A Recent Scourge as Old as Mankind Itself

An elite is inevitable.

—Jenny Holzer, Truism

I’m not saying things were better before, I’m just saying they’re worse now.

—Michael Seidenberg (in conversation)

 

“Maybe they’ve always been with us.” This uncertainty, this “maybe,” is a sort of undertow sucking at the toes of They Live. Our ostensible satire of the Reagan yuppie generation, specific in time and place, keeps gesturing toward corruptions of the human spirit and species as ancient as Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, or some other force even more fundamentally Gnostic. So, when did the problem start? As far as specific dates go, the film is noncommittal, though it wouldn’t seem necessary for alien invaders who’d been with us for more than a few decades to spend much time bragging about their recent growth curve, as these ghouls do. At deeper layers, here the film’s employed a Keatsian “negative capability”: that profitable anxiety set resonating in us at the levels at which we register the confusion. If “our own cold fucking hearts” are the matter here, then who needs alien invaders? (Like most of the best science fiction, the literal devices at some point threaten to resolve into “mere” metaphor.) And if the nightmare’s intrinsic to human history, why such an emphasis on present regimes of consumer greed, dry-look hairstyles, and blue-corn tortillas?

Paging Slavoj Žižek! The Slovenian philosopher’s conflation of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxist politics equips a viewer to consider the notion that human consciousness, forged in familial psychodrama, yearns innately toward totalitarian ideological control (the most recent incarnation of which, according to Žižek and Carpenter, is the inverted totalitarianism of late capitalism, with its injunctions to consume and enjoy). In other words, maybe Bad Daddy and Big Brother are more or less all one problem. Poor Nada’s got an inkling; though outfitted only for rampage, his fury’s more revolutionary (in Žižekian terms), not less so, for having bundled outrage at the ghouls together with recollection of both Judeo-Christian paternalism and his own father’s monstrousness.