(41:04)

I’ve come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of ass.

—Mystery Science Theater 3000

I have been programmed to eviscerate your repulsive squishy organic bits and chew gum. And I hate gum.

—Marvel Zombies 3

I have come from the frozen heart of Naxxramas to feast on souls and deliver a vicious thrashing upon our sworn enemies. And I’m all out of souls.

—World of Warcraft

Nada walks (backward) into a bank, there to take measure of yet another tableau of ghoul penetration of the daily life of the marketplace. Then he squares himself and his weaponry, in the manner of William Holden and his colleagues bracing for their suicidal fuck-you slaughter in The Wild Bunch. Only, in place of the weary determination of Holden’s “Let’s go,” Nada delivers an ostentatious quip with a admirable lack of ostentation (Piper is anchored in his WWF comfort zone here, selling what’s rococo as working-class grit), though in principle the quip extends the air of blustery self-amusement begun in the market’s cheese-dip aisle. Some accounts credit the quip as a Piper improvisation: “I’ve come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.”

The line has a vibrant posthumous life, recursing through a video game called Duke Nukem and detaching from there into the popular unconscious. The unexplored subtext is, again, cloddish stupidity, as when Gerald Ford was mocked by the Chevy Chases of the world for being unable to “chew gum and walk at the same time.” Unlike a Republican president, Nada can do both, as the quip implicitly brags. That’s if he could afford to chew gum, or would actually bother to do so—chewing gum being the opposite of nourishment, a kind of newsstand magazine or television program for the tongue and teeth. You’re not allowed to buy gum with food stamps, but then, as was established earlier, Nada’s type of person is out of food stamps, too. Not ammunition, though.

Amiri Baraka: “If you play James Brown (say, ‘Money Won’t Change You . . . but time will take you out’) in a bank, the total environment is changed . . . An energy is released in the bank, a summoning of images that take the bank, and everybody in it, on a trip. That is, they visit another place. A place where Black People live.” They Live’s bank is a high-vaulted, echoey stone palace, still common enough in 1988, but dwindling since, as major-city chains like Chase and Wells Fargo abandon the (literal) high overhead and overt architectural power dynamics of such real estate commitments and disperse instead into myriad shallow storefronts: bank as Dunkin’ Donuts. Future viewers may register the pointless grandeur of such interiors as this one with puzzlement.

Or not. After all, their resonance will have survived in movie iconography. From Capra’s American Madness through hundreds of Westerns and gangster films, to It’s a Wonderful Life, Bonnie and Clyde, Dog Day Afternoon, Inside Man, and, yes, The Wild Bunch, the entry of an existentially kinetic (and usually armed) man or group of men into one of money’s static and forbidding palaces forms a basic Hollywood enactment of the anxiety of individual fate and imperative when confronted with the slablike facts—the twenty-four-inch vault doors, the gated windows—of power, access, class, and privilege. In the myth, the individual makes off at least temporarily with the loot, though from that point he’s a wanted man, his clock ticking. To triumph rather than be pulled back to earth, an escape across some border is probably indicated. (They Live has already cited this archetype twice. Gilbert, in the fake church, expresses his exasperation with the resistance movement’s present strategies: “robbing banks, manufacturing Hoffman lenses ’til we’re blue in the face.” And Drifter, cynically retailing rumors of far-off rebellion, mentions “shootin’ people, robbin’ banks, same old thing as always.”)

Nada’s situation on entering the bank, though, is atypical—having just killed a cop, he’s already crossed the line, made his outlaw commitment. Anyway, he’s wearing the glasses; this bank’s legible, and unintimidating. The majestic vintage marble column and gilded steelwork interior has been dragged into the prosaic contemporary by some shoddy renovation as well as by the presence of new signage, readily translated: OBEY, WATCH TV, DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY, and so on. If money declares “I am your God,” then Nada’s here to defile a church (and never in moviedom has an armed intruder showed less interest in a bank’s loot). If he’s worked it out in advance—more likely, we feel, he’s working on instinct— Nada would have to hope to cross some particularly remote border, one separating him in time or space from all he’s just learned about his world, to melt back into any crowd. By delivering his quip, he declares his lack of interest in remaining civilian, the decision that will define his actions for the remainder of the film. No one threatens Nada here; he starts the trouble. The bank becomes an arena for testing a new policy of taking out as many ghouls as he can, while sparing the deluded (and, presumably, often complicit) humans.

My own bank branch as of this writing, on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, happens to resemble Nada’s (though it’s undoubtedly older): a looming marble palace rendered mundane by crappy renovation and generic corporate furnishings. The public language inside this space is contradictorily “double,” like the public language in They Live. On the one hand, carved deep in burnished stone, high above our heads and the grand interior lintels, are two mottos. The first: COMMERCE DEFIES EVERY WIND, OUTRIDES EVERY TEMPEST, AND INVADES EVERY ZONE. (Google reveals these to be the words of the historian George Bancroft. They’re also etched above the entrance to the Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C.) The second: SOCIETY IS BUILT UPON TRUST, AND TRUST UPON CONFIDENCE IN ONE ANOTHER’S INTEGRITY. (Google: Robert South, seventeen-century English poet.) Meanwhile, blaring from cardboard and vinyl signs as well as a video screen placed behind the teller’s heads, the following messages: POCKET A LITTLE PIXIE DUST! DISNEY-REWARDS DEBIT CARD FROM CHASE, GIVING YOU THE MOST MAGICAL OF PERKS AND THE DREAMIEST OF REWARDS. YOUR EVERYDAY MAGIC! Another: A WINNER EVERY FIVE MINUTES: CHASE PICKS UP THE TAB IS BACK! And the fuzzily Orwellian MORE REWARDS ON CHASE FREEDOM. No Hoffman lenses are required to contemplate the weird gulf, the incoherent void that looms between these two versions of civic discourse, which offer themselves as some kind of tragic microcosm of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America—or an allegory of Ralph Waldo Emerson dragged bodily into a Disney casino. No one in my bank remarks on this, or gives evidence of seeing. Though we’re all wearing the glasses here, we seem to find ourselves blinded—or rendered dumb—by what they reveal.