They Live

Nada’s disappointment, when he discovers that the illicit or subversive treasure he’s salvaged from the church turns out to be a carton full of sunglasses, may or may not be a conscious joke about the film’s low-budget props: the first unveiling of futuristic technology being something available in any drugstore for a few dollars (exact price depending on whether these are brand-name Ray-Ban Wayfarer glasses or a knockoff—I can’t find confirmation one way or another, but would bet on the knockoffs). Ray-Ban Wayfarers, which convey an iconographic lineage back to J.F.K. and Marilyn Monroe, as well as Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Cary Grant in North by Northwest, had been established as a specifically eighties movie icon by a crushingly effective product-placement campaign begun in 1982; after Tom Cruise’s use of the glasses in Risky Business (1983) and Don Johnson’s in Miami Vice (1984-89), and then with their adoption by the music icons Michael Jackson and Debbie Harry, and in the texts and jacket designs of the novels of Bret Easton Ellis, the glasses were an eighties cliché no one was ever embarrassed to deploy. They Live’s original promotional poster must have been a conscious satire of the poster for Risky Business (it’s less likely the designer had the sleeve of Elvis Costello’s Trust in mind).

Still, when they’re added to Nada’s blue-collar uniform and trucker haircut, a mild degree of code-switching is in the air. In a breakdown comparable to the early sixties U.K. mod/rocker binary, Wayfarers, together with suits and ties, and short-back-and-sides haircuts, suggested a new-wave stylistic glancing back, past the hairy seventies, to late-fifties cool. Nada’s look, signifying country-hippie or heavy-metal grit, evokes blue-collar disdain for all that’s urbane; his type’s more likely to be decorated with aviator frames, perhaps with reflective lenses. Once he adopts the glasses, Nada’s scruffy-with-Wayfarers look calls up one droll referent—ZZ Top, who sang: “Now go out and get yourself some big black frames / With the glass so dark they won’t even know your name . . .”

(31:18)