They Live, We Sleep (Part I)

I’ve been spending more and more time looking at movies lately, from synchromysticism to detailing the layers of various embedded elements. One item I may not have addressed in detail previously is the two levels some movies contain: the surface story, meant to be consumed by the masses as “entertainment,” and the subsurface, where the real story is told.

As I already covered in Fight Club Revisited, sometimes you get a movie where the surface story and subsurface are both on paré excellence. Today, I choose to focus on an old movie, where the surface story is simply a campy science fiction movie, but below the surface, you have one of the most illuminating pieces of education ever told in cinema. This film is They Live.

This movie is a must see. And, worth repeating, especially if you saw it a long time ago, and are now one of those who are looking for truth, then you must see this again. The movie is based on a short story entitled “8 O’clock in the Morning” by Ray Nelson. Nelson worked with the futurist Philip K. Dick, whose old science fiction novels are now becoming the reality growing around us, so we should be in for a treat.

The movie begins and we meet the protagonist, Nada, played by former pro wrestler, Rowdy Roddy Piper. {*1} He is lost, wandering and in dire economic straits. We hear that he left Denver, where the banks are closing. So, he’s moved on, in a futile effort, to escape yet another planned economic collapse. {*2}

The choice of Denver is interesting from a few perspectives. One, by being at the beginning of the movie, Denver, where there are vast underground complexes around the area, and as well, beneath Denver Airport, serves as a subtle hint, that if you don’t look beneath the surface story, you will miss out on what this movie is about. Two, the disturbing murals at Denver International, show a theme related to this movie, with some alien hybrid wiping out humanity. Three, the entire Colorado area was a virtual ground zero of the S&L collapse, where Bush and his cronies raped this country’s citizenry for millions.

Back to the movie, our protagonist sees a “crazy” blind preacher stands on the corner, shouting at passersby:

They use their tongues to deceive you. The venom of snakes is on their lips. They have taken the hearts and minds of our leaders. They have recruited the rich and the powerful. And they have blinded us to the truth.

Our human spirit is corrupted. Why do we worship greed? Because, outside the limit of our sight, they’re feeding off us. Perched on top of us from birth to death, are our owners. Our owners! They have us. They control us. They are our masters.

And, he closes it off with an all-important message to the viewers:

Wake up! They’re all about you. All around you.

The police come and grab the preacher and hustle him away. Nada, gives out our typical programmed apathetic response. He shrugs his shoulders and moves on.

The above speech tells us a lot about what is going to happen in the movie, but more importantly, what is presently going on all around us. The “venom of snakes” could be a reference to a few things, but we’ll explore that later. You need look no further than to your friends and neighbors and perhaps yourself to see greed worship, or watch BBC’s The Century of the Self.

As for our owners, Jordan Maxwell does a pretty good job of confirming that we are in fact, “owned,” though I wonder if Charles Fort’s musings are more on target.

Nada then passes a storefront which sells televisions. There is a black youth standing in front of the display. He is transfixed. He looks zombiefied. The images shown on the screen are subtle hints of the mechanisms of control: the faces carved into Mount Rushmore, a Eagle flying, a Flag waving, sports, and of course, beer commercials. {*3}

Our weary protagonist seeks a place to rest for the night. He finds an alley and beds down among the vagrants (aka other unfortunate souls). Down the alley, a window is open. Through that window he sees an old woman watching television. Her show features some actress saying:

Sometimes when I watch TV, I stop being myself, and I’m a star of a series, or I have my own talk show, or I’m on the news getting out of a limo, going someplace important.

All I ever have to do is be famous. People watch me, and they love me. And I never never grow old, and I never die.

But the woman in front of the television is growing old. She is, surely, and slowly, dying. And, she is wasting her last few years of life in front of this television. Another sad depiction of the mechanism of control. How many of us waste a good part of our lives worshiping these empty “stars” thrown at us by the media? How many of us escape into the programmed fantasy wishing for our own fame and fortune, or prostitute ourselves (spiritually, and I’d hazard, sometimes physically), in hopes of ourselves becoming “stars” one day?

Now, for the surface story, and to keep the interest of those watching who’ll never understand that this is not science fiction, our protagonist meets his buddy. Have to have a buddy in a buddy picture. The choice of a black man is telling. Race is yet another of many of the Hegelian dialectics they use to divide us from each other.

The two buddies discuss the current economic situation, sometimes hitting on the truth about rampant corporatism, and sometimes missing, falling into other Hegelian traps themselves. For example, they blame foreigners for our manufacturing woes, instead of our masters, who methodically, and by design, took the manufacturing jobs out of this country.

The television “programming” is interrupted by a message from a “hacker.” He has interrupted the signal and is trying to broadcast the truth:

Our impulses are being redirected. We live in an artificially-induced state of consciousness, that resembles sleep. The poor and the under-class are growing. Racial justice and human rights are non-existent.

They have created a repressive society, and we are their unwitting accomplices. Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled into a trance. They have made us indifferent, to ourselves, and to others. We are focused only on our own gain [signal cuts out]

Please understand, they are safe as long as they are not discovered. That is their method of survival. Keep us asleep. Keep us selfish. Keep us sedated.

The regular programming comes back on. “That thing’s giving me a headache,” complains one vagrant. What’s giving him a headache? Truth is giving him a headache.

The other vagrant mocks the hacker. “Blow it out your ass!” That fits right in to what David Icke says of what pathetic sheep we have all become. Our masters have figured out a more effective means of control, consensus (peer pressure for adults). As Icke says, “At least sheep need a sheepdog to keep them in line, we’ve even dispensed with that. We keep ourselves in line.”

But, Nada, he’s not so quick to dismiss it. The broadcast which everyone else ridiculed strikes his curiosity. Is his heart recognizing the truth our eyes can’t see? He is slowly awakening. He is becoming a truth-seeker. He’s looking at obscure details. He’s looking at things in the distance (symbolically, past the propaganda). More importantly, he is asking questions.

We flash to a scene of the two oblivious vagrants (the sheep / dismissers) watching TV again. Before their eyes, two towers explode and collapse! Very very synchromystic! [I completely missed this the first 3 times I watched the movie.]

Our protagonist has found refuge in a make-shift tent city, where others of the new underclass have built a small community. Are the squalid conditions these people live in a preview of the Neofeudalism George Soros and other corrupt elites speak of? Or, could one take this further, and consider it predictive programming for Americans to prepare them for the pending economic collapse?

The regular programming is again interrupted by the hacker, aka the voice of truth:

They are dismantling the sleeping middle-class. Suddenly , more and more people are becoming poor

[Um, just look around you!]

We are their cattle, We are being bred for slavery. {*4}

Again, the signal cuts off. The “people” give their typical responses, reflecting ignorance, and even more noteworthy, fear:

• “Daddy, I have a headache.” “Me too, honey.” –> Again, the truth is scary and disconcerting. It threatens our innocence/naiveté.
• “Can someone please explain to me what that was all about?” –> Our ability to think critically has been intentionally removed by the education (i.e., indoctrination) system. So, it is much easier for us mentally, when a newscaster (i.e., person of authority) tells us what to think.
• “That idiot’s licking his nuts again.” –> Programmed quick dismissal of challenging theories. Think of the “conspiracy theory label.

Our protagonist, not dissuaded, continues to investigate. What is going on in that mysterious little church? And alas, we see the words painted on the wall:

THEY LIVE, WE SLEEP

Am I really watching a John Carpenter film here? {*5}

[To be continued in, They Live, We Sleep: Part II]

 

They Live, We Sleep (Part I)	They Live, We Sleep (Part II)
They Live, We Sleep (Part III)	They Live [Video Companion]

 

*1: The choice of names, Nada, which means nothing in Spanish and Portuguese, could be indicative of our worthlessness, or just be an inside joke by the director. The credits specify the character name as Nada, but at no point in the movie is he referred to by name. [LB]

*2: There are no accidental economic collapses. I remember being taught in school about how the Great Depression was caused by the 1929 Stock Market Crash. But, critical thinking suppressed by the school system, none dared ask, “Well, if everyone lost their fortunes by selling on that day, who was buying?” We’re not taught about the expansion and reduction of the money supply that caused the depression. Or, of the few that stepped in and bought everything. Real history is much different. [LB]

*3: All of those items are effective as a means of control. The faces in the mountain could be interpreted to represent the facades which we see as our “leaders.” The flag of patriotism is a useful tool “when necessary” to send fools off to kill each other. The eagle, which so many Americans seem to think represents them goes back to the fascism of WWII, further back as Julius Caesar’s standard, and even further back as the Phoenix. Sports promotes mindlessness and the redirection of our competitive / protective instinct into futile avenues. Lastly, liquor goes back to the Pirate families, and their rise to prominence as reward for intoxicating the masses. Michael Tsarion and David Icke present some interesting arguments over the history of liquor and taverns. [LB]

*4: Again, I reference Charles Fort as a possible allusion. Another, should we subscribe to the Zionist Control Theory is that the word “goyim,” used by the Zionist’s Jewish puppets, is a derogatory term used for non-Jews that means “cattle.” [LB]

*5: Watching this, it’s hard to imagine this was brought to us by the same director who brought us Ghosts of Mars, which featured the classic line: “What happens if we blow up the nuclear power plant? There’d be a big explosion, right?” [LB]

~ by celticrebel on March 3, 2008.