QAA Podcast - Premium Episode 111: They Live (Movie Night) feat Will Menaker (Sample)

Episode Date: February 14, 2021

We discuss John Carpenter's 1988 cult classic about a secret alien television signal that hijacks human minds and enforces their submission to the wealthy elites & ghoul overlords. ↓↓↓↓ SUBSCRIBE FOR $5 A MONTH SO YOU DON'T MISS THE SECOND WEEKLY EPISODE ↓↓↓↓ www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous Follow Will Menaker: http://twitter.com/willmenaker Listen to Chapo Trap House: http://chapotraphouse.com/ Merch / Join the Discord Community / Find the Lost Episodes / Etc: http://qanonanonymous.com Episode music by Doom Chakra Tapes (http://doomchakratapes.bandcamp.com)

What's up QAA listeners? The fun games have begun. I found a way to connect to the internet. I'm sorry, boy. Welcome listener to Premium Chapter 101 of the Q&ONANANANANANANANANIS podcast, the They Live Movie Night episode. As always, we are your host, Jake Rockatansky, and Julian Field. This week we'll be discussing John Carpenter's classic 1980

film, they live. That's right, Jake. And I'm putting on the glasses right now, and I can see it. You're a ghoul. No, no, you're the ghoul. No, you're the ghoul, Jake. We both have glasses on. Our guns are out. This is going to be one of the most relaxed episodes. I warn you, I will feel free to, you know, go on tangents. Jake will feel free to be wrong in everything he says. Stuff like that. If you have not yet watched the film, I highly recommend watching it because we have a very special guest today. That's right. Joining us from the Chopo Trap House podcast is fellow movie expert, Will Medeker.

Broadcasting live from Channel 54 here in downtown Los Angeles. How's it going, fellas? I'm really ashamed because, I mean, I'm not American, and I came late to Carpenter, mostly because I think, like, all the stuff that today I find fascinating, like, all the kitchen and stuff like that threw me off when I was too young to, like, dig that kind of stuff. But this movie, for example, did not know that the kick-out. and chew bubble gum line came from this movie at all. I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubble gum.

Oh, shit. Which is the only thing we'll be discussing. One-liners, there's no social critique in this movie. There's nothing deeper beneath the surface here. Yeah, a lot of people read too much into this movie. And in fact, they live is just about, it's about an alien invasion and sunglasses that lets you fight them. And I'm sick of people reading politics into into movies that are just fun. We join Carpenter in believing this

because after I think much badgering over the course of like 30 or 40 years in 2015, he finally said, listen, this is an interview. Listen, I'm a very happy capitalist. I love my country. I love the system that we're in, but not without some restraints on it. The mentality that the 80s bread is really alive and well. I just think the interesting thing about watching They Live in 2021 is that, like, I mean, it was way ahead of its time when it came out in the 80s as like one of the only movies that was like, you know, a very pretty savage attack on like, on Reagan's America and also like a very cany distillation of how ideology works in our society. But I think the funny thing watching in 2021 is that like it says like all the satire remains like brutally true.

but like there are no sunglasses needed in American society at all anymore like there's no there's no coded messages you don't need a sunglasses you don't need to put on the sunglasses to like to see the messages that are alien overlords are like brainwashing us with they just tell you they just tell you like obey sleep I open up my my Instagram account

which is a graveyard why would you have one of those it's literally just ads now like my friends are making ads and there are other companies that are making ads and acquaintances that I don't know that what you know spouses and husbands of acquaintances are everybody's just making ads yeah well we have control of our own bodies and by selling them by becoming the admen for our own selves in a way we've won this war on them but i think that is interesting what you're saying will my

wife at the end of it she's like this is exactly uh this she she had read like kind of further into the metaphor because at the end of course uh they break the the signal we'll get to that uh and by the way we're definitely going to spoil they live so don't you know whatever that's just going to happen but let the end they fuck with the signal the signal goes off and everyone can see the like aliens but at least on screen they don't do anything about it so my wife was like oh it's exactly like now like we know it all yeah we can see the ghouls and we're still like well i guess i'll just keep having my fucking meal yeah what am i supposed to do i guess i'll keep fucking this guy still this is fucking this alien i guess i'll keep getting this pipe i mean i think that like if the uh if the

if the alien signal has like evolved at all over the like the previous three decades or so it's such that like even if you're not a you know formaldehyde face uh alien reptile overlord i think the signal is such that like uh the programming that it gives people is not just like um direct commands to go to sleep and obey i think the signal now like especially with a social media rather than channel 54 Or is it, is it, it allows everyone to become a ghoul and a formaldehyde face themselves. Even though if they're not actually an alien, everyone can now sort of take part in, in, in that kind of yuppie lifestyle, or at least like just sort of imitation of it via the alien signal that is infecting our brains and heating the planet. Like, look how fascinating my ghoulish image is. Like, you're looking at inside the phone and it's you capturing yourself. and you know those fucking new like emoji faces

that will like you speak and they'll move with you or whatever I mean I guess there was a big kitten thing recently but like it's essentially that it's like it's you're not being told to obey by anybody except the ghoul version of yourself that you fucking captured and it's repeating it back to you through the screen yeah and it's interesting like in the 80s it's this it's this image of like a

like a literal signal being broadcast from a building that's that's going out from like um sort of from the top down and um and brainwashing everyone And now I think it's just just sort of the democratization of Channel 54 and the alien signal is that everyone is, it doesn't need to be broadcast from like a, from like the evil cable company or the evil aliens. It's just that everybody is now taking part in it themselves. Everybody is broadcasting and enjoying being, having their brains melted and planet overheated by the alien brainwashing signal. That's it. And it's just like, bit torrent for the signal.

I saw today that Bitcoin, just the production and mining of Bitcoin now uses more electricity than the entire country of Argentina. Yeah. And then like, and then it still uses more electricity than like many countries on the planet in terms of like the carbon. It's putting into the atmosphere to use the electricity to like, I don't know, like they said solve Sudoku puzzles where you can buy heroin. It doesn't seem like the best way to manage an economic system.

No, yeah. That logic I think has long fallen away. Let's, I guess, get into the beats because the beats actually reveal, I think, a lot of these discussions in a natural way. Plus, I want to get to the part where wrestling happens. Like, professional wrestling happens in this movie. There's, like, a series of, like, suplexes. Oh, yeah, there's a lot of wrestling, a lot of Easter egg wrestling moves thrown in there for the fans. When I was a kid in France, like, Piper was, you know, the heel that was part of, like, there was a group of heels.

It was like Undertaker and shit. And they would do very like kind of Christian versus demonic stuff. And for some reason, the Irish guy, I never understood it. But very confusing to think of the Irish as just part of like the demonic horde in our country. It's like trying to crush Protestants and Catholics. Really quick going back to something Will said earlier because I've been thinking about this a lot. Like in the 1980s, like it was tough to get on TV. Like it was tough to get your image or video out to a general public.

You had to, like, be an actor. Public access. You know, be somebody on the news. And the pool was so much smaller, it was very difficult to achieve that level of success. But now in 2021, it's like everybody has a window. Like, everybody has a transponder on their phone. And it's just like, the content is ultimately shittier because there's less of a gate. A big part of the movie is that, like, the rebels are trying to, like, having their pirate broadcasts of, like, the bearded man who's trying to wake people up.

Yes. Right. You know, like I explain to them that like, you know, what's going on and what's being done to you or whatever. But like I said, like everyone can participate in the alien colonization of our planet or fight back against it. But it's really all kind of the same thing. It's like everyone is the bearded man now, just sort of screaming their thoughts. Like, wake up people. I mean, this is this is QAnon.

You know, this is the same phenomenon going on. But like, we are ultimately all still asleep. So the film is They Live. It was directed by John Carpenter and written by him as well under the alias Frank Armitage Because I was like Frank Armitage I was like what else did he write?

Wait, he wrote under the name of the black character in it Yes, and it's also It's also a nod to a character in Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror Oh, okay There we go. Armitage, the name Armitage The movie's based on a 1963 short story titled 8 o'clock in the morning

which was written by Ray Nelson It cost about $3 million to make, stars Keith David, Roddy, Roddy Piper, and Meg Foster. And it did fairly well when it came out in 1988. It was like, you know, number one when it premiered and then was in the top ten for a couple weeks. But critically, it was a, like people hated it. Critically, it was not received so well. But it has since become sort of a, you know, a cult movie. Yeah, a cult movie on the left.

And in some neo-Nazi circles who believe that the aliens are representative of Jews in the film. We'll get to that, because Carpenter had to tweet about that, I guess, in 2017. Yeah, he did have to weigh in on that. That is... I know that pissed off Carpenter so much, because he hates talking about his movies, and he hates people, like, analyzing his movies or, like, taking them too seriously. Or he just hates... He just wants to play Xbox and, like, just hanging out.

He just wants to play Valhalla. That's why the end of his movies are just corridor shooters. By the way, do we think this episode has a chance at getting us his gamer tag so we can get some late night late night sessions in I would love nothing more than to play video games with him the latest music he put out was really cool

like I genuinely liked it and if you want to let me soundtrack an episode with that John I would love that he wrote the music in this movie too with a partner yeah so so the first so the movie opens with this nameless drifter

who doesn't ever really get a name in the film he does his name is Nada Nada that's how he's credit John Nata John Noddy. John, nothing, actually. John nothing. Nothing.

My name is nobody. He's Mr. Nobody. So he shows up in L.A. He's looking for work. He snags a gig on a construction site where he's invited home. Snags a gig. Did you write this? Huh?

Snags. He does. It rocks because it opens with the most depressing. It's just like L.A. as it is today. Nothing's changed. It opens and it's like there's even like a PA message. Like he's in like a social center. And it's just like, we've canceled all food stamps.

It's just shit like that, which is, he's very direct. Yeah, but he does what you can't do nowadays, where he basically shows up at the place of employment is like, hey, I'm looking for work. Got anything? And the guy's like, you got tools? Because I guess he's just been walking around the country. This is something you did. You walked around the country with just tools in your backpack and hope that somebody would let you build or fix something. I mean, if you're familiar with our migrant workforce, that's who took over.

But yeah, it used to be only the Irish. with incredible chest the first time he takes out the jackhammer and has to kind of pretend to do construction work with his wrestler body fucking rocks it's like up there with the best Arnold's stuff he's he's jacked he's good at manual labor

and like the John Nata character you know is a stand-in like he he's nameless because he is this kind of every man for like the sort of like the white sort of like manual labor working class has been you know cut a drift in

in a sort of like in the in the Reagan's America in a neoliberal turn. There's no need for him. There's no work for him anymore in our society. There's no unions anymore in which someone with his skills and brawn and his brawny balls and can-do attitude

can have any kind of security or purchase in the economy in our society. And as such, he's a drifter. He just shows up like basically hopping a freight car to L.A. And all he has to sell is his muscles, is his body. And that, like, basically, he is working for food at the beginning of the movie. I mean, it's part of, like, some sort of job, sort of job, like, yeah, it's like a soup kitchen, basically, where you do a day's work, and then you get a place to sleep and eat at the end of the day. It's, like, very turn-of-this-century

London comes to, you know, America in the 1980s. But, yeah, like, and then, like, and then the Keith David character, it's, like, I think this is a very, like, interesting, like, you know, like sort of a multiracial class solidarity here. You know, the fact that it's like it's a white guy and a black guy. And, you know, like they both find that their conditions in life are now exactly the same. They're exactly as, um, unneeded in this kind of yuppie-fied American society where, you know, a manual labor is, you know, undercut in every way, it's just impossible. Like it's, did you be a skilled manual labor to like, to be able to work in a construction site

means that you are basically homeless? And, and, uh, his foreman at the end of the first day, of work says like don't even think of sleeping here because he sees him with the backpack and then that's where he meets his friend who reaches out in solidarity and says I know a place like if you need like a food and like a shower and and at first I love he doesn't say anything he's too proud and the guy walks off he's like ah whatever then fuck you and then he follows him quietly like it's a pretty good moment and it establishes him as essentially like a better realized version of Stallone in first blood, right?

Like the kind of the drifter. There's almost like a veteran quality to him. Yeah. And so, but also like he's not, he never articulates kind of a political point of view until he starts, you know, shooting people at a bank and killing cops. Yes.

You know, that, the violent break when, when his illusions, or he sees, you know, reality as it truly exists, our economy and our democratic system for what truly is underneath at all. I mean, yeah, that's when he snaps and does, goes paddock mode but it's the frank character who is the one who is like already politicized like he is he has a kind of uh and i honestly like in in keith david and in carpenter's words is like probably the closest to like any like real articulation of like any kind of genuine american like working class consciousness and solidarity because you know he he's sort of like he hips john

to the way it is and he says here there's a line where he says uh steel mills will laying people off left and right. They finally went under. We gave the steel companies a break when they needed it. Know what they gave themselves? Raises. He tells John this metaphor about basically describing capitalism. And he says,

The whole deal is like some kind of crazy game. They put you at the start in line. The name of the game is make it through life. Only everyone's out for themselves and looking to do you in at the same time. And this idea is like, they put you at a starting line, but the starting line for everyone else is different than it is for you. So, like, Frank's character has a political consciousness, and there's even, like, a, you know, this is a real thing that happened in Los Angeles of that area. Like, Los Angeles used to be, like, a major manufacturing city and particularly had, like, a black middle class because of things like the Goodyear, like a tire factory in South Central or elsewhere that, of course, all went under. We're all offshoreed in the 80s or like, or late 70s, 80s, I believe.

You have been listening to a sample of a premium episode of QAnon Anonymous. We don't run any advertising on the show, and we'd like to keep it that way. For five bucks a month, you'll get access to this episode, a new one each week, and our entire library of premium episodes. So head on over to patreon.com slash QAnonanonymous and subscribe. Thank you. Thanks. I love you. Jake loves you.

Thank you.