They Live Movie Analysis

In the film They Live, the director John Carpenter criticized 80s America on how it treated poverty and the working class. President Reagan established the idea of supply side and trickle down economy through Reagonomics. This was used to fix stagflation, which is a combination of inflation and unemployment. Through his film, Carpenter shows what the effects were from Reagonomics in the city of Los Angeles. Carpenter’s stance is that he is against it due to the fact that poverty is growing while arguably only the wealthy and elite are benefiting from it. John Carpenter tells the misfortunes of the poor caused by Reagonomics, and Nada is the protagonist and is an example of a homeless drifter that is able to find a union job in Los Angeles. There he meets a fellow construction worker who also left his hometown in search of a job to provide for his family. He explains that the steel company he had worked for had laid off the workers jobless yet executives gave themselves raises. Nada understands his friends situation, but still says that he
The idea was that lower taxes meant more people would spend and create an economic growth as well as having a higher tax revenue. Carpenter was able to capture the consumerism aspect in his film once the protagonist was able to see hidden, subliminal messages in advertisements. Carpenter shared the distrust of this era like many others as well as questioning the Republican agenda. The tax cuts quickly became questionable as alongside them came a deficit. It was reported that more than 170 billion in 1984 the deficit was nearly triple the level of any other administration (1). Also, Democratic nominee Mondale warned that the deficit would cause high interest rates, collapse the dollar, and cause a severe recession (1). The economic theory of Reagan’s administration was upheld due to its robust growth that economists promised