“What’s Wrong?”-They Live
“Hey, what’s wrong baby?” the now exposed alien asks. This question is posed less for the woman straddling him and more for the audience straddling their own perception of reality itself.
“What’s wrong?” the inflection your sibling uses when you find them standing next to your now broken toy.
“What’s wrong?” the inflection an alien uses to indicate that you’re actually still in disbelief about American society but will remain prisoners to the reality you spent an hour and a half condemning.
Yes, that one in particular actually.
I wish I knew the protagonists name, but I’m not going to check Wikipedia to drive home the point that he does not exist outside of the title he is credited with that can be seen rolling as you realize that this is a movie after all.
He is simply a pretty face, and one that can handle being punched for an astounding five minutes straight while remaining pretty save for trickles of blood that are a subtle attempt to make you not realize that this is a movie after all.
As for his friend, he got into the brawl for refusing to wear a pair of cheap sunglasses that were dropped on the alley floors of L.A. They both have admirable causes for the fight.
Both men have lousy excuses for not actively contributing to society. Our protag (that’s all you’re gonna get name wise) makes a vague statement about employment drying up, effectively forcing him to become an oddly stylish nomad. It’s clear that the protag actually had read On The Road for the first time this year like me, and was making a cheap attempt of living it and became bored.
The friend claims that he left a wife and kids at home states away, and is somehow noble for finding employment as if that would compensate for the emotional drainage he causes his family by consistently not living up to the role he fucked himself into years before.
Both men clearly don’t have a solid grip on reality, which is usually an ideal time to convince others that they don’t have a grip on reality either. Luckily, an opportunity manifests itself in the form of a radical religious group posing as a homeless shelter that could potentially disrupt the optometry field permanently. Instead they set their sights on a more ambitious target: the bourgeoisie/people that aren’t nomads affiliated with radical groups and/or work construction.
With their hold on the optometry field, the church begins distributing knock off Raybans that are not only probably polarized but polarizing in their ability to bring focus to the ills of consumer American culture. The ills being that you’re either selling others distractions from death, or are being sold distractions. But either way, you’re going to die so being that concerned seems somewhat frivolous.
Indeed, the glasses change everything in sight to black and white, and a handful of humans turn out to look oddly like skeletons underneath their skin, which is fairly normal, I’m told.
But these guys are bad! Just look at em! How could these guys not be bad? It’s fine because it turns out they’re bad, to the protag and his friend and their religious group.
Working in favor of the aliens/bourgeoisie is the protag himself who spends a day walking around the city in an attempt to draw as much attention to himself as possible so that the aliens are well aware of the counterfeit Raybans going around.
Before they can get him, the protag gets away via a contrived love interest that appears to be the most attractive actual human female (which is still a stretch) and promptly gets pushed out of a window. Damn, I shouldn’t have threatened her at gunpoint to put on the counterfeit Raybans, the protag thinks.
So I’ll force my one friend to put them on instead! He does just that, and his friend sees the light and miraculously joins him on his journey without hesitation, in spite of the arduous fight he just endured. They will take down the bourgeoisie aliens. But first they need to meet the radical church again to burn some of the film’s runtime. Turns out the counterfeit Rayban gig is over, now they lamely make contacts that don’t distinguish between “reality” or not for the audience except during select scenes. The church gets shot up, and in the ensuing carnage, they manage to fall through the floor of an alley and into bourgeoisie HQ.
After wandering around the entire perimeter and into a fancy banquet hall in which they are comically underdressed, the protag/friend’s thoughtless actions are instead rewarded: by meeting a former drifter who sold out to the bourgeoisie and naively believes that they just did too but simply weren’t interested in the dress code. So now for a guided tour, to make sure they didn’t miss anything on their first walk…
Such as the control room in which a mass media metaphor resides. Yes, the aliens created an antenna, became the top news network, and used thier position to constantly send out broadcasts that keep humans “asleep” using consumerist distractions. The design and execution of this plan was flawless until two homeless guys wearing sunglasses found out.
Not enough contacts were made for the whole world, so the protag ends up shooting the satellite sending the consumerism signal, but not before being betrayed by the love interest one more time in order to give a solid example of “deus ex machina.”
And we once again arrive at the opening question of “what’s wrong?”
Why wouldn’t you sell out too? They’re just skeletons, we all have skeletons inside of us. Or would it make more sense to dismantle what oppresses you in the same way that you were also dismantled, repeating the cycle once more, and at the expense of your life. No one is winning here, but it would have been possible for a comfortable stalemate.
Either way, we’re selling out somehow by having to use a status symbol such as sunglasses in order to view our circumstances as they are. Perhaps the most vain accessory of all, they allow you to see but not be seen.
The problem is not that we can’t see reality for what it is; it’s that we willingly choose not to see it on a daily basis.
