Note on Names

I’ll call the figures in the film by their character names when describing their actions within the diegesis (which is most of the time), and name the actors only when remarking on their performance, or their life and career outside this film in particular (which is less often). So “Nada” rather than “Roddy Piper” (though both, as it happens, are fictional names), and so forth.

One of They Live’s eccentricities is that we know Nada’s name only because of the end credits. No one speaks it in the course of the film. Yet his name is hardly incidental—Nada’s name, with its implication that he’s something of a zero, or null-set, turns out to come directly from the Ray Nelson short story “Eight O’clock,” They Live’s primary source. Similarly, the irascible homeless man/turncoat called “Drifter” is only granted that nickname by the credits. Most significant, while the film takes (laborious) pains to indicate that the creatures revealed by the sunglasses are aliens—i.e., science-fiction creatures who’ve invaded from another world, by means of advanced technology—the credits dub them ghouls. And they really do look like degenerated humans—like zombies, or decaying corpses, or perhaps corroded humanoid robots or cheapo androids. Don’t they? (This contradiction, this tension, isn’t incidental.) As with Nada’s and Drifter’s names, I’ll take my lead from the credits, and call the things ghouls.