ARE BILLIONAIRES THE VANGUARD OF AN INVASION FROM SPACE?
Are Blue Origin and SpaceX
LAST WEEK I STUMBLED across John Carpenter’s 1988 cult classic They Live. I’d never heard of it before; it popped up in one of those thirty-best lists that populate Google the same way takeout menus find their way into a physical mailbox. Its name suggested a zombie movie. But far from it. Instead it spins a conspiracy theory found in classic science fiction that current events prove eerily prescient.
Spoilers abound. Buckle up.
Our protagonist is a guy called Nada. Get it? Who wouldn’t? He’s played by Roddy Piper, a B lister of his day that I’d somehow escaped knowing about, so I just thought of him and his character as Mullet Muscle Man. Anyway, he’s a drifter who manages to find a job at an LA construction site. There he befriends a co-worker who leads him to a homeless encampment. The shantytown also hosts a Black revolutionary preacher and a White conspiracy theorist, both of whom rant about a “They” who have lulled humanity into submission for their own nefarious purposes. Hence the title of the movie; the revolutionary conspiracist homeless guys’ slogan is “They Live, We Sleep.” The encampment has both generators and a couple of TVs. Episodically a hacker breaks into broadcasts to spout warnings about They and Their control of humanity.
Well, trouble’s a-brewin’. When the cops bulldoze the camp, Nada seeks shelter in a nearby church, where who should he run into but the preacher, the conspiracist, and the hacker. The latter get the crap beaten out of them when the cops bulldoze the church as well, but Nada seizes the opportunity to grab and hide a couple of boxes of sunglasses just in the nick of time.
As one does.
But these aren’t just any sunglasses. Nada puts them on while strolling down an LA boulevard. And suddenly the world is black and white. And—real! The sunglasses strip away Their artifice, so Nada can see what billboards have really been saying all along: THEIR SUBLIMINAL COMMANDS!
What Mullet Muscle Man saw. Note the occasional glowing-eyed skull-faced boulevardier.
But even more frightening than the suddenly revealed messaging is who’s behind it. Nada’s new sunglasses reveal that there’s a pretty decent sprinkling of skeletal-faced bug-eyed nonhumans ambling around in three piece suits and police uniforms. Understandably, he is freaked out. Particularly when he enters a bank and sees a bunch of them. Reflexively he grabs the guns of a couple of alien security guards and shoots up the bank, and, finding a shotgun, embarks on an even wider killing spree.
As one does.
Nada’s buddy from the construction site warns him to stay away because mass murder is nothing but trouble. Nada tries to force him to wear another pair of magic sunglasses. Rather than say sure, whatever, his friend furiously resists, and an epic fistfight ensues, taking up at least ten minutes of the film’s ninety-minute runtime. (Ten minutes that possibly could have been better used explaining how the sunglasses work, but who am I to say?) Finally defeated, the buddy puts on the glasses and sees the world as Nada sees it. The two battered chums go into hiding, where they coincidentally run into their friends from the camp, who helm the human resistance to the aliens. They learn from them that the aliens’ purpose is to strip Earth of its resources and convert its climate to one similar to their own planet’s—through global warming!
Yup. 1988.
The movie concludes when the boys find their way to the TV station from which the aliens are beaming the subliminal messaging that enables them to hide in plain sight and program all of humanity to do their bidding. In the same building, a curiously Reaganesque alien stands at a ballroom podium telling tuxedoed and gowned human partygoers how richly they will be rewarded for their cooperation with the invasion. One of the quislings, thinking our beat-up heroes fellow travelers, cheerfully accedes to their request to see the transmission facilities. Word, fatally, has got out, and the boys get machinegunned from a police copter—but not before destroying the transmitter. Nada dies throwing the invaders the finger, and the whole world simultaneously wakes up to the truth. (Apparently there’s only one transmitter for the entire planet, but if you’ve bought into the sunglasses, why stop there?)
Despite its perforated plot and Planet of the Cheap Special Effects production values, They Live made an important point—that we are manipulated by the very rich whose indifference to the common good might as well have originated somewhere in the Andromeda Galaxy. Its producer claimed that his target was the Reagan Revolution, and his inspiration Roy Nelson’s 1963 short story Eight O’Clock In The Morning, whose rights he had acquired. (One wonders for how much.) Though the connection between the story—a man awakens from a stage magician’s hypnotic trance to see the aliens among us and inspires a world revolution against them—the invaders’ purpose is never clear. For that we have to look elsewhere.
Theodore Sturgeon was among the giants of twentieth century science fiction. Though they featured the obligatory rockets, robots, and ray guns, his stories were characterized by writing of genuine literary quality and an acid wit. His Occam’s Scalpel (1971) may have provided They Live with the aliens’ motivation.
The story revolves around two brothers. One is the private physician to the world’s richest man, an industrialist. The other has a highly specialised craft that allows him to work from home. The physician’s patient has just died. His will requires him to be cremated in the sub-basement of one of his factories with just the doctor and his chosen successor—a golden boy who’s survived personal and financial tragedies to rise to be the old man’s second-in-command—as witnesses. But when the coffin rolls into the furnace, it pops out a trap door in the back. Behind it is the doctor’s brother. Together they perform an autopsy as the golden boy watches, splitting the old man open to reveal that his human skin is a disguise covering an inhuman anatomy. They make make the successor himself cut an incision down the centerline of the old man’s human face and pull the halves apart, revealing the truth beneath:
Like the lungs and kidneys, the eyes — eye? — passed the median, very slightly reduced at the center. The pupil was oval, its long axis transverse. The skin was pale lavendar with yellow vessels and in place of a nose was a thread-fringed hole. The mouth was circular, the teeth not quite radially placed; there was little chin.
The late industrialist is, the brothers explain, an alien, vanguard of a species intent on converting the Earth to someplace they can live—with an atmosphere rich in sulfates and hydrocarbons. In short, they breathe smog. And the old man’s businesses all burned fossil fuels in abundance. The successor leaves the autopsy room intent on saving the planet by dismanteling his inheritance.
Now here’s the twist. The other brother? He’s a doctor too. And his “craft” is medical modeling. He’s the best there is, producing renderings of any anatomic structure, organ, or pathology known, utterly lifelike to sight, touch, and smell. So he and his brother cooked up a hoax alien to persuade the new boss to stop polluting before it’s too late. As they hook celebratory beers one remembers the logical principle of Occam’s Razor—that the simplest explanation is generally correct—and asks the chilling question: What if we were right?
What indeed? America’s billionaires have coalesced around an agenda of climate denial—and, of course, contributed to the ascendancy of a pudgy dotard who calls it a “hoax”—knowing full well that it’s real, accelerating, and likely to cause environmental catastrophe at least and civilizational collapse at worst. What could explain their persistence in a course so plainly self destructive—if not to themselves personally, then to their children?
Two hypotheses. One, they’re space aliens remaking the Earth’s environment into something homey. Two, they’re rich assholes remaking the political and legal environment into something that’s comfortable for rich assholes only. And succeeding. The Reagan Revolution began and slow-motion avalanche of “deregulation”—ie, abolition of environmental protections, workers’ rights, a social safety net, and fundamental public and individual health measures—blessed by an increasingly right-wing judiciary. And the avalanche is picking up speed, as they do—the pudgy dotard is packing his cabinet with billionaires and has put the richest man in the world and a smug Yale Law d-bag (but I repeat myself)—in charge of deciding which government agencies to cut. Here’s a guess—it will be whatever monitors rockets and electric cars and social media platforms and labor relations first!
Aliens or assholes? Time will tell.
