"... to chew bubblegum and kick ass... and I'm all out of bubblegum."
Yep, I'm in the middle of re-watching 'They Live!' John Carpenter's anti-consumerist paranoid fable of class war and the subversion of the American Dream, available currently on Amazon Prime. What has struck me on this viewing (and it is admittedly a good while since I last saw the film) is how subtly powerful the first twenty-five minutes or so are before the movie becomes this ridiculously over-the-top (and supremely entertaining) horror/action piece.
Roddy Piper's John Nada is considerably more affecting in the opening scenes - quiet, hard-working, gentle and observant. In a conversation with Frank (played by the excellent Keith David), his self-proclaimed belief in the American Dream comes across as touchingly naive. Carpenter plays the police brutality just right - the sight of a blind black preacher quoting the 23rd Psalm while trying to fend off a group of policemen with his cane is both surreal and profoundly disturbing.
Once Piper gets hold of those sunglasses though, the revelation of the true nature of the world in which he lives seems to unhinge him and he becomes a gun-toting wisecracking one-man revolution in incredibly short order. Not that I'm complaining particularly (some of those wisecracks are top quality stuff), but the change is jarring nonetheless.
Still, it's a classic film, not least because it presents us with images that live long in the memory. And that line, of course. :)
