Ghoul Motivation

Look at the front pages of our daily newspapers. Every title, especially when it pretends just to inform us, contains an implicit injunction. So when you are asked to choose between liberal democracy and fundamentalism, it is not only that one term is obviously preferred; what is more important, the true injunction is to see this as the true choice, to ignore third options. So, again, naïve as it may seem, the film’s staging of ideology is nonetheless more complex than it may appear. Once you put the glasses on and see it, it no longer determines you. Which means that before you see it through the glasses, you also saw it, but you were not aware of it.

—Slavoj Žižek, “They Live! Hollywood as an Ideological Machine”

 

What’s odd in retrospect about the ghoul at the newsstand is that he wants to read the newspapers. This appears to be far more than a show of interest on his part; he even takes one home, pausing to scowl at some headline before getting into his car. Similarly, the ghoul at the bar at the end of the film sits watching television, as absorbed as any of the other patrons. How can we account for this? Which do the ghouls’ robotic orbs register as they scan (presumably like a supermarket laser run over a bar code) the dummy media with which they’ve overpainted our world: exhortations like CONFORM and OBEY, or the illusory articles and photographs, or both? Maybe they’re seeing some third-level media, something we’d have to call “Real Ghoul News,” which is being broadcast on a wavelength perceptible only to their eyes. Huh. I wish I could say the film’s given me some help here, but I’m flying solo.

But this, another of They Live’s zones of lively incoherence, really raises the matter of ghoul motivation in general terms. Throw out my third-level-media theory: it’s likely the ghoul cares about the delusional broadcast that rules the human world because of his investment in the mass-con-sensual fiction that has resulted (at both levels of the word investment). After all, these entities have troubled to turn up here on Earth, to seek out hard-to-maintain bespoke suits and clumpy wigs, to tool around in our fancier cars when they could simply teleport, and to shop for blue-corn tortillas—in most regards they’ve bought the same ticket they’re selling. So, this gentleman’s probably checking his stock prices (even with the fix in, you can never be too sure the ghoul down the street isn’t getting ahead of you), but also perusing the Real Estate and Fashion sections, and Arts too, to see what recordings the hip ghouls are listening to these days. Maybe he’s a sports fan, too. The only part of the paper surely of no interest whatsoever would be the news per se—whether international or domestic, all such conflicts would seem to be tempests in teapots now, bogus distractions definitively trumped by the larger fact of alien invasion and control. Finally, it might just be that buying a newspaper to read while stopped at red lights helps this succubus feel important and real. The way he wants to feel. Human.

Tracing the film’s outward logic—“we’re livestock!”—suggests the ghouls are something along the lines of farmers who want to dress up as cows. At the very least, they’re like borderline cool kids in high school, just trying to fit in, to get over.