Employment Agency

(3:05)

They Live’s first official scene puts Nada at the desk of a dourly sarcastic employment counselor. He’s there just long enough to sketch his sketchy backstory (ten years working in Denver, then “things just seemed to dry up . . .”) before being dismissed: “There’s nothing available for you right now.” Adding to the efficiency of the one-minute scene’s portrait of no-trickle-down economic times, a droning announcement comes over the loudspeakers: “Due to a computer error, the food stamp program has been suspended until further notice . . .” A one-legged man in a wheelchair—A veteran? we might wonder, though he lacks the ironic military uniform and Willie Nelson beard-and-ponytail of the prototypical embittered Vietnam vet—shakes his head grimly as he exits, exasperated at some slight he’s endured therein. Employment agencies usually turn up in films where matters of work will remain central—Straight Time, Lost in America. Nada, however, solves his job problem within three more minutes of screen time, adding to our impression that his self-reliance sets him apart from the crowd. This scene is, like the homeless people, meant to set political context, rather than to describe where this particular protagonist is coming from or bound.

Watching the film a second time, a viewer begins to wonder which other characters would have been unmasked as ghouls had Nada worn the sunglasses from the start. The employment counselor makes an interesting first candidate. She’s both distinctly shriveled and heavily coiffed and made-up. These, together with her skeptical, almost sneering response to Nada’s remark about banks closing, evoke the ghoul-in-furs Nada will meet at the grocery store. As we’ll see, older female ghouls evoke such a degree of revulsion from Nada that it borders on ghoul misogyny. Yet she’s more likely just a sarcastic and un-savory crone—such people do exist, after all. Take it as a small first vote in favor of the view that we earth folk were capable of being unappealingly lousy (or, unappealing and lousy) to one another well before any alien intervention.