Playback / They Live
They Live · 1988
The Glasses
A pair of sunglasses strips the advertising world back to its instructions: OBEY, CONSUME, NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT.
Watch for
- What the billboards and magazines actually say once the glasses are on — the message underneath the message.
- The switch from saturated colour to stark black and white as the film's marker of seeing truly.
- How ordinary the signage looks: the joke is that the instruction was printed there all along.
A worked reading · COCA
CContention
Carpenter uses diegetic printed language to argue that advertising is a set of instructions audiences have been trained not to read.
OObservation
Seen through the glasses, a holiday billboard reads OBEY, a magazine reads NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT and a shop window reads OBEY AND CONFORM, all in plain black-and-white type.
CConnotation
Stripping away colour, photography and slogan leaves only the imperative verb, so persuasion that media normally hides inside style is exposed as a command.
AAudience
We are placed in the position of the newly literate, able to read our own media environment — which is precisely the habit the film wants us to keep after it ends.
Your turn
- What is the difference between what the billboards show and what they say?
- Why does the film use plain black and white for the 'true' version rather than something more dramatic?
- Pick a real advertisement. If you could see its instruction in a single word, what would that word be?
For teachers
The most useful media-literacy scene in cinema and, in four minutes, the thesis of the Manipulated unit: diegetic printed language plus representation. The wider film is violent and profane — this excerpt is neither, but preview it, and be ready for the film's reputation to arrive before the clip does.
