The Pervert's They Live: An Intertextual Analysis Of The Film

In his film The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher, cultural critic and Marxist intellectual, discusses his ideas on fantasy, reality, sexuality, subjectivity, desire, materiality and cinematic form. One of the film’s he analyzes is They Live, a John Carpenter film released in 1988 about a man named John Nada, a wanderer without meaning in his life, who discovers a pair of sunglasses capable of showing the world the way it truly is. Working like x-ray vision, the glasses allow Nada to see past the propaganda and initial meaning behind the advertisements and images that litter his world. He concludes that the government and media are comprised of subliminal messages meant to keep the population subdued. In the film, most of the social elite are skull faced aliens bent on world domination. What is this film saying?
They Live is a critique of ideology. According to Slavoj, when Nada puts the glasses on he can see the dictatorship in democracy. The invisible order which sustains the population’s apparent freedom.
In Judith Butler’s book, she describes subjecthood as a cyclical paradox. The agency of the subject appears to be an effect of subordination. Before the subject is even born there is a set of conditions that precedes it, effecting and subordinating the subject from the outside. From the days of our birth we are immersed in the political situation in which we are born. We have a name, gender, class position, and a multitude of other classifications before we even get to take our first breath of air. We are born into corruption. So how do we imagine our way out of it? Especially when following the rules and going along with the dominant ideology is the only way to gain recognition as a