They Live stars Rowdy Roddy Piper, who died July 31. It’s one of the greatest political sci-fi films of all time, and fittingly, it’s the opening film analyzed by Slavoj Žižek in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology.
Piper’s homeless character John Nada finds a box of sunglasses while squatting in an abandoned church.
And when he puts one of them on walking the LA streets, he discovers something weird. That these glasses function like Critique of Ideology glasses… When you put the glasses on, you see dictatorship in democracy. It’s the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.
The full documentary by Sophie Fiennes is currently available in the US on Netflix streaming. It’s a brisk stroll through cinema through the lens of ideology, and it’s a great companion to The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema by the same filmmaker.
