Note on Approach II

A Netflix copy of They Live plays behind these words as I type. Not on a television screen in the same room, but on the computer screen, on which my document also appears. Thanks to contemporary technology—not just DVDs, but YouTube excerpts, available via the wireless signal in the café where I write sometimes, if I’ve forgotten to bring the disk—I’m Pauline Kael’s ultimate opposite here: I’ve watched the entirety of my subject film a dozen times at least, and many individual scenes countless times more (Kael used to brag of seeing each film only once). This situation isn’t normal in the history of film studies (unless it’s “the new normal,” which it probably is): even if Robin Wood or Tag Gallagher resorted to owning a 16-millimeter print or a VHS tape of their Hitchcock or Rossellini subjects, they’d have worn holes in those artifacts and perhaps also destroyed their projection devices with the kind of obsessive close viewing I can do simply at the click of a cursor.

They Live, known generally as a “cult” film, lends itself to obsession. Howlingly blatant and obvious on many levels—some might ask, How many levels do you really think there are?—it grows marvelously slippery and paradoxical at its depths. Some days I hate the thing, for a while it bored me completely. But it came back, too. I watched They Live with friends, letting it do its work on new victims—that was one way to refresh myself. Needless to say, I began spotting details no one would register at a first viewing. In fact, I began spotting details few would register at a fifth viewing, or a tenth, such as the fact that the homeless blond “man-boy” Nada rescues at 27:15 is the same person from whom he borrows binoculars at 20:50. Maybe John Carpenter knew that once, but I bet he’s forgotten it.

Watch something enough times and all you see are the holes, much like a word whose meaning dissolves because you’ve said it aloud too many times in a row. I’ll spend a lot of pages describing what’s oblique or paradoxical or simply contradictory in They Live’s material, not in order to expose the film, but because those gaps are usually also closely related to its richest provocations, its vibrant ambiguities; it wouldn’t be wrong to say that its gaps are also zones of pregnancy, the places where the film is hatching what I think is most worth wondering over. According to the concept of “suture,” every movie (short of single-take exceptions like Russian Ark) consists of papered-over gaps, in which the language of narrative film stitches together unrelated elements—shots, but also meanings—to present the illusion of unity. Out of holes, a whole.

I’m rambling, but the point I want to make here is that I genuinely like They Live (which has nothing to do, of course, with ascribing every virtue, or for that matter every defect, I locate within it to some absolute agency on the part of its maker or makers). I’m sure I’ll watch it again, even after this vigil is concluded. If we meet up, I’ll watch it with you. In the meantime, I think you’ll have fun with this book—or, hey, without this book—if you watch They Live yourself.