I’ve come here to chew bubblegum and read Althusser, and I’m all out of bubblegum

A Film Review of They Live filtered through Althusser's concept of ideology

Released in the twilight of the Reagan and Thatcher Administrations, John Carpenter’s They Live offers a biting satirical critique of the era's dominant ideology: neoliberal capitalism. Wrapped up in this are the austerity politics of Reaganomics, American imperialism at the apex of the Cold War, the increasing corporatization of American Institutions coupled with the hegemony of the American dollar (This is Your God), the conglomeration of media and the perversion of class consciousness as manifested in the American Dream (Steinbeck’s temporarily embarrassed millionaires).

The film wastes no time in portraying the material conditions of Reagan’s America and the attending ideological apparatuses at play: poverty, unemployment, crime, and the collective anxieties as represented in the street preacher’s forewarning (more on him later) juxtaposed with glowing images of America’s consciousness: the soaring eagle, cowboys and Indians, Mount Rushmore, sports, a yearning desire for fame- all under the watchful eye of a police helicopter (Foucault’s panopticon, Wolin’s inverted totalitarianism).

We are introduced to Justiceville, a homeless camp where mutual aid and class solidarity are fomenting. We meet Frank, whose dissertation on the decline of the American Steel Industry (through the offshoring of labour, globalization, the OPEC crisis) reveals an undercurrent of proletariat frustation: “If they close one more factory, we should take a sledge to their fancy fucking foreign cars”. This is contrasted by the Drifter’s affirmation, “I believe in America''.

To the discerning eye, we already see a decidedly Marxist lens being applied by the filmmakers, something very rare for an ‘80s Hollywood production. Indeed the primary plot device, a pair of sunglasses which allow the wearer to see the “the truth” and free themselves of ideology disseminated by some outside (alien) force, is a thoroughly Marxist idea. That being said, the use of this device as a means to uncover the prevailing neoliberal ideology comes across as too simplistic and naive. This is why I’ve chosen to use Louis Althusser’s concept of ideology as a vehicle for critique.

Althusser takes issue with Marx’s simplistic definitions of ideology, namely that ideology is “the system of the ideas and representations that dominate the mind of man or a social group”. For Althusser, ideology isn’t an imaginary construction but rather “a ‘representation’ of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions”. This means that “Individuals aren’t passive dupes or victims of ideological falsehoods that descend from on high”. Moreover, Althusser argues that ideology has a material existence because "an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices". In this way, it is the individual, or subject, who reproduces ideology via “the actions of his material practice” - rituals, gestures, symbols, traditions.

For Althusser, this relies on the centrality of the concrete individual as subject vis a vis the mechanism of interpellation. "All ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects" and we either respond or don’t, making us good or bad subjects. Either way, we are still interacting with the ideological process, we are enmeshed, there is no outside: “That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological".

Good subjects then, accept their interpellation as reality, even though there are multiple conflicting demands made by multiple ideological state apparatuses- religion, the media, family, school, sports, arts etc. (which is similar to Gramsci’s idea of cultural hegemony). These (free) subjects “shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection 'all by himself”. Bad subjects then, are reigned in by repressive state apparatuses when needed- police, courts, government, military.

This brings me to They Live. While it’s not that the film challenges Althusser, but rather a reading of Althusser challenges the film. That being said, there are certainly some aspects which might be seen as supporting his theories, especially early on in the film (imagine instead an Italian neo-realist remake of They Live where nothing happens!). The preacher, the TV, the hacker, the transmitter, even the watches the aliens use could be seen as interpellation. The “sell-outs” could be good subjects. One could even argue that the glasses are exposing the neoliberal ideology whose pretence rests on the non–ideological. Or that the act of putting on the Hoffman lenses (reference to Abbie Hoffman?) is a material reality within an ideological apparatus of its own (the revolution).

But at its core, Althusser’s concepts of ideology are in opposition to the film's central thesis. My main contention is that the film suggests there is a way to be outside of ideology, to find the truth, and that we are being duped by the neoliberal capitalist ideology. In doing so, and by externalising capitalism as some alien force, it lets us off the hook in the ways in which we reproduce it freely. It leans too heavily on repressive state apparatuses.

The film uses the preacher and hacker to set the trap: “They have blinded us to the truth”, “outside the limit of our sight, they're feeding off us”, “This world may have blinded me, but the Lord let me see”, “In their repressive society, we are their unwitting accomplices. Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled into a trance”. It is only through some sort of accident that the truth is revealed, some internal contradiction of capitalism. It’s only through some magical Ray-Ban™ sunglasses that the ruling ideology is discovered.

“No independent thought”, “stay asleep”, “Do not question authority” are all ‘truths’ revealed by the glasses. As we later learn, it’s the result of a single (how convenient), centralised alien transmitter- a blatant repressive state apparatus itself. Anyone, like the drifter, who can see, is met with extreme police violence (and only violence can overthrow the ruling class). It even takes violence to convince your fellow proletariat to “wake up out of their dream”. But for Althusser, this wouldn’t be needed. The subject works by himself.

If ideology has no history, if we are always in it, then what was before the aliens arrived? Rousseau’s state of nature? What was before neoliberalism? Before capitalism? Or “maybe they’ve always been with us” as Frank muses. Turns out we are given an exact date, 1958, when the aliens began changing our atmosphere (the Golden Marker of the Anthropocene). What is after? What happens when the transmitter is destroyed (Fukuyama’s End of History)? For Althusser, Ideology has no outside. That the ideology disseminated in the film is alien is anathema to this understanding.

That being said, the following quote could warrant more inspection: “They're free-enterprisers. The earth is just another developing planet. Their third world”. One could make the connection that this is evidence for the material existence of ideology through the ISAs, but Rosa Luxembourg and by extension David Harvey’s idea of accumulation by dispossession and how it relates to colonialism might be better suited here. The proceeding line in the sequence brings me back to Althusser, “They want benign indifference”. They want to dupe us.

Ideology isn’t a dream or an illusion. It’s our imagined relation to real conditions. That capitalism is foreign, outside of us, not a product of our own ideological process of social reproduction does not align with Althusser’s ideas. Sure the media is an ISA, but it’s not our technology. It’s not our media. The TV broadcasters were aliens all along. We are free. We are awake. We are left off the hook.