Assorted Hoffmen

Some commentators on They Live credit “Hoffman lenses” as a reference to the accidental discoverer of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann. This makes an appealingly hip reference to matters of delusion and revelatory insight—the sunglasses as a kind of “windowpane” into reality, including a twist: What if hallucinations, once induced, revealed the fact that ordinary consciousness was itself a mass hallucination?

There’s another pretty fun candidate: Abbie Hoffman, subversive yippie jester and fugitive, and a paragon of “us versus them” political stances. Among Hoffman’s legacies is his terrific 1967 stunt in which he hurled paper currency from the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange onto the trading floor, interrupting the smooth operation of money-grubbing with an outburst of money-grabbing. What was this if not an attempt, very much in the spirit of They Live, to expose the dollar’s E Pluribus Unum motto as This Is Your God?

I’d rather end my report there, but according to the website Realnews247.com, They Live’s sunglasses were named in honor of the holocaust denier Michael Hoffman II. Brief lesson for paranoiacs: setting your open-ended conspiracy metaphors loose upon the world, they become (like anything) eligible for manifold repurposing. Free your mind and an ass may follow.

Hoffman lenses have become one of They Live’s free-floating signifiers, a talismanic high sign to be flashed by admirers. The term was taken for their name by a Canadian reggae band, and inspired the punk band Set Your Goals’s “With Hoffman Lenses We Will See the Truth.” Replica Hoffman lenses were also, as recently as 2007, available from the merchandise page of Roddy Piper’s personal website, though last I checked the link was dead, the page removed. Someone doesn’t want you to get your hands on these!