By Travis Johnson
It’s a terrible feeling when you find out something you love is being praised by awful people due to some weird misinterpretation or alternative take. It must be ten times worse if it’s something you’ve actually made, so we really feel for cult director and now music icon John Carpenter, who is rather incensed that his prescient AF 1988 sci fi satire, They Live, is being lauded by neo-Nazis as an allegory for Jewish control of the world.
THEY LIVE is about yuppies and unrestrained capitalism. It has nothing to do with Jewish control of the world, which is slander and a lie.
— John Carpenter (@TheHorrorMaster) January 4, 2017
Set in a near-future where the gap between the rich and the poor has widened (sounds familiar), They Live sees Rowdy Roddy Piper’s drifter, Nada, discover that we’ve been secretly invaded by alien capitalist raiders who have basically engineered our culture to enable them to secretly plunder our natural resources. It’s a great film, an angry, low budget middle finger thrust at Reaganomics and corporate America that only gets more relevant with each passing year.
However, it has emerged that the film has become a favourite of the far right, who see it as an allegory for the world being secretly controlled by, well, you know the drill. This has resulted in an utterly bizarre situation where racist trolls are telling Carpenter he’s wrong about the meaning of his own film.
https://twitter.com/shodandice/status/816524192476708864
Sadly, this isn’t even a new phenomenon, with posts on terrible white supremacist cesspool Stormfront praising the movie dating back to 2008. However, the recent cultural lurch to the right has seen this sort of thing gain mainstream prominence, as Alt Right pundits feel they have license to spout the most ridiculous, hateful nonsense in the name of “free speech” or “the lulz”, and for some weird reason we’re listening. We’re not even through the first week of 2017, team. It’s only going to get worse from here.
