A Carpenter Guide

On the second page of They Live, [Jonathan Lethem]’s close reading of the 1988 John Carpenter film of the same name, Lethem apologizes in advance for “not placing the film in the context of John Carpenter’s oeuvre or within the sciencefiction or horror-film genres per se.” Immediately, we have been assured, this is not film criticism. What it is, however, is not quite clear.

Deep Focus, the [Soft Skull Press] series which They Live inaugurates, states its purpose as such: to “[t] ake the smartest, liveliest writers in contemporary letters and let them loose on the most vital and popular corners of cinema history.” Which is vague enough to allow, really, anything. Carpenter’s film concerns an unemployed drifter who discovers a pair of sunglasses that allow him to see the “ghouls” who have turned the United States into a capitalist hellhole. Lethem’s primary focus is on Carpenter’s “ideological incoherence” (a phrase appearing in Jonathan Rosenbaum’s lengthy epigraph, one of many). While the film seems, at first, to be nothing more than a consumerist/ yuppie satire, its politics are far stranger than they, by all rights, should be, and Lethem gets into untwisting, then retwisting them. One of the myriad examples: a group of human freedom fighters/terrorists manufacture the sunglasses of truth while across the street from a homeless camp. It never occurs to them to hand out the instruments of such to the “losers” across the way. The truth is reserved for those who can get stuff done. Lethem delights in the ambiguity, never avoiding the film’s possible misogyny, or trumpeting the progressive racial politics.

By far, though, his focus is the moment when we are first offered a view of the “real” world: not only ghouls are displayed, but far more striking, the legion of subliminal messages that cover everything, including our magazines, our billboards, our money. They read, respectively, OBEY, CONSUME and THIS IS YOUR GOD. Lethem: “...no detective or artist can fix what’s wrong here... everyday life itself is Moriarty. Revolution is the only reply.” Then he drags in discussions of Ted Turner’s colorizations, Last Year at Marienbad and the flâneur, and attacks Shepard Fairey. If you’re not having fun at this point, there’s not really much that can be done for you. Other sections read like straight-up, if mildly deranged, film criticism: a sudden, and truly terrifying bout of violence, is compared, single-shot by single-shot, to the “Norman-Mother” staircase stabbing in Psycho (A Long Hard Look at “Psycho” by Raymond Durgnat is cited as inspiration). But, mostly, Lethem is drawn to the edge of extrapolation: He is entranced by a “stunned maid” with only a few seconds of screen time, dissects the massacred ghouls’ society and emotional needs, and details the origin of the phrase “Die Yuppie Scum!” in the Tompkins Square Park riots.

These ruminations are emitted in brief, often two-paged bursts, headed by lengthy quotations (Zizek, Holzer, Poe, Barthes) with titles like “Gay Porn,” “Individual Ethics Under Late Capitalism” and “We Have Met the Enemy And He Is Not Us.” Lethem does not skimp on the prose either, describing the ghouls as “syphilis-victim scare-photos from teenage health-ed nightmares... burnt, yet gooey.” A dying character “falls rather like a Nosferatuan vampire rising in reverse.” He obsessively mentions the blue-corn tortilla chips one ghoul is seen buying, and interjects, while talking about the cheap-o on-site set, “film crew as homeless person.” After questioning Carpenter’s intentions, Lethem spouts, “Am I hedging here? Sure I am!” At one point he uses “grok” as a verb.

At the same time, Lethem is capable of immediate and stunning seriousness, as in one section where he tries to convey the sense of horror of a workplace shooting. It is Carpenter’s style that Lethem thus emulates, consciously or not: ridiculousness underlaid with intent. The experience is brief and far from profound, as disturbing as it is comforting, as if the reader were ensconced in Lethem’s basement, getting high and watching an old VHS recording of the film while listening to the host’s slow ramble. Early on, Lethem promises, “If we meet up, I’ll watch [They Live] with you.” Until that happens, this book will have to do.