Impossible Eloquent Cityscape

(33:29)

“If you’re driving down a street, going up in an elevator, or sitting in a restaurant, you find that your eyes travel around the room at a specific height . . . if I’m watching a scene I’m interpreting it through my eyes, so where I will put the camera is wherever I’d like it to be. It doesn’t mean it’s right; it just means it’s mine.”

—John Carpenter, quoted in Boulenger, John Carpenter

 

For one tantalizing instant we’re treated to a wide shot of a sunstruck Los Angeles desublimated: under lengthening afternoon shadows, dozy vehicular traffic courses beneath vast billboards reading SUBMIT, STAY ASLEEP, and CONFORM. The shot’s composition is futurist-sublime—this may be the nearest we’ll come to wishing to submit to They Live’s poisonous trance. In fact, here the film subtly ruptures our identification with Nada, leaving us to meditate alone with our masochistic ache for authority’s loving grace: though the suturing action of shot/countershot suggests this wide shot proceeds from Nada’s Hoffman-lensed view, the angle on the traffic is far too high to be that of our man on the street. We’re looking down at the traffic. As if, in a dream, we’ve soared free.