Hacker

(12:01)

A rebel “hacker,” professorial in his glasses and white beard, breaks into the television show being enjoyed by the homeless in their outdoor living room, which consists of discarded chairs and an upturned spool for a coffee table. We’ll see him twice, at night and sometime the following day, suggesting that this particular group of indigents rarely budge from the boob tube. “. . . A small group of scientists who discovered, quite by accident, the signals being sent . . . Keep us asleep, keep us selfish, keep us sedated.”

As with the street preacher, the hacker lays out the situation and the stakes plainly, even predicting They Live’s ending: “The signal must be shut off at the source.” Yet his message, larded through with both static interruptions and monotonous political-speak, is tempting to reject as leftist cant (much as high biblical style made the preacher easy to ignore): “They are dismantling the sleeping middle class,” “They have created a repression society, and we are their unwitting accomplices,” etcetera. What the hacker never does is identify the threat: aliens, ghouls, or otherwise. The incantation of the pronoun they conspires with the film’s title, more disturbing in its encompassing vagueness than any monster’s name.

The homeless do reject it, with irritation. Nada, standing by, has started to suspect something. He glances in the direction of the church. There we see the street preacher lipsynching the words of the hacker’s broadcast, even pausing when the signal fails, as though “channeling” this radical feed. The unnerving detail is never explained. Unless we’re fumbling around in the neighborhood of ESP, or choose to believe the street preacher is some sort of robot with a signal receiver in his forebrain, it can’t be explained, except by the suggestion that, as with the blind prophet Tiresias, or Marvel Comics’ Daredevil character, the blind are granted uncanny compensatory powers. Anyway, the cutting from this weird motif back to the fuzzy pirate broadcast, then to the black-and-white Monolith Monsters, creates an eerie montage, full of visual and sonic dislocations—one of They Live’s “art film” moments, for sure.