 The untold truth of They Live is that it IS the truth. Despite being an initial failure at the box office, They Live is widely considered to be one of the forgotten masterpieces of 80s cinema. Chops full of cheesy one-liners, overly long fight scenes, and B-movie special effects that look like they were made in someone's garage. If you've seen the movie, you probably know everything that we're going to say. But for those who haven't seen it, well, you can find it here on YouTube, but spoiler warning, here's the plot. They Live follows an unnamed protagonist who discovers, through special sunglasses, that the ruling class are aliens concealing their appearance and manipulating people to spend money, breed, and accept the status quo with subliminal messages and mass media. The best or worst part, though, besides that bubblegum line, duh, I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum. While it was meant to be a funny gag, the Orwellian reality of the movie's universe is not so different from our own. In fact, with all of the new information coming out in recent months, you'd be forgiven for thinking we're not actually living the movie ourselves. While the sci-fi horror world doesn't really seem like conspiracy or fantasy, it's actually closer to reality than you think. Drones in the sky, conspiracies in our heads, militarized police in the streets, economic inequality at every corner of society, media and a ruling class that seeks to control our minds through broadcast frequencies. Oh, wait, sorry, the movie, right? So the film follows this unnamed nobody, whose identity is revealed in the credits as Nada, the Spanish word for nothing. And while this is seemingly just an editing choice, there's an extra layer of meaning to it, in that Roddy Piper's character really is a nobody. He's a homeless drifter with no family, job, or any kind of life that we know of. There's something comfortingly poetic about the fact that a nobody can see through the lives of society, an idea that you don't need to be special or be of a particular class to awaken to the truth. The movie's first and most important message is that all you need to wake up is the ability and determination to see. There's so much we could talk about in this movie, about its similarities to our world, and even the fact that the director, John Carpenter, came out in 2015 and outright said, you have to understand something. It's a documentary, not science fiction, about it being a critique of the Reagan administration and commercialism. But the truth is, there's something much more sinister and relevant expressed in the movie. Spiritual warfare. The aliens who may have influenced David Ike's reptilian somehow, staying in control by using repetitive, subliminal messaging and broadcasting frequencies to deliberately keep everyone's vibration low, which is what allows everyone to be controlled. How did they do this? The frequencies and messages are sent out by these little satellite dishes attached to traffic lights that are disguised, and they send off some classical subliminal programming like, you will obey, you will not question reality, you will work nine to five. Of course, no one can actually hear this, you know, because it's subliminal and everything, but everyone is unknowingly affected. On top of that, every billboard, magazine, and piece of media is delicately crafted to perpetuate the same message. Nothing ever comes solely from one source, except, of course, their signal, and the aliens are sending the same message through every aspect of society, repeating it every day, every year, forever. In other words, it is that sense of repetition and modality that keeps everyone asleep. This is even where we get the name of the movie from. They live. We sleep. In the past few months, the whole COVID pandemic is a great example of this. It's beginning to come out that certain countries are overstating their death rates, over-diagnosing people with regular flu, and even pushing vaccines that haven't been controlled tested. As we talked about before on this channel, the true virus is the sense of fear and distress that has come along with COVID-19, and the mass media has bombarded us from every angle with exaggerated information, arguably in an effort to favor control and social influence. When he has his sunglasses on, Nada sees through the smoke and mirrors projected by the advertisement and mass media. He only sees the core of their message, the only reason why they exist. Every advert, media, and magazine is the exact same. Even though they appear different and are all owned by different companies, they all have the same base message. Ultimately, they all serve as the same purpose of translating the message from the 1% to the masses, consume, obey, reproduce, and conform. Now, the movie's main concept is, of course, the truth-seeing sunglasses that let Nada see the aliens. While they look like the most 80s fashion choice ever, there's something more about them underneath the surface. For the most part, they illustrate the importance of knowledge in one's world perception. Two people can be looking at the exact same thing, yet perceive two very different realities, depending on the level of information and the awareness that they have. Modern politics today is an excellent choice. Some people see the left wing, some people see the right wing, and some people see a bird that's having a lot of difficulty flying. Nada's sunglasses can, thus, represent one's knowledge of the truth, which allows a clear perception of reality. Further, the sunglasses usually give everyone a nasty headache, especially when they're taken off. When first exposed to the truth, adapting to the new reality can be difficult and even painful. However, after a while, it becomes a seamless part of the person. Once you understand a new truth, you can never go back to your old reality. In fact, the overly long-winded fight scene is probably the best example of this. During his alley fight with Frank, Nada only wants to show his friend the truth and to help him wake up, but Frank is so attached to the lie that he's living that he even gets violent to defend it. In what is probably the greatest fight scene in movie history, it's effectively an 80s meme, okay? The underlying message is that sometimes you have to beat the truth into people because they're comfortable in their lies and illusion and are willing to fight to protect it. Then again, maybe there's another lesson here of allowing others to have their own experience, although of course, that idea is not very in the favor of Nada here. Now, the other major tactic used by the aliens is to falsify any new information and brand it as a conspiracy theory to get the masses believing its nonsense. Right from the start when our hero meets the guys in the church, the police force and SWAT unit come and arrest everyone to keep them quiet. Later on, the truth-seers are branded as terrorists and start getting hunted because they're a threat to the status quo, which of course is totally something that's broadcast by mass media. Nada and Frank quickly become social pariahs, being hunted by the police, the media, and even the average Joes who think that they're helping the good guys. Towards the end of the film, Nada and Frank sneak into the alien's secret base, which is a network of secret tunnels that even has portals to the rest of the world and even outer space. Inside, they see some pretty weird things, like all of the elite having a fancy dinner party discussing world domination. One of the most bitter lines comes just after this where the broke poor homeless guy from the beginning is now a super rich elite and tells them, We all sell out every day, much will be on the winning team. All this talk of a world without countries, borders, good guys and bad guys seems great on the surface, but once you look underneath, you see some pretty obvious references to the whole Illuminati New World Order thing, which has been a popular interpretation of this movie for a long time. It's pretty clearly shown that the aliens and the one-percenters work together for mutual benefit, with the ruling class supplying everyday people to the aliens and the aliens giving everyone little pay raises. The greatest atrocity of spiritual warfare committed by the aliens then is the commercialization of human life, but the agonizing truth of they live is the implication that the one-percent are okay with it and that they would sell their own species out if it meant a pay raise. The movie was also plagued with racial issues surrounding the identity of the aliens, but there's a lot of different interpretations. For one, the aliens refer to Earth as their own third world nation, a sentiment that is eerily similar to the colonial attitudes of Europe in the 18th century. Further, there may be something to be said about the fact that the truth-seer sunglasses make the wearer perceive the world in black and white, allowing us to see everything for what it is, without the distraction of color, which ultimately is seen as something that separates us. Taking a spiritual perspective to they live really is just a matter of changing how we define things. Nothing really changes in the interpretation. The sunglasses are a metaphor for enlightenment and awakening. The frequencies and subliminal messaging represent stuff like the fluoride in our water and other real-life frequencies in our music, cell towers and whatnot that also lower our vibration while increasing our sense of separation. Whichever way you want to interpret they live, the underlying messages usually stay the same. Society is structured in a way to keep us complacent and trapped in a never-ending cycle of debt to keep us controlled. Ironically, though, the movie is also a critique of American greed in which the solution is an all-American macho man shooting up foreign intruders with the machine gun. The way that the movie shows the solution is the biggest case of America, f*** yeah, ever seen. Perhaps, like MatPat's film theory on The Matrix, there's a sense here that we can never truly escape the system as long as we subscribe to the more commercialized ways of solving it. In other words, perhaps the system can't be fixed because it isn't broken. It's perfectly designed this way to create suffering. Maybe that's too pessimistic of an outlook, though. But I do think that in order to make real change, both within ourselves and in society, we must shift our mindset first away from that which originally created the system and into a higher vibration. The only question then is whether we'll be able to do that when the world is designed against us doing exactly that. Fortune, however, does favor the bold. In this movie, this happens with not a destroying the broadcast tower at the end of the film, and suddenly the truth is revealed in plain sight to everyone. Perhaps that's really what we need today, a mass revelation of truth for the all. So, with that, thanks for watching. If you liked this video, be sure to like, comment, and subscribe. You know, spread the video around, and we'll see you again soon for even more videos.