The Big Picture

by Kevin Candela

Watching They Live again a few nights ago got me to thinking about the influence of movies on my perspective. In particular, I set about figuring what movies had helped “awaken” me to my current state, whatever that might be.

First of all I should explain that I started out as a Young American True Believer. This is when I was in single digits—the 1960s, to be exact. America had done some crazy stuff, but the way I was getting it told to me it was always someone else who “started it”. You know there’s a playground/sibling parallel to that “he/she/they started it!” thing that makes it real to a little kid, bringing it home before his or her eyes, so whoever “started it” is the all-purpose bad guy. This is how it is done with our society. So if your news shows are backing up your textbooks in agreeing that we’re only violent in response to “outside threats”, as a little kid you don’t (or we didn’t) consider that Orwellian. You’re not even up to READING Orwell yet anyway. You figure Father Knows Best. And you believe.

So I did. I was a straight A student, which didn’t help my social status a bit but landed me Cardinals tickets and thus had its moments. And to this day, I think some of what we were told in history classes was legit. Not a lot, but some. The rest was sociological manipulation of the masses.

Those “scary” hippies were old enough to have figured out the scam. I wasn’t. I was wrapped up absorbing—and believing wholeheartedly in—our noblest intentions as depicted on TV: Jonny Quest meeting monsters and mysteries in remote corners of the world; the Robinson family doing the same in space; Golden Age Harryhausen and Toho and Hammer and Universal movies where morality mattered and we had to work hard not to let the power-obsessed rule us and/or destroy the world.

But that grand façade chipped when I saw Executive Action in 1973. I’d just gotten my license, and my buddy and I went to see the most controversial non-adult film of that era besides the same year’s Exorcist. Looking back, this is when I realized that no, we weren’t being told the truth. The physics—the SCIENCE (which always did matter to me a lot more than history)—didn’t work according to the Warren Commission’s findings. And if I can’t accept the science, I won’t accept the story.

Flash forward a decade and a half, during which time I was busy figuring out a lot more prescient in-my-face things like how jobs and dating worked (the latter often didn’t) and why I wanted to be a rock musician so much more than simply accepting the engineering career for which I’d gone to school while others were partying.

I already loved the works of John Carpenter. I’ll be honest, that started with The Thing because I really don’t dig slasher movies with human monsters, so Halloween didn’t do that much for me. And I hadn’t yet seen The Fog, which I DO enjoy quite a bit, or anything else he did before 1982, although since I really enjoy his early classic Dark Star and it might have been on cable TV before 1982, maybe that was my intro. But I digress. Bottom line: The man had just come off a roll that include said Antarctic monster epic, Starman, the wondrous Big Trouble in Little China and Prince of Darkness and I was eager to see what was up next.

The answer to that was a movie that, although not as fully engaging as BTILC script-wise, is far more important to our culture than perhaps any movie that I’ve ever seen (although in the long run, Five Million Years to Earth looks closer to non-fiction every day). The cinematizing of a brilliant short story called Eight O’Clock in the Morning (written by Ray Nelson), They Live shows us the Man Behind the Curtain. In fact it is not a man, or men—it’s men and women, countless, moving among us by a type of mind control that makes these alien creatures who rule us look just like your next door neighbor.

In The Thing identity was at the core of the story. Written by John W. Campbell, Jr., the novel on which it’s based, Who Goes There?, details the arrival of an insidious invader that can look just like us. The same concept was presented in a somewhat different SF classic of the same era, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (story by Jack Finney, movie from Walter Wanger and Don Siegel), and I quite often find myself wondering how much irony exists in the fact that my first name was given to me in honor of Body Snatchers’ star Kevin McCarthy. I ended up as Miles Bennell after all, except no way can I see myself ever wanting to be an MD. Oh well, it was a useful plot device and I’m digressing again. The bottom line in all of these is trust, and how tricky it can be to keep it.

Like my once-blind trust in the people who run this country, and by proxy the world.

Let’s finish this up. I did not come here to keep digressing. I came here to ruminate and kick ass, and I’m all outta metaphor.

Since They Live a number of movies have come along that challenge our perceptions of reality (and often make us think that maybe we’re being played like game board tokens and don’t even sense the unseen hands moving us around and manipulating our responses to their ends). 1999 saw two great ones, the well-known The Matrix and the lesser-known but possibly even more enlightening The Thirteenth Floor. If you haven’t seen the latter you should—it’s really well done. Much more recently, we’ve seen Inception (a sort of Thirteenth Floor variation, conceptually interesting but hard to follow whereas TTF makes all kinds of coherent sense). And Doctor Strange, which doesn’t so much break new ground as making the illusory/parallel world concept food for thought for a broad audience of superhero fans.

These are by no means ALL the movies that un-think our programming and challenge us to do the same. No doubt you can come up with some that I haven’t mentioned here. I suggest we all respect these films as well as the writers of the tales, the directors—heck, even the studio execs that okayed their making. Like their counterparts behind the X-Files, including Chris Carter, these folks are heroes in the truest sense: subversively (and sometimes not so subversively) striving to bring the truth to the rest of us.

Viva the Truth, and those who would spread it. It’s still out there, but you have to be willing to perceive it if you want to try to accept it. And with movies like They Live, it’s like taking a really advanced university course in True Sociology in a little over ninety highly entertaining minutes.