(36:40)

Wobbling, perhaps showing signs of truth-drunkenness or truth-migraine, Nada staggers through the doorway of a grocery store—an upscale one, presumably, and seething with ghouls, though the store’s old-fashioned aisles, with displays low enough to look and speak across, may remind film buffs of the site of Fred MacMurray’s and Barbara Stanwyck’s nerve-wracked assignations in Double Indemnity. In here, Nada will break the lush spell of the long sequence by, at last, opening his mouth, and beginning to bellow out his signature lead-balloon quips. He’ll also, as an immediate result, get busted by a particularly repugnant, fur-wearing old-lady ghoul, who hisses into her wristwatch-communicator, “I’ve got one that can see!” From that moment on Nada’s a hunted man, and one bent on, or at least bending toward, vengeance.

First, though, after wandering through the food aisles and taking the measure of an assorted tableau of yuppie-ghoul snarkiness (one cackles at a friend’s having served blue-corn tortillas—“so dated”; another irritably dismisses the career anxieties of an overtly depressed human colleague), Nada meets another television set, the first since Justiceville. On the screen, a Reaganite politician blathers about “Morning in America” in front of a gigantic OBEY banner. For an instant this broadcast reverses like a photographic negative, accompanied by a feedback-like whine in the (fairly subliminal here) musical score. Either the hackers are trying to break through again, or this represents an instant of expressionistic emphasis from the director, as the film steps out and names its political targets, a suspicion perhaps confirmed by Nada’s response. The befuddled adventurer seems to relax into his disgust at the inevitability of it all and, chuckling, finds his tongue at last: “It figures it’d be something like this.” (Another place my perfect sequence could quit—here.)

The spectacle of so many ghouls placidly testing the ripeness of citrus and gathering up frozen dinners calls up recollection of William S. Burroughs’s simple explanation of the title of Naked Lunch: “A frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” Certainly, They Live has come out of hiding.