(1:30:21)

John Carpenter closes 1994’s In the Mouth of Madness (another tale of a skeptic who discovers that his world has been corrupted by an evil fiction) with the protagonist settling into a front-row seat at a movie theater, for a screening of In the Mouth of Madness, the movie we’ve been watching all along (cf. The Muppet Movie). They Live, which begins in prosaic documentary style, in some ways begs to be a film that ends lost in artifice. We might, for instance, cut away to another vacant lot, another version of Justiceville, where another batch of tatterdemalion couch potatoes sit vacantly gazing at a television’s screen. On their screen, we’d see the final instants of Nada’s “triumph”—his killing of Holly; his destruction of the broadcast tower; his epochal, dying flip of the bird. The homeless viewers would hoot and cheer, then change the channel. Life goes on. Cue hollow laughter.

They Live flirts with this impulse. The post-Nada montage, Ghouls Unmasked Worldwide, nearly comes to a close not in the arena of the real, but instead lost within the kaleidoscopic maze of commercial simulations, that hall of mirrors that might truly reveal monstrosity, if we ever locate our glasses. Instead, Carpenter plunges us back into something both more and less real, this smutty kick at the finish. He’s found one last destabilizing swerve, one last fuck-you gesture. The director might be toying with the ratings system (or the Gene Siskels of the world): Looking for a new definition of the word gratuitous? I’ll take an “R” for the last shot in my film, thank you.

Or he might be toying with us. The girl and ghoul don’t really feel like they derive from the same version of reality that earlier defined this film, a quasi-documentary on disenfranchisement. These two are lost somewhere in the breach between the TV satires and their own longing for authentic contact, fucking with the TV on, or watching TV with the fucking on, their behavior mediated through porn stylistics that have invaded their sexual imaginations (the human woman’s “cowgirl position,” her regimented moaning, his “baby”) to an extent They Live simply can’t help them unmask. And we, complicit (male) viewers, noticing ourselves twitch to hardwired attention at one flash of tube-boob, thinking Was it that sort of movie all along? Do I owe someone an apology? (A brief, ridiculous cut-in shows a human woman gasping in censure as she slaps the face of a male ghoul, who then turns to the camera as though shocked by the site of bare breasts, making him the first unmasked ghoul to begin to grasp that the jig is up—and is he somehow looking through the screen?) Can we freeze that frame a second longer? No? Oh well, roll credits. Cue mocking laughter (and an obnoxiously taunting, discofied version of the score’s blues motif). We’re stranded here, at the end, women handcuffed to men, in bed with the pun/chline’s verdict: We’re all fucking ghouls.