YMMV / They Live!

• Adaptation Displacement: The plot originally comes from a Science Fiction short story involving a man who can see the messages after being hypnotized, which Carpenter encountered via a comic version. The aliens in there also eat humans.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • At what point did Holly join the aliens' side? From the beginning? Or did they just make her a better offer during Nada's absence? Meg Foster's performance as Holly might not simply be Dull Surprise but subtle foreshadowing that she is The Quisling from the start, demonstrating that she's in on the conspiracy even before Nada kidnaps her. This is supported by the fact that she drives a BMW and lives in the hills of Los Angeles, clearly well-off.
  • Is the bearded drifter someone who sold out in the aftermath of the shantytown raid, or was he a spy from the start, working to discourage the masses from listening to the bearded hacker, and perhaps spying on the church resistance group?
  • Are the aliens really reaping the Earth, or do they actually think they are helping? Are they planning on harming the majority of the human race in the end, or simply removing the wheat from the chaff?
• Anvilicious: In spades, the movie really is not subtle it’s messages and can get a bit overbearing for some people.
• Complete Monster: Holly Thompson is an apparently innocent bystander-turned-rebel, but in truth is a traitor to the human race in service of the aliens oppressing the Earth. Playing the role of a friendly ally to the rebels, Holly helps lead the military to a rebel outfit and gets the entire group massacred. Personally overseeing the main transmitter enabling the aliens to hypnotize and brainwash humankind, Holly continues to feign helpfulness until she kills Frank, threatens to gun down Nada, and attempts to secure her position in the alien hierarchy and ensure humanity's continued horrid oppression for her own greed.
• Cult Classic: Make no mistake, this movie isn't for everyone - it isn't the most fast-paced, the fight scene goes on a bit (maybe more than a bit), its social commentary isn't subtle - but it has a devoted following of both sci-fi fans and action fans. There's a reason you still see the OBEY signs everywhere.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The blind street preacher working with the resistance is an immensely powerful, likable and memorable presence despite only appearing in the film's first half hour.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Given the spree of mass shootings that America has had to deal with in the decades since this movie came out, it's just a little jarring that the most heroic and memorable scene in the movie is where the main character shoots up a bank, killing evil monsters which rule the world that he and he and alone is capable of seeing.
  • In the original story the film adapts, Nada's character died from a programmed heart attack, which really stings in retrospect after Roddy Piper's life was also ended at 61 by a cardiac arrest.
  • This won't be the last time a character played by Keith David learns a harsh truth thanks to some incredibly specialized glasses after a long, bloody fight in downtown Los Angeles.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Frank and his soft heart under the cynicism. He tries to help Nada from the moment he sees him and gets him his pay even when he thinks Nada has gone on a criminal rampage.
  • Nada stops to rescue a teenager frozen by fear during the police raid and doesn't let go of him until they find safety.
  • After Nada has gunned down a bunch of aliens masquerading as cops, a human cop cowers before him. Nada tells him, "Beat your feet", allowing him to run away unharmed.
• He Really Can Act: Roddy Piper as Nada is widely considered one of (if not the) best acting performances in a movie by a pro wrestler.
• He's Just Hiding: Some fans hope that a few of the more notable Spear Carrier attendees of the rebel meeting escaped the police raid/massacre.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Old school Professional Wrestling fans, of course, watch to see Roddy Piper be an action hero.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The iconic line, "I have come here to Chew Bubblegum and kick ass, and I'm all out of bubblegum" has been stolen and parodied six ways from Sunday.
  • The subliminal OBEY/CONSUME/etc signs have been remixed all over the place, notably into Shepard Fairey's OBEY GIANT campaign (which uses the likeness of Piper's fellow WWE wrestler André the Giant).
  • A popular meme format consists of two panels, one showing Nada without the glasses looking at a sign of the memer's choosing, and another where he's put the glasses on and the sign has changed into what the memer thinks it really means.
  • "Eating from the trashcan of ideology" is popular among Slavoj Žižek fans, due to his documentary The Pervert's Guide to Ideology where he references the alley fight scene. More broadly, a lot of different people use the scene as an analogy for how hard it is to change someone's worldview.
  • During election seasons it's common to see every politician depicted as one of the evil aliens from the film, implicitly accusing them of pursuing an ulterior agenda (of evil). Pop culture celebrities, especially ones that market to a mass audience, get the brunt of this too.
• Misaimed Fandom:
  • Naturally, given that it's a film about shadowy elites ruling the world from behind the scenes, Conspiracy Theorists have taken a significant liking to it. Carpenter insists that it's a satire of '80s yuppie capitalism run amok, and has told neo-Nazi fans of the film (who read a specifically anti-Semitic meaning into it, about the alleged international Jewish conspiracy to take over the world) to go piss right the hell off.
  • A lot of conservatives and libertarians read this movie as anti-socialist, mostly as an offshoot of a line of thinking that sees liberals and socialists as the real elite within society. Never mind the fact that the whole film is an overt criticism of the excesses of capitalism (and, by Word of God, satire of the Reagan administration specifically), and that the heroes are portrayed as socialists. A lot of John Carpenter's films have been read as libertarian, even though Carpenter himself is a staunch progressive. In an interview with fellow horror director Mick Garris, Carpenter questioned why he has so many libertarian fans and joked that he might have to rethink his political beliefs.
    • This is especially odd, as it's stated outright that one of the things the aliens have hypnotized the humans to do is to be individualistic and not engage in solidarity in their thinking, which is possibly one of the most blatant call-outs of libertarianism put to film.
• Narm:
  • Holly's wide-eyed nervous stare becomes this after a while, thanks to an infamously flat performance from Meg Foster.
  • "Life's a bitch, and she's back in heat."
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • The couple who are having sex in the final seconds of the film when the man (an alien) experiences a Glamour Failure.
  • The brave, shotgun-wielding Badass Biker sentry at the resistance meeting, who has less than a minute of screen time but has a pretty impressive presence.
• Padding: The fist fight, infamously so.
• Paranoia Fuel: The whole point, in a way. That commercial you just saw on television... just a commercial, or a subliminal message telling you to "OBEY" and "CONFORM"?
• Signature Line: "I have come here to chew bubblegum, and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum."
• Signature Scene:
  • The alley fight. For better and for worse.
  • The scene where Nada puts on the glasses for the first time, especially once the memes came out.
• Too Cool to Live: Nada and Frank.
• Values Resonance: Nada's struggles with unemployment and job seeking during harsh economical times and the condemnation of rampant commercialization, the corruption and Kill the Poor tendencies of capitalists and the Police Brutality during the raid of the shanty town are topics that maintained their relevance.
• The Woobie: It can be easy to pity Frank and Nada with how difficult their lives are in an unsympathetic society (with Frank not even having seen his wife and kids in months and both men working homeless) even before they get mixed up with the aliens.

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