The Next Six (or Eight, or Ten) Minutes of Film

Desert island time: Carpenter’s The Thing is his masterpiece, and I can easily think of two dozen directors I personally hold above Carpenter. But, given the imperative to preserve just a dozen sequences from film history in a time capsule, the rest to evaporate from human memory, I might pick the next six, or eight, or ten minutes of They Live. I’d pick them to stand for the eighties, and for the minor tradition of the “self-conscious B-movie,” and for that side of science-fiction cinema devoted to what the critic Darko Suvin calls “cognitive estrangement” (as opposed to wish fulfillment, thrills, action, techno-lust, or horror). And I’d pick them out of affection. This, for me, is They Live’s hard, chewy, delicious center. If I had the powers, I’d slow these minutes down and expand them, somehow, into a world in which to linger and explore like an interactive DVD or video game—flipping through more of the “translated” magazines, gazing at the revelatory architecture and signage, eavesdropping on further conversations. I’ll try the next best thing, slowing my little book down to dwell here, to savor the sequence from as many angles as I think it can tolerably sustain. (I believe it can sustain more than a few.)

So—six minutes, or eight, or ten? I know where to begin: in that alley. Up to now, the film has been an explosive device in assembly, one painstakingly accumulating the force, the plastique, of implication, needed to detonate when Nada takes his new sunglasses for a walk down the street. They Live is never so pressurized again; how could it be? Exploring the new world this sequence leaves behind, the film is destined to wander through smaller recursions of the same eureka moment, through action-film braggadocio, through dumbbell sci-fi explanations, nervous violence, and grating in-jokes. No complaint from me: what came before has earned it all. But if They Live’s “masterpiece sequence” falls back to earth, exactly when is it? And how? I’ll audition candidates for this stopping point as I come upon them.