Don Jr.? I Do Not Think So, JVL

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Jonathan V. Last, staff writer and watch-geek over at The Bulwark, has intoned both in print and on various podcasts from that fine publication that if Donald Trump does not run for a third term as President of the United States, then the man would be unwilling to hand such awesome moneymaking and criminal authority over to anyone who is not in the family by blood. JVL has suggested that one of the prime contenders to take the Republican nomination, should Trump, in a break from character, obey a law that disadvantages him, would be the eldest son, Don Jr.

While JVL is often right and can do a pretty decent job as a modern Cassandra seeing the disaster around the corner while far too many ignore his warnings, here I think his gift of prophecy fails him.

Several factors worked synergistically to curse our nation with the two terms of Donald J. Trump, destroying our alliances and our institutions, causing the deaths of countless people, loosing masked police madness on our streets, all while engorging himself and his cronies at the public trough. Decades of priming the GOP base for cruelty and to view their fellow Americans not as people with a different view as to how this nation might improve but as ‘the enemy’ worthy only of contempt and destruction cultivated the poisonous soil for a crude, mean man like Trump. A 40-year parasocial relationship built on the myth and the lie that Trump possessed some innate and superhuman talent for business, despite managing to drive casinos into bankruptcy, paired against a professional politician who had been the subject of vicious attacks for more than twenty years, made the unthinkable a reality with Trump’s election in 2016. Biden’s physical feebleness combined with the toxic stew of his inherent arrogance made it impossible for him to step aside in 2022, and then his far too late departure in 2024 crafted the conditions to return to the presidency a convicted felon who, despite Senator Collins’ insistence, had never learned a lesson in his life.

None of this applies to Junior.

Prior to 2016, I doubt many people could pick this man out of a photograph. He has no long parasocial relationship either through culture or politics. He has displayed none of his father’s dubious talents for working a crowd, and outside the circle of sycophants, grifters, and foreign money, he has no base of support from which to build any sort of electoral coalition. Trump commands a cult of personality that built around himself and solely himself. While the cultivated ground will be there for another ideologue to harvest a crop of hate, that gardener will not be Junior. Trump has expended zero energy in building anything around his son, or any of his children. For a cult leader to successfully transfer the devotion of the cult to a chosen successor, that leader must work, and work hard, to affix the affections of the masses to the next in line. Trump, handicapped by his own blinding narcissism, finds such action an impossibility.

Perhaps most damning of all, I would suggest to you that to the broader public not only does he have no real base, he is, in fact, for all intents and purposes, an unknown.

I have laid out the reasons why, practically speaking, Junior has no real base of support, but here is a different yardstick by which we can measure the man’s invisibility to the public at large: do an impression of him.

As with every sitting president, Trump impressions are everywhere. That is true for every person who has sat in that office and for all the major contenders for that post. The satirical impression is a marker for how far your star has risen above all the other people vying for the public’s attention. Fifty years later, people can still recognize even a bad impression of Richard Nixon, but is anyone anywhere doing an impression of Junior that isn’t simply a one-note punchline about rumored cocaine use? Elections are about public perceptions, good or bad, and frankly, in my opinion, the public has no perception of Don Junior at all.

I don’t know what the presidential field in 2028 will look like on either side, but I am confident that even if Junior makes the attempt, it will flame out rather quickly.

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Carrie: Episode 1, First Period

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I first read Carrie, the debut novel of Stephen King, during my final year of high school in 1978. I quite liked the novel, and it sparked a King fandom that lasted about a decade before the author just sort of slipped off my reading pile. There was no break with King, no novel that so offended me in some manner, as has happened with other writers, that drove me away, but just a gradual drifting into different tastes. I have never been a hater nor a great fan of Brian de Palma’s feature film adaptation of the text. I am more partial to his other psychic-teenagers movie, The Fury, so there is no inherent need to defend de Palma’s version over others as this newest adaptation by Mike Flanagan arrives.

Flanagan has adapted the novel into a limited series show of eight episodes, each titled after an aspect of high school with the premiere episode having the punning title of First Period.

Amazon Studios

From the start of this first episode, it is clear that Flanagan is making significant changes to the text in his adaptation. Carrie White’s father (Tahmoh Penikett) is not an absent figure in Carrie’s life, but a doomsday conspiracist whose untimely death forces the home-schooled Carrie (Summer H. Howell) into the public education system and her mother Margaret (Samantha Sloyan) into the workforce in order to maintain custody of her child. While Margaret is portrayed as hyper-religious, Flanagan pulls back from the gross caricature of both de Palma and King, crafting a character that is a little more credible than Piper Laurie’s inspired performance. Laurie breathes life into a role that is little more than a collection of tropes and exaggerations. While I myself have no religious convictions or beliefs, I find overly zealous Christians so common in King’s works and in so many others, to be a tiresome and unimaginative antagonist.

Updating the story to the current age, Flanagan gives us a high school with security guards and metal detectors at the entrances and a far more diverse student body than that lily-white set that populated both Maine in the 1970s and King’s novel.

Just like both previous adaptations, Carrie White is not an overweight, pimpled religious zealot, but a conventionally attractive young woman already testing the boundaries of her mother’s worldview and dogma. Soft-spoken but outgoing, Carrie, ignorant of the realities of the modern age, thrilled to the be engaging with school and what she imagined to be other people her own age as obsessed with reading as she is, enters the school happy and hopeful. Instead, the events of her first day in a public school traumatize her.

When the series showed Carrie navigating the metal detector and bag-search screening to enter the high school the thought passed through my mind that Flanagan was not going to take up valuable screentime to also show us an active shooter drill, a routine in many schools these days that traumatizes both staff and students.

I was wrong.

Ewen High does indeed have an active shooter drill on the very first day back after the holiday break. The students and staff are shown as bored with the routine, having followed the script for years, but Carrie, ignorant of even the existence of school shootings and the practice nature of a drill, is understandably terrified and, in her terror, ignites her telekinetic talent that will drive the story’s horrific conclusion.

It is the next day that brings one of the most recognized sequences to life, Carrie’s first menstruation. Kept ignorant of the realities of biology, Carrie, convinced that she is dying from this unprovoked and inexplicable bleeding, is taunted and torments by the other young women who hurl tampons and pads at her while chanting “Plug it up!” sparking another burst of terror-triggered telekinesis.

Flanagan’s most divergent change from the text takes place here, with an abrupt scene change to some unknown location, where another young woman psychically experiences Carrie’s terror and her telekinetic outburst before reporting it to some unseen authority.

This adaptation also spends some of its screentime exploring the home life of the story’s chief antagonist, the bully, Christine (Chris), who conceived of the horrific prank that ends in tragedy for the town. It has been decades since I read the novel, and I have no memory of any pages being devoted to Chris and her inner life. I have a vague memory of her brutal boyfriend and possibly of his enjoyment of running down dogs with his car, but it is possible that memory is tangled with the novel Christine and not Carrie. I do not believe that Flanagan is trying to generate sympathy for Chris, but only further episodes will reveal his intent. I can say that it is hard for me to have sympathy for the poor little rich girl who torments those lower down on the social ladder, no matter how horrid and idiotic her father may be.

I am intrigued enough that I will not only continue watching the series but I shall also continue avoiding the spoilers and discussions that are already roiling on social media. Since this was deployed with the binge-model of release, meaning that the entire series became available on Amazon Prime Video, instead of the more traditional model of releasing an episode a week, social media is already flooded with opinions and arguments from people who have devoured the entire show. I prefer the weekly release; not only does that avoid the issue of different discussions at different levels of knowledge about the show, and not only does that help build attention from week to week as people tell others about the program that they are watching, but for me personally it makes it more likely I will not watch the show at all. For some reason, when the entire thing is available at one time, I am disinclined to even start it. Even when I do, I rarely watch more than a single episode at a time. Sadly, while researching actors’ names and such for this post, I became exposed to some of the text-shattering twists that Flanagan has crafted for his version of Carrie, robbing me of the fun of speculating what might be happening at the unknown location.

Still, I expect that I will watch the rest of the series, possibly one or two episodes a week until I finish. I adored Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep but did not care for his adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House, so we will have to see where his Carrie ends up.

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The Point is More Than Just Cruelty

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Adam Serwer titled an Atlantic article, The Cruelty Is the Point, arguing that the first Trump administration and its supporters were more interested in inflicting harm on their enemies than in any actual outcome of their various initiatives and programs. The concept struck such a chord that the phrase has become a shorthand for everything cruel and malicious that originates with Trump, his administration, and his supporters. The phrase is almost certain to gain usage with October 8’s revelation that not only does the administration plan to execute a mass-murdering soldier by firing squad, but that the Department of Defense, at the prompting of ‘No Tab, Whiskey Pete,’ wants to livestream the killing, much in the same manner that mass shooters have utilized social media to glorify their killings.

There is no doubt, none at all, in my mind that both the method of execution and the desire to stream it live to the world were chosen for their cruelty, but there is another factor beyond that reason which I believe motivates this heinous proposal.

It is a psychological imperative for Trump, Hegseth, Miller, and the rest of this depraved and damaged administration that they be seen as ‘strong.’ These are men whom life, childhood and beyond, has wounded deeply with a powerful and crippling insecurity at the heart of their psyches that compels them to behave in a manner that they need others to perceive as evidence of their tremendous, but entirely illusory, strength.

I have often said that a grave error a person can make is to mistake cynicism for wisdom. Here is a companion piece of knowledge: what these men are doing with nearly every official act is cruelty masquerading as strength. The brutal imposition of a twisted and corrupted form of ‘justice’ serves dual purposes and fails at both. It seeks to cow and impress the people into believing that Trump and his broken and frightened cabinet are actually strong, like the mafia goons and tin-pot dictators that they so idolize. And second, it vainly tries to fill the hole in their souls, because no matter how cruel you are, no matter what torments you inflict on others, you cannot escape yourself, and it is their own terror and intuitive understanding of their weakness that proves inescapable.

If they were not doing so much damage to our nation, our government, and our people, I might feel more sympathy for these pathetic persons. They weren’t born monsters: life made them into monstrosities, but these men in particular would rather the world burn to ash around them than admit fault or seek help that they so desperately require.

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Rachel, Is That You?

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From ages 10 through 19 I lived in the hot, humid, mosquito-infested state of Florida. During those nine years, I experienced one hurricane, David, that passed directly over my town. The eye passed over my house, so I got the full show of winds from one direction, a fast and sudden lull to calm and clear, then the wall of wind returning from the opposite direction. David had been a lethal storm, but by the time it reached my home it had become a baby of a hurricane, barely reaching Category 2, but it was sufficient enough that I felt no curiosity to see a stronger storm for myself. After a brief stint in the United States Navy, a career that I was not suited for at all, I moved to San Diego, California, which has been my home ever since.

California boasts its own set of natural disasters to frighten and terrify its population with, chiefly earthquakes and wildfires, both of which I have had some experience with. I commented yesterday about watching the wall of a Denny’s ripple with waves that were like wind-driven water. In the early ’90s a wildfire in the eastern reaches of the county grew so large and so destructive that the sky turned red with smoke and ash, prompting a friend to comment that he suspected that was what it was like living in Mordor.

But do you know what I did not expect at all from Southern California?

A hurricane.

Currently off the western coast of Mexico, Hurricane Rachel spins harmlessly out over the waters of the Pacific. This is the time of the year when tropical storms, cyclones, and hurricanes form over the usually peaceful Pacific Ocean. Jet streams and coriolis forces bend the tracks of these eastern Pacific storms to the west so that they expend their energies usually far from shore, though occasionally Hawaii feels the forces of such a storm. If the storm develops further south, the coasts of Central and South America are in the path of these systems, but more often it is the Atlantic storms that threaten.

Rachel, a smallish hurricane, is currently west of the tip of Baja California. Due to a strange, unlikely, and bizarre set of weather conditions, partially driven by this year’s enormous El Niño, the storm is expected to turn North and East, driving towards the West Coast. As it crosses the relatively cooler waters closer to land, the experts expect it to degrade from a hurricane, sustained winds of 74 miles per hour or more, to a tropical storm, winds of 39 miles per hour or greater.

The projected cone of the storm’s track indicates that its landfall could be south, in Baja California, or as far north as Orange County or San Diego. If it takes this more northerly track, Rachel is expected to make landfall late Saturday evening or early Sunday morning.

My friends, San Diego is not built for hurricanes or tropical storms, or even a lesser tropical depression. In San Diego, the trifling little rains that Floridians experience nearly every afternoon during the summer closes roads and knocks out traffic lights. There are roads near my home here in Mission Valley that have gates installed because mild California storms cause the San Diego River to escape its banks and flood out the streets, forcing their closure. This town is not prepared for sustained high winds and heavy rainfall.

Fortunately, I reside atop a high hill overlooking the Eastern end of Mission Valley, and as such my home, is not subject to flooding, but everything below me is going to have a rough time of it if Rachel comes.

I had a friend, a San Diego native, as rare as that beast is, who expressed more than once that he would have loved to have seen a hurricane come to this city. He passed away far too young two years ago, but if there is an afterlife, and I do not believe that there is, he’s watching with amusement.

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You Mean the Song Lied? (With Apologies to Scribe Dan O’Bannon)

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Before I can get to the song and its lying lyricist, I have to take you on a little side trip down the genre of adult contemporary music of the 1970s.

In 1977 Debby Boone daughter, of Pat Boone, (kids, you’ll need to skip your parents and go straight to your grandparents to ask about him) released the chart-topping song You Light Up My Life, written by Joe Brooks. The song held for 10 weeks at number one on the charts helping propel Debby Boone to a Grammy for Best New Artist. The next year she followed up her tremendous success with the song California, also by Brooks. This time the tune languished, never rising above 50 on Billboard’s Hot 100, relegating Miss Boone to being the subject of Trivial Pursuit questions; but hang on to that second swing for the top of the charts because it utters the lie that has stayed with me since my move to California 44 years ago.

For the past several days Southern California, including San Diego, has suffered terribly high, unseasonable temperatures, breaking records as we have reached triple digits in early October. What has brought the baking environment is a weather condition which popular myth erroneously asserts is named after the famed Mexican military commander Santa Anna, but is really more tied to the name of the mountain range, a Santa Ana.

Driven by high pressure out Nevada way, Santa Ana wind come over the inland mountains to the east, drops from high altitudes to sea level and blows hard toward the ocean. Following the ideal gas law, the air, as it compresses to sea level pressures, rapidly rises in temperature, creating the hot, very dry, and strong winds of the Santa Ana, which are not unlike having a blast furnace blowing directly into your face.

Now, we come back to Joe Brooks, a New York native who apparently never lived in the subject of his song, California. In 1978, living in the soggy wet heat of Florida, I listened to Debby Boone singing about that distant and near-mythical state of California. (Yes, as a teenager in the 70s, I listened to Adult Contemporary radio; there is a reason I never went to a prom.) She possessed a pleasant voice, used it well, and if one set aside her overt evangelistic religiosity her music suited me just fine. Now, almost 50 years later, fragments of the melody for California remain in my head, but one line, the lie written by Joe Brooks and voiced by Debby Boone, echoes in my skull.

Where the winds called Santa Ana make you feel like you belong …

Belong? Belong where? Hell? Dante’s Inferno?

For over 40 years I have lived in San Diego, experiencing winter storms that tore away large piers, earthquakes that made the wall of a Denny’s ripple like wind-driven water, and blindingly bright and hot summers, but never once during a Santa Ana did I feel like I belonged. I have a quite intense memory of riding my motorcycle east on I-8, directly into Santa Ana winds, with the sensation that my face was being cooked off of my skull. The past week has been a more tolerable Santa Ana, not because the weather condition is any more pleasant but because I now live and work in air-conditioned comfort.

Mr. Brooks, the phrase may have solved meter issues you struggled with in the song California, but it is also a near-Platonic ideal of the expression that one should ‘know what you write.’

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A Companion Disorder for ‘X’ Derangement Syndrome

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Notes:

1) Current practice is that mental health issues are disorders, derangement is out dated terminology and its use is considered prejudicial.

2) A.I. was utilized to affix the format and style of the entry to conform it to the manner of a DSM entry.

 

DIAGNOSTIC AND STATISTICAL MANUAL OF MENTAL DISORDERS

SECTION III: PROPOSED CONDITIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY

 

300.99 (Q00.0) Partisan Oppositional Disorder

Diagnostic Criteria

  1. A persistent and clinically significant pattern of political behavior characterized by an irresistible compulsion to oppose, reject, or vote against any measure, candidate, or policy associated with an identified opposing political party (“The Rivals”), regardless of the proposal’s actual merit, underlying principles, or personal utility.
  2. The pattern of opposition is manifested by at least three (or more) of the following symptoms occurring consistently over at least one election cycle (or 6 months of active legislative sessions):
  3. Ideological Flip-Flopping: Sudden, unexplained reversal of a long-held ethical, fiscal, or personal belief immediately upon learning that the opposing party shares or has endorsed that belief.
  4. Policy Reflexivity: Immediate, reflex-like condemnation of a proposed bill or ordinance prior to reading or understanding its contents, driven solely by the party affiliation of the primary sponsor.
  5. Spite-Driven Balloting: Expressing high emotional satisfaction after voting for a candidate whose platform directly harms the individual’s own economic or social interests, provided the outcome causes distress to supporters of the opposing party (commonly referred to in clinical literature as the “Owning the Opposition” phenomenon).
  6. Affective Hyper-Fixation: Expending excessive cognitive energy, daily conversation time, or social media engagement reacting to the opposing party’s minor figures, slogans, or aesthetic choices.
  7. Double Standard Somatization: Visceral physical or emotional outrage when the opposing party engages in a specific conduct, accompanied by total apathy, cognitive dissonance, or rationalization when one’s own preferred party engages in identical conduct.
  8. Hyperbolic Demonization: A persistent and omnipresent verbal tic resulting in an inability to discuss the opposing party without characterizing them as uniquely existential, dangerous, or malicious, routinely conflating all factions of the opposition with historical totalitarian regimes based on faint or superficial political overlap.
  9. The behavior causes marked distress or clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or interpersonal functioning (e.g., severe breakdown of family holiday gatherings, unfriending long-time neighbors, or inability to discuss local municipal park maintenance without invoking national party politics).
  10. The disturbance is not better explained by a genuine, coherent political philosophy, well-reasoned policy critique, or actual economic self-interest.
  11. The symptoms are not attributable to the direct physiological effects of consuming 24-hour cable news or outrage-driven social media algorithms (though these frequently act as exacerbating environmental triggers).

Specifiers

Specify current severity based on the degree of functional impairment:

  • Mild: The individual consistently votes against the opposing party but can still maintain civil conversations with neighbors of the opposite affiliation regarding non-political topics (e.g., lawn care, weather).
  • Moderate: The individual actively alters purchasing habits, media consumption, and sports fandom based solely on the real or perceived political alignment of corporate sponsors or athletes.
  • Severe: Total cognitive capture. The individual’s entire personal identity, daily vocabulary, and social routine are governed by reacting to the opposing party. Incapable of agreement on basic empirical facts if stated by an opponent.

Specify if: With Intra-Party Purging — Accompanied by aggressive turning against members of one’s own party who demonstrate even brief moments of bipartisan agreement, nuance, or legislative compromise.

Diagnostic Features

The essential feature of Partisan Oppositional Disorder is an externalized, purely reactionary locus of control. Individuals with POD do not evaluate ideas, candidates, or legislation based on intrinsic content, projected outcomes, or an underlying ethical framework. Rather, the party identity of the proponent serves as the sole heuristic for value judgment. If the opposing party advocates for Position X, the individual feels a compulsive necessity to adopt Position Not-X. Hyperbolic demonization (Criterion B6) frequently serves as the psychological justification for this reactivity, allowing the individual to frame mundane political disagreements as existential battles against historical evils.

Differential Diagnosis

Genuine Ideological Commitment: Unlike individuals with principled, deeply held political stances—who maintain consistent core values regardless of who occupies public office—individuals with POD will routinely abandon or reverse their stated core values if maintaining them would require agreeing with the opposing party.

Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD): ODD is typically diagnosed in pediatric populations and directed toward general authority figures (parents, teachers). POD occurs almost exclusively in adults and is strictly targeted at opposing political campaigns, commentators, and fellow citizens wearing conflicting political paraphernalia.

Development and Course

Onset is typically insidious, beginning with casual exposure to partisan talk radio, opinion columns, or social media commentary. Symptoms accelerate dramatically during midterm or presidential election cycles. Full remission is exceedingly rare without significant digital detoxification, algorithmic intervention, or temporary removal from family group chats.

Comorbidity

Partisan Oppositional Disorder frequently co-occurs with Doomscrolling-Induced Insomnia, Doom Posting, Excessive Yard-Sign Display Syndrome (EYDS), and Acute Social Media Agitation.

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Movie Review: Beware Boiúna

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Friday night, with a hankering to see something in the theaters to kick off this year’s spooky season, I did something I have not done in a very long time: I saw a movie knowing so little about it I had not even watched a trailer. Scanning through the AMC app on my phone, I read the bare details about Beware Boiúna: “deep in the Amazon, a medical mission spirals into a fight for survival when Boiúna, a colossal ancient predator, awakens to reclaim her domain in the jungle were nature holds absolute power, she decides who lives and who dies.”

Lionsgate Films

Okay, so Beware Boiúna was a creature feature, a monster movie, and frankly that was just the sort of shallow horror film that suited my mood. I clicked on a show time, confirmed it as one of the subscription screenings, which came at no additional cost, and after my sweetie-wife had retired for the evening, drove to Fashion Valley mall for the film. I seated myself in the nearly empty theater with quite low expectations. Monster movies along with slashers are not known for deep and engaging stories, often populated by caricatures of people rather than characters, and ones that make the most idiotic of decisions. This sub-genre can be fun in a silly, campy sort of way. (Though it is possible to be just bad enough that the movie is painful to watch without any redeeming camp value.)

Beware Boiúna surprised me.

While it clearly does not carry the heft of more celebrated recent horror films such as Obsession, Backrooms, Midsommar, or Nosferatu, this movie is smart enough and entertaining enough to be counted among the rare category of good monster movies. It possesses just enough story within its plot to have something to say about the human condition but without becoming a meditation on grief, or loss, or identity.

The plot of the film is straightforward: a team of doctors and medical students travel by chartered boat deep along the Amazon River in Colombia, delivering medical supplies and care to impoverished villages. The team comes into conflict with a commercial survey/prospecting team which rapidly spirals into violence. When both groups find themselves on an isolated tributary, they are forced to reckon with a serpent of gigantic stature, Boiúna, and it is unclear who, if anyone, will survive.

In my opinion, Beware Boiúna, while not reaching the heights of these films, carries the genetic heritage of three great films of the horror canon: Jaws, Alien, and Aliens.

Like that Spielberg classic Jaws, this film doesn’t overexpose the audience to the monster at the center of the story. Boiúna makes her appearances in the first half of the movie without fully exposing her horrific nature. Like ‘Bruce’ the shark, her presence is represented by the things she affects instead of blatant CGI. It isn’t until the final act of the film that the creature is fully seen and even then, the director, Mike P. Nelson, and the VFX teams wisely restrict these scenes to the forgiving nature of well-shot night sequences.

Alien is famous for hiding just which character is the actual protagonist of the tale. It isn’t until Dallas’ foray into the airshafts that it becomes clear that Ripley is the story’s main character. Beware Boiúna performs a similar sleight of hand, revealing its protagonist at the film’s midpoint.

The connection to Cameron’s Aliens is more tenuous but struck me as plain when our surviving protagonist battles the enormous creature with massive claw-equipped machinery, echoing Ripley’s power-loader battle with the alien queen.

Well-directed by Mike P. Nelson and well-scripted by writer Alan B. McElroy, Beware Boiúna is a rare thing, a rather decent creature feature that doesn’t try for too much or overstay its welcome with a slim 104-minute running time. Cinematographer Nick Junkersfeld shot the film well; there are no overly showy flourishes of photography but rather a simple and direct style that helps ground the fantastic premise.

Overall, I found this film worth my time, and while it is not getting as wide a release as it deserves and will be overshadowed by films such as Obsession, Beware Boiúna is a film that horror fans should see, and if possible, in a theater.

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They Live Is Overrated

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They Live (1988) was the 11th feature film from celebrated writer/director John Carpenter, and, in my contested opinion, halfway through the movie it becomes evident that Carpenter’s talent had fled, never to return. (Do NOT try to argue that In the Mouth of Madness is a great or even good film. A story where a shotgun-armed angry mob of men are chased off by mere dogs is stupid and expects its audience to be stupid.) I will be spoiling an already spoiled story.

Universal Pictures

A conspiratorial mess, the story follows Nada (Roddy Piper), an unnamed and unhoused itinerant worker who has come to Los Angeles and is drawn into a vast alien plot to subjugate humanity and transform the planet to an environment more suitable to their lifeforms. Nada and another displaced worker, Frank (Keith David), join up with a resistance group and eventually destroy the single satellite transmitter that has hypnotized humanity in a walking sleep that has prevented anyone from perceiving the aliens or their subliminal manipulation.

The first half or so of They Live is actually quite good, subtle, with a growing unease that creates an uncanny valley as the audience remains as ignorant of the reality of the story as the protagonist. However, once the vast conspiracy is revealed, all semblance of intelligence flees the pages of the script, replaced with overly extended fight sequences and action movie tropes that, even by 1988, had become tired, worn out, and cliché. The descent into formula is further degraded by the ham-handed nature of Carpenter’s political preaching. Meant as a commentary on Conservatism as Reagan’s second term drew to a close, They Live delivers its message with all of the subtlety of a cocaine-addled bull elephant. Compounding this clumsy critique is a level of world building that cannot stand even a moment’s analysis and consideration.

The unnamed alien race has come to Earth to extract wealth and convert the planet’s climate to their own by way of industrial pollution. Okay, a metaphor for capitalism: it’s not particularly original, but it’s serviceable enough that Carpenter is not the only storyteller to have stumbled upon it. I will even accept the hand-waving over exactly how that wealth is being extracted, as, one, a film has no time to delve into interstellar economics and, two, we have no clue how such an economy would function anyway. The idea that aliens are covertly manipulating humanity is hardly original; too many people already accept it as a true thing, but it can be made to work.

But not in this movie.

The aliens have covered incomprehensible distances to come to Earth, but after that terrible expenditure of resources, what do they do? They become beat cops in Los Angeles. Oh, sure, they are presented at the very top of society and government, with one shot meant to imply that Reagan is one of them, but so, so many are walking about as working-class and lower-upper-class individuals. This is patently ridiculous. Yes, you might make the argument that this echoes humanity’s own action as European nations colonized much of the world, but colonization is not Carpenter’s metaphor. He is explicitly playing on the secret forces that really control society, using aliens as a metaphor for capitalism, but that idea doesn’t work if the secret masters of the economy are also the ones driving the patrol cars. This is the reason that, while he had aimed his satire at capitalism, the metaphor was handled so clumsily that Nazis took the aliens as a stand-in for Jews. Carpenter warred with them online about this reading, but he left that door open with his slipshod world building. Of course, if Carpenter had reserved his aliens for the ones pulling the strings from secret positions high above the common rabble, then he couldn’t have had his glorious scenes of Nada gunning down aliens in public, scenes that have become only more and more disquieting as America experiences an endless horrid parade of mass shooter events.

Even if you accept the concept that aliens have come across light-years to hold down street-level jobs, They Live is still a deeply flawed mess of a story.

Nada, shortly after learning the truth and going on his spree of murdering aliens that to everyone around him look as human as anyone else, takes a hostage, Holly (Meg Foster), to escape downtown Los Angeles. In her expensive hillside home, Holly puts Nada at ease and then, shattering a champagne bottle across his skull, ejects him from the structure and down the steep embankment.

Later, when Nada and Frank attend their first resistance meeting, Holly is there, presumably because she has had her eyes literally opened by the magic sunglasses left behind after Nada was thrown from her home. She is all doe-eyed and sympathetic to Nada, despite her only interaction with the man having been as his hostage at gunpoint.

The evil controlling forces show up, some deus ex machina shit goes down, transporting Nada and Frank to the local cable station that manages the vast interstellar conspiracy. They regroup with Holly, last seen at the resistance meeting in a bad section of town and now present without explanation, and hustle to the roof where the final plot coupon, the transmitter, waits. In the stairwell Holly wordlessly murders Frank, but on the roof she, with more doe eyes, pleads with Nada, while holding him at gunpoint, not to destroy the transmitter. Apparently, in addition to selling out humanity, she has a very specific kink about being kidnapped and held at gunpoint. Nada destroys the transmitter and dies, but exposes the entire global plot because aliens smart enough to not only traverse light-years but manage a decades-long cultural conspiracy are too stupid to avoid a single-point-of-failure system.

I cannot for the life of me understand why this film is held in such high regard. I found it trite, preachy, and stupid when I first saw it in ’88, and that opinion has only grown with the decades.

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“Why Didn’t You Take the Train?”

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Last Friday I made the drive from San Diego to Los Angeles to visit the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. The trip up took about two hours and a little change, frankly faster than I had expected, and was well worth it.

The exhibit The Horror Show is broken up into sub-genres that each have their own room: Religious, Scientific, Gothic, Psychological, Ghost, and Slasher horrors. As you wander from room to room, you are presented with artifacts and history of some of the principal films from that category. (Though I found it a miss in the Slasher section that there was no mention of Italian giallo, which clearly was a predecessor to the slashers of the ’80s and onward.)

Some of the exhibits are quite old, such as the cape worn by Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931) or the original mask from Creature from the Black Lagoon, while others come from very recent horror films such as the lovely flower gown from Midsommar.

Chatting with a couple of ladies who were also visiting, I mentioned that I had driven two hours to see this little preview (the exhibit officially opened the next day), and one asked, “Why didn’t you take the train?”

I have to confess that it simply had not occurred to me, and perhaps it would have been better if it had. True, I would have had to pay for all-day parking at the station, but even with public transit at the L.A. end, it may very well have saved me time. The drive home proved to be much more of an endurance test than the drive up, as it took me about four hours to make the return trip.

Still, it was a fun day: I have a couple of new tee shirts that I got from the museum store, and it was good to get away and be pretty much in my head for a day.

 Here is a model fo the creaure from the film The Host.

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End of Summer Movie Tally

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September is drawing to a close with October coming later this week, bringing with it spooky season and the busiest period for the next several months at my day job, a perfect time to reflect on my summer movies.

In April, I posted about some of the movies coming out this summer that I planned to see in their theatrical release.

  • Over Your Dead Body
  • Hokum
  • The Sheep Detectives
  • In the Grey
  • Obsession
  • Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu
  • Backrooms
  • Pressure
  • Disclosure Day
  • Hungry
  • The Odyssey
  • Spider-Man: Brand New Day
  • Coyote vs. Acme

For various reasons, running time vs. showtimes, brief or non-existent theatrical releases in my area, or other factors, I missed Disclosure Day, Pressure, and Hungry in theaters, but I made all the rest. I must say that with the except of the Star Wars entry on the list, not one of these films felt like a waste of my time and energy. Most proved quite the opposite, well worth the voyage out to the local multiplex, with Obsession being the standout feature. I have given that horror film more thought, consideration, and public writing than any other this summer and possibly this year.

Of the 13 movies listed, three I still have not seen, one bored me so intensely I still harbor ill will towards it, and one assaulted my eardrums with such ferocity I find it difficult to remember anything else about the experience of seeing it. That leaves eight that I enjoyed watching from a rear-row seat at the theater. That’s a final score of 80 percent, discounting the ones I missed, because I may have loved one or more of those, giving this summer’s movies a B.

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