Speaker 1 (00:00):
Coming up on Art Palace. 

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Yeah, we live in a meme era and memes function on subtext over text, right? There may be a text on there, but that's just for an orientation point. 

Speaker 1 (00:22):
Welcome to Art Palace, produced by Cincinnati Art Museum. This is your host, Russell iig. Here at the Art Palace, we meet cool people and then talk to them about art. Today's cool person is Evan Toner, professor at University of Cincinnati. Evan and I discussed the 1988 film. They live as a part of the museum's, Hank Willis Thomas, all Things Being Equal Film and Discussion series. You can learn more about the series@cincinnatiartmuseum.org slash hwt film series and also find a video of this conversation there. Hi, I'm Russell Leig, the associate director of interpretive programming at the Cincinnati Art Museum. 

Speaker 2 (01:10):
And I'm Professor Evan Toner at the University of Cincinnati, specializing in German and film media studies, science fiction and critical race theory. 

Speaker 1 (01:18):
And today we're going to be talking about John Carpenter's film. They live from 1988. So this discussion is programming and dialogue with the exhibition Hank Willis Thomas, all Things Being Equal, which is on view at the Cincinnati Art Museum from September 4th through November 8th, 2020. So the reason we're talking about this today is actually Hank Willis Thomas, the artist, listed this as a film that, let me read his quote here. These films impacted my life and whole understanding of the power of art to shape our notions of the truth and therefore reality. So this was one of several films that he picked out and that was what he said. So to give a quick summary, the movie, this is a film, well actually, do you want to give it a try? 

Speaker 2 (02:12):
Sure, sure. So John Carpenter in 1988 made a science fiction film starring Rowdy Roddy Piper and Keith David, both of whom have semi-professional professional wrestling backgrounds. Roddy, Roddy Piper being one of the key heels of worldwide wrestling. And it's a science fiction film about more or less working class people discovering that the yuppies of the eighties are mostly aliens who have then been buying off, basically getting all these other humans to sell out their species and have put a massive virtual reality simulation over a pile of subconscious messaging in advertising and in television among other places to disguise the fact that they're aliens. And of course, the key is that about half an hour into the film, nada played by Roddy Piper, discovers these pair of sunglasses that he can then use to see the truth and the truth is bleak and horrible and gives him the license to start shooting particularly aliens and those alien others, which it then gets more complicated because there are human accomplices. And so it's not quite as clear who is the villain. So I don't want to go too much into the plot details, but effectively all of the heroes have to martyr themselves in the end in order to achieve what they want, which is to destroy the transmitter, expending this false consciousness as Marx would say, all over the globe. And suddenly people wake up and see this particular, all the aliens and all of the BSS subliminal messaging and it sort of ends on a cliffhanger. What will humanity do now that the veil has fallen? 

Speaker 1 (04:19):
One thing I really love about the sunglasses that he puts on is it's a really clever thing that John Carpenter is doing, which is that when he puts the glasses on, everything becomes black and white. So you immediately sort of know also when we're seeing things through Roddy Piper's eyes and through the glasses and when we're not, and it's a really clever thing, but I think it also makes things extra that bleakness you described. It makes it extra bleak. And it also hearkens back to 1950s and sci-fi for me as well. Some of the look of the, there's these little flying saucey type drones that fly around, and when I see those in black and white, it feels very early sci-fi films to me. 

Speaker 2 (05:13):
It's also a film about an interracial friendship, specifically between Nada and Frank. Frank played by Keith David who you also saw in John Carpenter's the thing and whose voice would later on to be found and spawn in the H B O Spawn series. He has a classic baritone Keith. David really shines out as this figure of integrity, who is a family man that comes into contact with this drifter who seems to have bought into the system. And I would say Keith, David's character already knows that he's a black man in America in the 1980s. He knows he's gotten a bad bargain, but he's made the bad bargain because he's got kids and a family. And so he's like, I am working this crappy job and living in a homeless encampment, which is later bulldozed. But of course this kind of temporary utopia that they're able to go to in the homeless encampment where their needs are provided for they have community is interrupted not only with this TV that is both broadcasting the evil signals and also hacked by this resistance group that's trying to wake up everyone up. 

Speaker 2 (06:38):
This utopia is directly destroyed by police violence. And of course this police violence is then mapped onto race relations in the 1980s. And the key sequence of the film is of course the six minute alley brawl in which Nada wants Frank to put on the glasses. This is literally an enlightenment moment. Why won't Frank accept his enlightenment? And this is racially charged, the white dude trying to handle black guy who already knows what situation he has in life, these glasses that attune him to pretty much a horrific class warfare perpetrated by aliens on the human species. And why are we in six minutes in this Jeff Imada choreographed beautiful wrestling alley match? I mean, for me it's one of the queerest moments in the film because there's a moment where it's just like, no, these two, this is like sex. They are having something more than a fight over just who will put on the glasses. This is about showing mutual affection and care and boundaries for each other and I think is a very interesting relationship that develops there. And that also is I think one of the more progressive angles and otherwise kind of a misogynistic film. 

Speaker 1 (08:15):
Yeah, yeah. There's something also, I love that after that fight they go get a hotel room together. 

Speaker 2 (08:23):
Exactly. They have the hotel fight and then they have the awkward hotel room and all of the gay subtext is right there. It's absolutely right there. And of course the science fiction plot interrupts, so no, they're just going to the hotel room so they can figure their stuff out and if the plot line allows us not to worry too much about the homosexual undertones, but it's totally there. 

Speaker 1 (08:47):
Yeah, speaking of that, it is something I noticed and then we're kind of hopping around the movie a little bit, so sorry, but that was kind of something also I was sort of noticing a lot of eighties movies are pretty notoriously homophobic and I was kind of surprised that to me, I don't know if I'm just seeing things where they're not there, but I was totally amazed that it seemed like an intentional choice to have Holly's neighbors be this gay couple. And I was like, oh, that's a really just specific thing that I don't know any other way to interpret it as that, but it was pretty non-judgmental. It was just kind of like, yeah, that's her neighbors. I thought that was kind of interesting and something you just don't see in a 1980s film usually. 

Speaker 2 (09:34):
Well, this is a pretty good portrayal of Los Angeles in my opinion. It really is a Los Angeles film and trying to cut between the different parts of Los Angeles, both the slums, the paranoid delusion, dark corners as well as the Hollywood hills suburbs, and of course the media broadcasting institutions themselves. So you get a nice cross section of the city. But interestingly, I think if you look at another dimension, which is not even visual, the music is John Carpenter because John Carpenter is usually the one writing his own music. You have this kind of blues tune that accompanies through out just a real quiet baseline. And that goes from the very beginning through much of the film, which aligns us with Rowdy Roddy Piper, the drifter working class guy. And the interesting, I think it's very interesting is that the film strongly aligns us with this kind of working class view of reality so that then we have our allegiance with them against the yuppies later on. And then I think that subverted at the end, maybe we are the yuppies with that surprise ending and we can maybe look at that later on. 

Speaker 1 (11:05):
So I guess, I know you just sort of looked at Hank's work, sort of experienced it for the first time just a little bit ago. So was there anything immediately connections you made between the film when you looked at that work? 

Speaker 2 (11:23):
Yeah, I like to again look at the all Tian distinction between ideological and repressive state apparatus from the seventies, which is to say a repressive state apparatus is the police in the military. And you see that in the work. I mean the police, if you look at the work public enemy black and gold from 2017, that this is an image of a child, black child, faceless looking back, scared at these advancing soldiers. And that right there is the repressive state apparatus and we see that in they live. I mean, I think the storming of the resistance hideout sequence is horrifying and very realistic. I mean, you have to think, John Carpenter's a horror director and he's doing the horror of both black experience of this country and communist gay experience of getting your club busted up or even hearkening back to other fascist regimes. The wall explodes and they begin to murder people willy nilly. 

Speaker 2 (12:37):
All of the protagonists make it out with their various guns in tech as it turns into an action movie at that point, really, if it hasn't already, but it is horrifying moment. And I think that that specter of police violence from the repressive state apparatus is there, but it doesn't function as well as the ideological state apparatus, which is the obey signs. And Hank is also dealing with that. So Hank Will Thomas has a Nike symbol tattooed on a black person's head who's then faceless. And so there's a corporate branding, an idea of selling out to corporations, to sports, to empty phrases and slogans and that these work in concert so that you've got the violence apparatus over here and then the media and sort of the ideology of the state, which can be propagated through the church, through schools and other organs. So they work in tandem and of course we also see that and they live both the obey billboards and the television as well as the cops who are there if you get out of the line. 

Speaker 1 (14:00):
Yeah, I was thinking about the messaging that comes across and one of the things I love about it is how you'll see the images and then the sort of hidden message once he puts on the glasses and they're usually pretty related to what the image was, and it's sort of about the kind of subtext that's being communicated. Another Body of Hank's work is all about taking advertising that mostly features black people and removing the sort of text and only letting the subtext exist. So he'll remove all of the digitally take out the actual advertisement, so you don't really know necessarily what was being advertised and you can just sort of sit with those images and see what this is saying. That was sort of a response. The Nike branded image was sort of his first phase of those of the branded series where he was making images in the style of advertisement and then he thought like, well, let's go and just let's look at the real deal here. And so we began taking those and just removing elements of it and they sort of really reveal so much when you look at them without being distracted by whatever cigarettes being advertised, you realize what is really being sold to you. And I was just thinking about that as I watched it this time with the idea of dog whistle politics in mind, especially the way things are said without saying the thing. Well, we didn't really say it, but you didn't have to say it because everybody got the message and it was communicated quite clearly. 

Speaker 2 (15:46):
We live in a meme era and memes function on subtext over text, right? There may be a text on there, but that's just for an orientation point. The emotional core is going to be in the content and its sort of overall disposition. And if you bring American race politics into it, or even global race politics, and I'm thinking of theorists such as w b Deis and Franson and the idea of the double consciousness, a very old thought in modern African and Afro European African-American thinking, where the colonizing process basically asks you every day to continuously sell out who you are and to sell yourself out to what you think you have to live two lives, both a life that lets you survive, which is an inauthentic one, and your authentic one, which shrivels because you've got the second life. And so what I think is interesting also about this subtext is that it comes back to the American, the uniquely American advertising and propaganda industry. 

Speaker 2 (17:07):
I mean, whenever we say word propaganda, we often think of Nazi and Soviet examples and don't think deeply about America's innovation in that particular category. Edward Bernas being the most important figure on that front. Nephew comes over, he's raised in New York and he's the guy who advertised women's smoking through the suffragette movement. He's the one who did propaganda for United Fruit. He's able to sell everything from products to political campaigns to pretty harsh and harmful ideas. And Bernay's work is of course premised on Freud. So we are not conscious consumers of ads, we're subconscious consumers. We get the emotional content, we get the point from an immediate read of the visual image way before we interpret the text or something. So if you've got this text that's stark in there, it says Obey or in Hank Willis Thomas's his I Am, amen work at subverting that very, I would say American advertising position of you put an evocative image or something that's saying something subtextual. And then the text is, oh, by the way product, you think about any Super Bowl advertisement, right? 30 seconds of someone sitting in an office, then violent act happens to them. Then product that was very prevalent in about a decade worth of advertising. Now why do that? Right? Well, the product, selling the product is supposedly the point, but the subtext is even more important than anything. 

Speaker 1 (19:10):
I had this sort of revelation when I went to the world of Koch museum in Atlanta, and before you can go into the sort of museum proper, they're like, okay, we're going to sit, you're go into this theater and we're going to show you a five minute film about Coke. And I thought, okay, this is probably going to be about the history of Coca-Cola. I'm going to begin in the turn of the century, and that's what I was imagining. And instead it starts, and it's this basically a five minute advertisement in which all of these families are sort of doing different things like, oh, somebody's coming home from the military and somebody's having a big hockey game. A couple's going on a hot air balloon and he's ready to propose for her. And they're all kind of building to this big moment of the proposal, the walk in the door. And you don't exactly know what's going on in each of these scenes, but they're sort of intercut and they're all going to come together. And so then you watch all these things happen, and then at the very end it's like Coke. And you're like, what? That wasn't about Coke at all, 

Speaker 2 (20:17):
Right? 

Speaker 1 (20:19):
And so I was sitting there, what am I witnessing? This is so insane. This is amazing. And then they go, okay, now you go into the museum, there's no explanation of it. And so then you go into the museum and I see this really early Coke ad and it's a girl ice skating and the 1910s or whatever, and it just drink coke. And I'm like, oh yeah, this is all they've ever done. And it's like their genius move is they don't try to sell you the product through the advertisement, they're actually selling you something else, and the Coke is just, they're selling you an idea of happiness. And then if you happen to drink the Coke, that's great. It really actually, I don't know if they intended it to be a lesson in that, but it was a lesson in that for me, 

Speaker 2 (21:05):
And I think they live and Hank Thomas's work are along these similar lines, which is like, well, there is an actual message here, and that is you have no agency. You are, the world is beset by violence, not only literal violence, but also this kind of symbolic violence. And we agree to it every day and it takes these manifestations in all these different forms, but the most important thing is the disposition that you go into encounter it so that then you got the Coke ad that then it's like, okay, well the wallpaper is good. Okay, there's a Coke. This billboard may say obey underneath it, but I can unsee it and see the product because then ultimately I want to think, I do have agency, 

Speaker 1 (21:58):
One of my favorite moments just in the relationship between the image you're seeing and then the sort of hidden message is in the very first scene where he puts on the glasses and he's walking around the city and he stops at a newsstand. I noticed this viewing, there's a magazine behind him and actual, one of the actual headlines on the magazine said, it's a golf magazine and it says, let TV teach you. And that could have been one of the sort of hidden messages, but there it is, and it's like an actual magazine cover from the eighties and you're like, oh, wow. Some of this is so direct, it's kind of insane. 

Speaker 2 (22:42):
And those who are really within a certain school of marketing, they are reading psychoanalysis, they are doing focus groups in which they hand Crays to adults and say, draw whatever, draw happiness, draw curling up on a rainy day and they just see what they produce. And then you have maybe three or four dozen focus groups doing these inane creative activities. And it costs quite a bit of money to do that, this kind of extensive market research. But then you can bubble it up and let all your creatives work with this material and really feel like you are tapping into some sort of subconscious vein. 

Speaker 2 (23:23):
Like I said, this is pervasive in American advertising, but particular in the eighties, what happens is the financialization of everything that now we're still seeing the effects of 40 years later, the eighties definitely produced our president the eighties definitely produced our current financial system in which you have millions of microtransactions every second happening just between computers and sort of on top of this layer of incomprehensible economic activity is the real economy. And the masters of this are these in the eighties, these yuppies people who kind of understand what's going on. People are being sold empty bills of goods or basically being the sellouts in the banquet scene who are basically trading the entire future of humanity or the sustained human project in which we take care of each other for these stock bonuses. 

Speaker 2 (24:29):
So that's mirrored in the film, but then you get that also in the eighties reality. And of course right-wing people have interpreted this film as, oh, these are all the liberal messages that are underneath all of the, and Carpenter came flat out and said, no, I meant the yuppies, I meant the corporate hacks. He's very direct that he said, this is a class, a film out class, and he a working class heroes who have to take on the corporations who really are evil, not only in evil in the way that we think they are, but they're evil because they're aliens and they are buying out humans at an incredibly cheap rate. And I think that cheapness of the selling out in the eighties is where Carpenter is going with the film. 

Speaker 1 (25:17):
Yeah, I worried about that actually. I was thinking about the movie before I re-watched it this time, and I was wondering about that because I think it's a risk that a lot of satire takes is that it can be really easily misinterpreted by people. It's kind of like that Archie Bunker effect where half the audience is going like, oh my gosh, Archie Bunker, what a jackass. And then the other half is like, that's right, Archie, you tell it like it is. And so you have that two people able to see the same thing for different reasons. And I had heard that there were even neo-Nazi groups who were really into they live and trying to show that, whoa, this is just a Jewish conspiracy. And that was really, really upset carpenter over that. So it is a risk I think you take when you make something like this that it can be kind of, everybody fears the authority when it's not on their side, right? So you could just as easily watch this from a really right wing perspective and be like, it's just the Obama administration. So I think that's where it can be a little dodgy because everybody can see it in, everybody can feel disenfranchised at some point. 

Speaker 2 (26:35):
And I would say the right's main victory in the last 20 years has been total co-optation of every possible leftist tactic or talking point to serve a very specific role and everything from identity politics to the substance of left-wing organizing or kind of anarchist resistance. 

Speaker 1 (26:58):
And I mean, actually I think that's something I do like about the movie that I think there is some nuance to it as well, because I think the bank scene in particular, I think it's very easy to imagine how just a person who's going to the bank is reading this scene as well. There's the level that Roddy Piper's character is experiencing it where he sees all these horrible monsters and shooting them, and then there's a person who's just watching this madman bust in and murder a bunch of people. And it's the same thing with the office scene later. It's the same kind of like, oh, this is kind of terrifying for them. And I like that he leaves that in there because it makes it a little uncomfortable and a little ambiguous instead of just all the way, 

Speaker 2 (27:49):
Oh, yeah, I think that the shooting in the film is quite ambiguous, and again, the ending is partially abrupt and unsatisfying because we are partially complicit in this, right? As soon as Nada, as Roddy Piper's character is able to sort the world into good and bad, which again, as we know from the accomplices later on, that doesn't work. So carpenter is being like, okay, I know you think if you just shoot all the capitalists, it'll work, but it doesn't quite work that way. So that is one subliminal sort of plot line. There is, yes, violence works in the short term, but not remotely in the long term because not only are these aliens, the owners of everything, but they're also the drones, they're also people hanging out in the bar. They're everybody, right? The aliens are fully integrated into society. And so this kind of genocidal tactic of just shooting whichever alien you see is not going to work. 

Speaker 2 (29:00):
And so of course he realizes this and says, okay, we need to go after the source of the signal, because of course there's a Hollywood McGuffin that says, if you just get the McGuffin, then everything is going to solve itself. The solution is much stranger. What it does is it collapses the signal. Then people all wake up simultaneously, and then you've got the news anchors who are kind of shocked that they're ugly and on the screen like this. And then we cut to the bar where there's just a regular guy having a drink. And then of course, most shockingly a woman having sex with partner and her partner says, what's wrong, honey? And that's it. So we don't get this kind of revolution, which is actually what happens in the story that this is based on that eight o'clock in the morning is the title of the short story where both destroys the signal, but he is scheduled by basically the aliens to die of a heart attack at eight o'clock in the morning the next day. And he does because he still can't escape the system. But then people overthrow the aliens, yay. And John Carpenter says, nah, nah, things are weirder. 

Speaker 1 (30:19):
Yeah, I love the ending. I mean, I love the idea of the ending. I don't know if I love the actual that final scene with the Lady because it's the only nudity in the movie, and it is. It's not that it's nudity that bothers me that it's framed, it's out of porkies or something. It's so weird, and it just seems very out of tone of the rest of the movie. Then at the same time, part of what I like about this movie is it is a little schlocky at times. I love that it's take itself super seriously, and I think that actually helps the medicine go down a little bit. I spent this last time watching it thinking a lot about Roddy Piper's performance and what I think about it. Is this good? Is he bad? I don't know. I mean, I came to the decision that I think he's really quite good in some scenes usually that don't involve him opening his mouth and the minute he has to deliver lines, it's pretty flat, and he delivers his sort of action movie catchphrases in the funniest flattest way possible. Mama don't like tattle tails. But then at the same time, I don't know if I want somebody to make those lines sound cool because I think that actually makes the movie more interesting that this person is sort of like, it's a kid just reciting what they've seen on TV or something. It comes across as so weird that it's actually makes the movie better to me than if somebody was really giving it their best asta baby. 

Speaker 2 (32:00):
Yes, it's anti naturalistic in a way. I mean, it both takes a side of the working class and then it's not like, but then it's not like we're going to portray an authentic portrait, sorry, we're not going to do an authentic portrait of the working class. We're going to do a kind of satire, but you get it. 

Speaker 1 (32:22):
And 

Speaker 2 (32:24):
I am thinking too of Sam Rainey's Evil Dead Too, which came out just a year before this, or Naked Lunch by Cronenberg two, which is like 1990 I think. So this is a complex of films in which you have this sort of solip cystic guy figuring out how things really are and then performing acts of violence, but then it's a satire and not necessarily celebrating or condoning them, but more being like, what a weird psychological state we're all in. And I think that insecurity at the end of the eighties is not recognized as much. I think people are now, especially given how 2020 feels, people look back at these times as if they were stable, and of course they're not. I mean, the savings and loan corruption in the late eighties, which happened during the production of this film or right before it exploded, banking and consolidated banking in the same way that we're seeing consolidations happening due to coronavirus. 

Speaker 2 (33:34):
And that's even mentioned in the film when he goes to the unemployment office and the woman at the unemployment office says, 13 banks have just closed this week. And that's of course referring to the savings and loan scandal, basically saying there's no money and there's no money in the system, there's no jobs, and since there's no jobs, you're off defend for yourself, buddy. Even though we say, oh, the boomers had a good, and there was still social safety nets and things, their tent city still got bulldozed, and the precarity in the film is still pretty stark. And if you look at a lot of other alternative cinema of sort of the American cannon, you see that poverty and that desperation right away. It's an American epic rather than something isolated to this year. Post 2008, the 

Speaker 1 (34:30):
Last time I watched this movie was, I'm guessing in the early two thousands. I was trying to remember exactly how long it had been, but I am pretty sure I watched it on an actual physical D V D that came to me via mail. So back when Netflix still did that. So that's how, at least somewhere in that ballpark, maybe 2008 or something like that. And I definitely viewed it very differently this time, and specifically because I was viewing it through the lens of Hank's work. I couldn't help but pull out a lot of things, ideas about race in the movie. I heard you said something about that earlier. Is that something that's always existed for you in the movie or something you've begun to see more recently? 

Speaker 2 (35:20):
I watched the movie as a Keith David fan. I mean, I was already, as I watched the Spawn, the H B O Spawn Animated series, which is just absolutely stunning. And then of course he was in Requiem for a Dream as Little John, very iconic and performance there. And of course his role in the thing. And so my sense is, is that he gives a startlingly moving performance for, and that then he is capped in the head shortly before the end of the film so that nada can become this white savior. And of course, you have a dual white savior action or Nada first saves him from the ignorance of the mundane with the sunglasses. And of course that's that first battle, but then Holly then kills him, but there's no backstory about is she a collaborator? What is she? And so she just seems like malicious, 

Speaker 1 (36:32):
I guess I interpreted as she was a double agent because at the time when we see her appear at the little community meeting or whatever that's happening, we kind of feel like, oh, she's a genuine, she's had her eyes open because he left the glasses there. She discovers them. Oh, it's like you're sort of following this story going, oh, okay, she put on the glasses. Now she realizes she's joining them. And she tells them straight up, there's nothing wrong with the signal from cable 54, it's not coming from the station. So she straight up lies to them at that moment. So then once we get there, we realize like, oh no, she was playing them the whole time. And I think it's sort of after the meeting and everything where we first see that there are these human collaborators who are aware of it at the banquet scene. So then it kind of, I think makes her role in that make more sense when she sort of realize that I love her in this. I think she's so fun. I can't remember that actress's name. I also just know her as evil Lynn for Masters of the Universe. Yeah, of 

Speaker 2 (37:47):
Course. Yeah. As soon as you see your eyes, you're like, oh, it's evil. Lynn from Masters of the Universe 

Speaker 1 (37:53):
Talking blue eyes. 

Speaker 2 (37:54):
Yeah, she's 

Speaker 1 (37:59):
So great. I mean, she's so good at communicating this person who's obviously freaked out by this man who has kidnapped her, but she's also always in control of the situation. And it's one of my favorite things about this movie in that scene with her and Roddy in her house where I'm actually more afraid for him because I can tell she knows what she is doing and she is 100% smarter than him. She has the upper hand and she knows it, and you're just ready for her to strike. And when it happens, it is so good. 

Speaker 2 (38:43):
But you can read it as this class allegory and Meg Foster is the actress's name. So you basically have a situation where you have a white working class and a black working class guy who form an alliance, and that the alliance that produces the glasses, the resistance movements is also multiracial 

Speaker 2 (39:10):
Much more sort of cross class. There's various people from various walks of life, intellectuals, workers, religious figures, all coming together to face this threat, which is these kind of utopian community idea of this is what resistance looks like. And of course that community is blown up or more or less totally annihilated. And these two working class guys are dealing with their homoerotic, whatever, but also forming their own battle team and means of confronting their personal problems, their external problems altogether. They're figuring out the nature of the world together. I mean, that's intoxicating. And then of course, the problem is this woman is still in not as mind. And of course he trusts her enough to let her betray them. And of course, she's like the middle class, so the working class is going along. And then the problem is the middle class keeps siding with the wrong. They keep S citing into their class interests, what are they doing? And I see that as sort of classical, a classical Marxian idea of it, but then the ending is not Marxian at all. It is a different construct. We have a martyrdom Jesus on the cross, or rather a Roddy Piper dying in front of the satellite having saved everybody with disconcerting effects. So it doesn't produce necessarily a class revolution. What it means is that, okay, we're all in this complicated mess together, and it'll probably be more of the same now that the has fallen. 

Speaker 1 (41:05):
Yeah, I was thinking about the sort of very, it seemed very consciously multiracial in the camp and in the resistance group. Again, because I was looking at it through this lens ends. I was very aware of that this viewing in a way that I don't think I had been in the past. And I was talking about imagining about Roddy's casting in this movie, and I started kind of being like, well, why isn't Keith David the lead in this? And it was a thing I kind of started imagining how would that movie play differently if Keith David was the lead? He certainly the most capable actor in the movie, I think, who could clearly handle it. He's the best. He's the most fun to watch. He's so good in every scene. But it is interesting. I mean, I think I would have perceived it immediately as a movie about race if Keith David was the lead. And that just kind of goes to show how ingrained the idea that whiteness is default. If I see Roddy Piper in this movie, I can interpret it all as like, oh, it doesn't necessarily have to do with race The minute the actor would, if the lead actor was black, I would immediately think about it as race related. And I think it would be perceived differently by the public too. I think something like the bank scene would play very differently if Keith David walked in with a gun and started blowing away white people, right? 

Speaker 2 (42:40):
Yep. Yeah, exactly. I think the fantasies hinge on a strong allegiance with this white male working class character who then Keith David can be his sidekick with heart, which is problematic. But it would've been even more problematic if Keith David had been not only the lead, but had been sort of a magical negro figure who was then granting special sight to white people. But I guess the other thing is ultimately would've been a different, maybe even more interesting film with Keith. David. We're the lead if you just change all of the lines. But we often, whenever we say the word working class in America, we almost always mean the white working class. And those who are in among working class spaces recognize that they're extremely multiracial. And that I think the sort of conscious composition that John Carpenter's working with is both part of his larger legacy of being very consciously multiracial and urban in his casting in general. But here in particular, if he wanted to represent the working class and then made a whole lot of white people forming solidarity with each other, I think it would not have been true to what he was looking for. And that the working class as a construct is a myth we keep telling ourselves versus what the actual demographics are. 

Speaker 1 (44:23):
Well, and we brought up the gala scene a few times and that sort of idea of the selling out, and I couldn't help but feel implicated 

Speaker 1 (44:37):
While watching that because I'm sort of thinking about the way nonprofits like museums have to throw these big galas and how we align ourselves with the mega wealthy to survive and that sort of relationship that we have. And it's like, oh yeah, this is hitting a little closer to home. I think that moment, and again, thinking about when I watched it 15 years ago or something, I don't really even remember that scene. I didn't even remember that moment in the movie. And now it really sticks out to me because I'm just at a different point in my life, I guess, and sort of thinking about different things now, 

Speaker 2 (45:20):
Baby. I also was thinking of the macropolitics of Covid and the universities where the universities are both cash strapped enough that they have to charge full tuition and try to bring students back and also send them away as soon as clusters develop, which everybody obviously knew. And one thing I like about both Hank Willis Thomas's work as well as they live, is that it is playing with this obviousness, right? They're like, the subtext here is obvious. Why aren't you doing anything right? Or the power relations are obvious here. Why aren't you doing anything? And then you can be like, well, it's hard because we're all complicit. But then you realize, okay, you realize that it's more uncomfortable than you'd think, and that's where I think the ending is so effective. And two, then the film can realize this nice fantasy of you blowing everybody away, which is again, its own chime of is that really the fantasy you want to live out? 

Speaker 2 (46:33):
You can't think about the consequences of that. And there's where I think the social critique of the viewer happens that you can both enjoy this violence and are also implicated in it. And that trope continues, obviously through the nineties with Tarantino and other sort of ultraviolet films, both playing with the fact that you enjoy this spectacle and also that it is thoroughly dehumanizing and also problematic fantasy. So I think Carpenter, Ramey Cronenberg are all on that particular wavelength in the eighties exploring the depths of human violence and the borders of what is humanity per se. And then in the case of they live seeing the thin sheen of symbols that we put over it, that then we all ideologically and say, oh, that's okay. It's okay. Things are fine. 

Speaker 1 (47:34):
Yeah, I mean, there's so many things in our lives that we accept until people make us aware of it and point it out to us. And then it's like, oh my gosh. I remember the first time I realized how often I had heard a girl as a derogatory statement as a child and growing up and just accepted it and never really questioned it. Like, oh, that's crazy that we just say you're like 50% of the population, and everybody knows that that's an insult. That's an insane idea. And when that was pointed out to me, it just kind of blew my mind because it's just like, oh, this is a really powerful thing that's happening and it can be really invisible to us. And that idea of invisibility, I think is so key to this. And I think you're right. It's really similar to what Hank Willis Thomas is doing, is showing us the things that are invisible but are right in front of us. 

Speaker 2 (48:35):
Well, even the words crazy and insane are words that have been mobilized against populations. We use them to say, well, this is wild and out of control. And so there's this, I'm not playing gotcha with you. I'm just pointing out that in the absolute everyday speech that we have, there is a subtext that is quite violent and infused with systems of control, and we just have to push back in the ways we can. But there's a lot of living with it, and I think there's living with it in they live, and there's definitely living with it in Hank Willis Thomas's work. I think that this is a artist who understands the weird universe of brands and corporate marketing mixed with absurd inequality and violence. 

Speaker 1 (49:33):
Well, thank you so much for chatting with me about They Live. You can visit Cincinnati art museum.org/hank Willis Thomas to learn about more programs that allow us to lift up our voices to listen and work towards positive change. 

Speaker 3 (49:57):
Thank you for listening to Art Palace. We hope you'll be inspired to come visit the Cincinnati Art Museum and have conversations about the Art Yourself. Special exhibitions right now are Women Breaking Boundaries and Hank Willis Thomas, all Things Being Equal, the Museum is currently open during our regular operating hours, but please visit Cincinnati art museum.org to register for your free timed admission tickets and to reserve tickets for Hank Willis Thomas. All Things Equal, you can follow the museum on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and we also have an Art Palace Facebook group. Our theme song is, oh, frond Music How? By Balal. And Always, please Rate and Review Us to help others find the show. I'm Russell, and this has been Art Palace produced by the Cincinnati Art Museum.