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They Live Movie Essay

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The last name of the director of the 1988 science fiction horror film They Live is fitting. Carpenter. John Carpenter wrote and directed this underappreciated movie, and his last name is fitting because They Live is clearly inspired by the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—philosophers primarily concerned about the working man, which, of course, includes carpenters. The basic premise of this film is that aliens have secretly infiltrated society and actually make up much of the upper class. These nefarious extraterrestrials have shaped society by facilitating those changes most favorable to their ends, which is to use up the earth’s resources and terraform the planet so that it is more accommodating to their alien biology. These antagonists …show more content…

However, in the film, the proletariat is expanded to include not just the working class but anyone who does not belong to the upper class; the concentration of wealth that Marx and Engels warn against in their “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” is illustrated in a number of scenes that display humans as struggling to make ends meet while alien imposters almost exclusively enjoy a privileged existence. (The qualifier “almost exclusively” is used because a small number of human co-conspirators are also granted entry into the upper class.) For instance, the film begins with the main protagonist, John Nada, homeless and encountering numerous obstacles in his search for employment; at a state unemployment office, Nada is told that no jobs are currently available to him, and when he approaches a foreman about construction work, he is informed in an overtly dismissive tone that the project “is a union job” (Carpenter). Another early scene shows two businessmen—one human and one alien—discussing recent promotions; the alien received a promotion and placates the stressed human businessman who did not and who doubts that a promotion is in his near future. Unbeknownst to the human, his disguised peer belongs to the upper class while he does not. In this dejected businessman, the aforementioned contention that capitalism leads to an

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