I didn’t watch John Carpenter’s They Live. I’m not a buff by any standard. Intentionally, even as I anticipated the book’s arrival, I declined the free opportunity to see this film. But I have read Jonathan Lethem’s They Live. My interest stemmed from my Lethem fandom and a single description printed in size 18 serif font atop the front cover of this book: it reads, “A Novel Approach to Cinema.” My curiosity was snagged wondering at the narrative innovations Lethem could offer in a book of criticism. Other descriptions are similar, if not quite as stimulating. About their new Deep Focus series, of which this work is the first of two so far, Soft Skull Press promises it will present, “…long form criticism that’s relentlessly provocative and entertaining.” And in “Note to Approach I,” set as a preface, Lethem himself describes the piece matter-of-factly, writing “This is the first monograph on They Live.”
Above all, this book represents Lethem’s repeated viewings of They Live articulated through stream-of-consciousness probes on anything from the implied homosexuality of the characters, Los Angeles as its-unnamed-self, RayBan Wayfarers (or, as Lethem points out as the likely case in this movie, their drugstore rip-offs), to diving into racial, Marxist, and generic motifs. The quick introduction, a poetic and prophetic day-after reaction—entitled “What You’ll Recall of the Dream in the Morning”—renders the experience of this book as it does the movie more aptly than any review ever could.
A street preacher’s warning and a pirate television broadcast.
The demolition by riot policemen, helicopters, and bulldozers of an open-air homeless-persons’ compound in a vast vacant lot.
A brazen assault on a ghetto church.
A hero, a wrestler garbed as a construction worker.
A pair of sunglasses that reveals yuppies as alien ghouls.
A chilly, enigmatic beauty, her intentions toward our hero unknown.
The black guy and the white guy. They begin in distrust, but soon learn they’ve got enemies in common. From that point they’ll cover each other’s backs.
Machine-gun fire in a television studio.
A surprise with tits.
But, above all, two sequences…
That is to say, this is Lethem’s experience and this will be your experience too.
Lethem’s writing is, as usual, amazingly pleasurable. Free-associative though rarely tangential, it constantly compels forward movement by refreshing readers on what feels most like every peculiarity of the movie. “RayBan Waferers … had been established as a specifically eighties movie icon…” Or: “At the height of the colorization crisis, a rumor spread that Ted Turner intended to colorize the Kansas sequences in The Wizard of Oz…” Yet all these observations are tightly situated in the narrative of They Live itself. That is, the book literally follows the movie’s established discourse. Once the premises are settled, we start at “0:00” and move toward the movie’s conclusion at “1:30:21,” and to help check the two mediums when need be, run time is often cued—“(2:18)” or “(1:02:05).” Also, though this is a work of criticism, Lethem often presents the movie’s shots and sequences as fictional scenes. “Garbed in default blue-collar duds and wearing a back-pack, Nada picks his way out of the distance, across the tracks, toward us … our hero strolls into the story’s frame through the civilization’s back doors, unnoticed, an entrance simultaneously suggesting modesty of means, self-reliant competency, wraithlike anonymity, and (at least to begin) neutrality…” The overall effect is that of a novel stealing the film’s diegetic. That is to say, a novel whose narrator is embedded within the movie itself. (Not many other books give background music).
This was my reason for picking up the book: I’d imagined a work truly adapted from film, appropriating not only the plot but any trope of action and science-fiction movies or even film code. I’d imagined a perspective not unlike that in Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, an ultimately distant view that treats the characters with seemingly complete objectivity, but made “fun” by the popcorn content. Why not, at a minimum, leave open the narrative hooks or even help produce rather than squelch them even before they come up? Here’s an example: in the section titled “Villainous Vehicles (22:40),” Lethem writes of helicopters, “Nada will later be killed by a sniper shot from one.” Is this your friend ruining the end of the story or is this Lethem purposely deflating the narrative so as to direct your full attention to his own “reading” of the film? Ultimately, as B-movies go, They Live is, in the best Roger Corman tradition, a film of ideas. Had I watched it, I would have understood this in my anticipation. Thus arises the need to expand, explain, and explicate. Another note that Lethem provides on helicopters is this: “So, in They Live’s ironclad us-versus-them scheme, the director’s affiliation with his persecuting machines points to a subliminal ambivalence, or even complicity.” Ultimately, this book becomes one of ideas that exist on so many slippery levels that… it, in many ways, re-enacts its own version of these events and becomes the movie as hoped for, as previewed or advertised, as promised.
For this reader the total effect is that of an awed (odd) epic of an 1980s America that could only be retold precisely this way. It drew me in entirely—I set the book down only once to wrap myself in more blankets as my heater recently died—so by the end, I was completely rewarded, just as any reader is upon discovering an new manner in which fiction momentarily demystifies our world. “Put on the @*#!ing glasses.”
by Justus Caudell
an Editorial Assistant for Black Clock and an MFA Writing candidate at CalArts
