All of this is to say that I love these movies a lot, and I think they make a lot of clever observations about the way we live, but they’ve both got a vibe that can very easily curdle into something very ugly. I’m worried that these movies, if they could talk to us today, would say that maybe RFK Jr. has some valid points to make. I’m worried that these movies have opinions on vaccines and seed oils.
The Live and The Stuff are both very smart, well made movies that if you pushed just a little could have been very dumb, which is impressive, but that means they can still be overinterpreted by pretty dumb people in dumb ways. That’s not the fault of either film, exactly; there are always going to be dummies out there. There are people who find Goodfellas aspirational, after all. But watching these films while seeing the ways that cranks have become ascendant in our politics can be a little uncomfortable.
They Live is a left-wing film; it was created out of Carpenter’s rage at Reaganism and the ways mainstream culture effectively gaslit people into seeing Reagan’s policies as normal. Media in the 80s was focused on celebrating acquisition and consumerism while the bottom was falling out for the most vulnerable people in America. The film says, explicitly: you’re not crazy. You’re seeing what’s true: they’re lying to you, all of them. Everyone who says everything ok isn’t just wrong, they’re lying. They’re not even human. Your life isn’t bad because you’re a failure, but because those at the top need you to stay at the bottom. It’s incredibly satisfying that when Nada, the hero of They Live, puts on the glasses and sees the truth, he wastes very little time before starting to fight. He doesn’t ever question the truth he uncovers, because it isn’t surprising: it makes everything else make sense.
Roddy Piper, who played Nada, thinks this is a movie about Jews. He is not the only person he thinks this. He is wrong, and John Carpenter is rightly pretty pissed off about this interpretation, but there it is. Antisemitism has been called the socialism of fools, and there are unfortunately a lot of fools out there.
The Stuff is about how Americans eat a lot of crap. We all know this. One of the cleverest touches is that the titular “Stuff” is marketed to people as something like a miracle health food: calorie and guilt free. Its opponents aren’t anybody sympathetic but instead junk food CEOs who are angry that the Stuff is pushing them out of business. It’s a miracle that I think Americans desperately want to believe in; we want to believe that there exists out there something we can consume endlessly with no consequences; that there’s one weird trick to healthy living without any restrictions. Just eat this one thing, just cut out this one thing, just do this one thing, and you’re good to go. It’s alarmingly plausible, the way people in the film just start eating and selling and buying the Stuff despite having no idea what it is or where it comes from.
There’s been reporting recently on how commonly used protein powders contain shockingly high levels of lead; supplements fall into a gray area where they aren’t inspected like medicine and they aren’t inspected like food either, so they aren’t really inspected at all. We’d like to think that if something is for sale, it’s been confirmed as safe. Usually that’s more or less true, but not always. We can all see that Americans aren’t particularly healthy, and that probably has a lot to do with our diets. It’s difficult to deal with the tangle of genetics and environment that lead to this; we evolved for conditions of scarcity, so our bodies can’t easily handle the abundance we have now. We want it to be somebody’s fault; it’s not that we eat too much, it’s that we eat things that are poison, and the people who sell it know it’s poison, and they want us to eat it to make us weak.
This is a popular position in the online right, now: that we are being deliberately made weaker with seed oils and soy and processed “slop” and you know who’s behind it. Like carcinization, the process by which unrelated lifeforms eventually evolve into crabs, most conspiracy theories eventually converge into antisemitism. All rivers make it to the sea. Like I said, socialism of fools. Lot of fools out there.
These films are both good. They’re both funnier than they are scary, and that’s on purpose. Even the moments of violence and horror are played for laughs. They Live in particular features a fight scene that has become legendary for its absurdity – you know the one if you’ve seen it. The Stuff has a junkier aesthetic; it feels more old fashioned, like an exploitation film. They Live is, like all Carpenter films, beautiful and deliberately composed. It’s more sophisticated. It’s also angrier; The Stuff has a kind of knowing, ironic smirk to it, like it was made by people poking fun at themselves as much as anybody else. It was made by people who would probably acknowledge that they would eat the Stuff too. They Live is clearer that whatever is happening, it’s being done to us, we’re not doing it to ourselves.
They Live wins it.