 It's no secret that a lot of Hollywood writers and directors are not exactly fans of business and free enterprise capitalism. That's been true for a long time. A couple years ago, I did a whole episode on this point called Hollywood's Favorite Trope, It's Just Business. It's actually one of my favorites and totally worth checking out. The way that different ideas are presented in entertainment and media plays a really important role in shaping the values that become dominant in our culture. And I've long believed that the way business people are often portrayed in movies and TV shows has really skewed people's understanding of reality. The evil capitalist narrative wasn't always as common as it is now, but you really start to see the shift in the movies of the 1970s and 80s. That was a weird time in American cinema. On the one hand, you had overtly jingoistic, pro-America, anti-communist movies like Red Dawn. On the other hand, you had quintessentially anti-capitalist movies like Wall Street. Of course, there's a lot more like the latter than the former. Interestingly, one of the most consistently anti-capitalist genres going back well into the 1970s is horror. Directors like George Romero made no secret of the fact that their movies were commentaries on war, race relations, consumer culture, capitalism, and mainstream conservative thought. Heck, Dawn of the Dead is about a group of mindlessly consuming zombies attacking a shopping mall. It's not hard to read between the lines on that one. But the movie I want to talk about today is a classic from another one of the most legendary horror directors, John Carpenter's 1988 film They Live. There will be spoilers, but I think after 32 years, the statute of limitations may have expired. Hit that subscribe button, ring the bell icon to get all the notifications, and get ready for this thrilling short edition of Out of Frame. They Live isn't a terribly complicated story. A drifter, whose name we're never really given, but is listed in the credits as Nata, arrives in town and starts looking for work. He goes to the government employment office and is told by a pinch-faced heritain that she doesn't have any jobs available for him. Not to be dissuaded, Nata stops at a construction site nearby and asks the foreman if he needs any help. The foreman does, but it's a union job, so Nata needs to join. On the job, he meets Frank, who shows him a tent camp slash homeless shelter across the street from a church that seems to be perpetually having choir practice. This is They Live's Chekhov's gun. It'll be important later. Throughout the first half of the film, misery is everywhere. Entire families are out on the streets, the wealthy elite care only about their own vanity. The police appear to take a great deal of pleasure in harassing the less fortunate. Frank takes a particular relish in telling Nata that everyone is out to get everybody else. The whole deal is like some kind of crazy game. They put you at the start in line. The name of the game is Make It Through Life. Only everyone's out for themselves and looking to do you in at the same turn. This is not a cheerful setting, but Nata is an optimistic guy and he's a curious guy. So when the police raid the church across the street for no apparent reason, he decides to check it out. He discovers that the church is actually a front, their choir practice is fake, and the people there are engaged in the nefarious practice of making sunglasses. For this heinous crime, not only is the church ransacked and the staff run out, but the homeless encampment is raised with bulldozers and the residents' corral killed or chased into hiding. Naturally, the only thing for Nata to do is try on a pair of the sunglasses. And through these sunglasses, he can see the true state of the world and why the people are so miserable. What normally appear as billboards and magazine are actually instructions to obey and submit and consume. No independent thought allowed. And hidden among the regular humans of the world are horrifying aliens who bear a striking resemblance to skinless anatomy dolls. The aliens have completely infiltrated human society, disguised among them as police officers, politicians, bankers, television personalities, and the idle rich. They're brainwashing the humans into complacency through TV and advertisements. The whole state of the world is entirely engineered. I can understand being a bit pessimistic during the 80s. The hippie movement of the 1960s never actually ushered in an era of peace and love like it was supposed to. The Vietnam War had been a devastating blow to American morale, and it was followed by a terrible economic climate caused by incredibly irresponsible fiscal policy in the 1970s. Even as late as 1988 when they live came out, it wasn't at all clear to the average American that the Cold War would ever be over. Death in the American Dream was extremely low, and if you think about it through that lens, it makes some sense to set movies from that era, especially horror films, against a depressing backdrop. But in an interview for the great documentary Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue, John Carpenter is super clear about his agenda with They Live. I had this deal with Universal that makes some movies where I would write the scripts and I'd have complete control and such, which was great. And I wanted to do something about Reaganism, and because it just pissed me off so much. Now, whether or not Reagan was a principled politician who was truly dedicated to the limited government philosophy he spoke so eloquently about is a discussion for another day. The fact is, a lot of the anti-capitalist animosity from the entertainment that came about during this time period was really built around the writers and directors hatred for people like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. But despite the fact that Carpenter was railing against what he perceived to be the prevailing conservative attitude of the time, the bad guys in this movie are largely politicians and police. Even the petty condescension at the beginning of the first act comes from a low-level government bureaucrat, and that's pretty typical of the genre. Carpenter was by no means the only director of the day annoyed with conservative political aesthetics in the 1980s. But while Carpenter might have been good at identifying problems, like corruption and ill intent within the halls of power, the solutions he proposes ultimately don't prevent the same thing from happening again. In They Live, there's a very clear distinction made between the bankers and big business people who are either evil aliens or unwilling league with them and the everyday, fully human small business people like the newsstand owner Nada Encounters shortly after putting on the sunglasses. And there's a very clear division between the alien ruling class and the hapless humans they subjugate. But the problem in the 80s wasn't, and still isn't, that the wrong people are in power. The problem is the power itself. But instead of getting to the root cause of what Carpenter was so upset about, we get a metaphor-heavy, trope-filled slog, up to and including And there it is. Carpenter gives us the explicit scapegoating of the free market. But it obviously isn't the case that a society and economy totally controlled by politicians and their alien masters can be a free market. And it all misses the point entirely anyway. As I said in our recent feature episode on Wonder Woman, the problems of the world aren't caused by a single person thing or force. And those problems won't disappear even if we could wave a magic wand and replace the bad thing with a good thing. We all bear some responsibility for our current situation. It's easy and simple to reject that responsibility by foisting the blame on the other guys or free enterprise or even big government for our own failings and shortcomings. But as easy as it is, it isn't helpful. All of us have a remarkable gift for getting in our own way and messing up our own plans. But acknowledging the fact that we each have agency and personal responsibility for the outcomes we experience in life is the first step toward actually fixing the things we don't like about ourselves and the world around us. It isn't that they live, it's that we live. And the world we create won't be determined by politicians or by body-snatching aliens. If we want a better world, it's up to us to do it for ourselves. Hey everybody, thanks for watching this episode of Out of Frame. I'm not the biggest fan of horror movies, but we've decided to fully embrace spooky season this year. But you know what's not horrifying? Entrepreneurship. It's literally the basis of free enterprise as a concept, but it's also something you can apply to every aspect of your life. And we're hosting an awesome webinar series during Global Entrepreneurship Week this year. Starting November 16, Fee's Entrepreneur Week event will feature four days of amazing speakers, beginning at 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time every day. I'm leading a session on creativity on day two that's going to include my friends Kevin Lieber of Vsauce 2 on YouTube, Assassin's Creed Syndicate and Journey composer Austin Wintery and HBO's Lovecraft country artist Afua Richardson. But there's going to be great stuff happening all week. If you're interested in attending any or all of these webinars for free, check out the link in the description. And as always, be sure to like this video and subscribe to the channel. Hit that bell icon, listen to our behind the scenes podcast, support us on Patreon and follow our brand new out of frame accounts on Twitter and Instagram. See you next time.