Category Archives: writing

Is it the Struggle That Compels Us?

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Recently I have watched the Twitter discourse rise up over the character of Syril Karn from the series Andor with a number of people debating if the show had been disrespectful of the character prompting strong feelings about the man.

Running alongside this discussion is the memory I have of a number of YouTube reactors being quite emotionally torn by both Syril and Dedra Meero, the Imperial Security Bureau (ISB) sector supervisor, as they navigate both enforcing the Empire’s authoritarian government and their own interesting romantic relationship. These were the bad guys, Dedra more clearly than Syril as she employed torture to get what she wanted while Syril remained essentially naive to the Imperial law and order that he strove to maintain. Pluck Syril out of Star Wars and insert his character in 70s New York desperate to catch the killers of two dirty cops and you have a classic anti-hero trapped in a corrupt and decaying culture even as he fights to maintain a ‘true’ sense of justice.

But he isn’t a 70s anti-hero. He is a cog in the fascist machine that is the evil Galactic Empire, and yet there is a pull to root for him as he tries ever so hard to clear his name and bring the hero of the story to ‘justice.’ Dedra is an equally compelling character. Her villainy is more evident, particularly her willingness to not only torture suspects but her disregard for their murder once their usefulness has passed. Yet, here we are again, feeling the pull to care about her. What is going on here?

Let’s look at some other characters from cinema and see if we can’t gain a better understanding in a manner that is more general.

Pulp Fiction gave us Vincent Vega, the street-level thug and murderer working for L.A. crime boss Marsellus Wallace. Our introduction to Vincent was his task of retrieving a briefcase for his boss and calmly murdering the boss’s former partners in the process. Vincent is a violent thug and drug user and yet over the course of his story within the film we are drawn to him and concerned as he falls deeper and deeper into trouble that may end with Marsellus Wallace having him killed as mercilessly as Vincent killed Wallace’s former partners.

Nightcrawler (2014), a neo-noir from Dan Gilroy, who also wrote on Andor, introduced the audience to Louis Bloom, a sociopathic man who rises from street-level thief to celebrated ‘journalist’ as he discovers his talent for finding and creating tragedies he can videotape and sell to local television news. Unlike the other characters mentioned here, I have heard of no one that held any sympathy for Louis, but while the audience kept him at an emotional distance, he remained an object of fascination and of deep interest even as he got his partner killed, murdered his rivals, and blackmailed a woman to satisfy his sexual urges. No one showed sympathy for such a cold, manipulative man, but he remained deeply interesting. Why?

There is a common thread running through all of these characters, criminals, cops, thugs, and bureaucrats; all of them have goals and all of them are fighting against forces that are keeping them from their objectives.

Syril wants justice and the killer of his men caught and punished, but a corrupt system would rather have good reports than truth.

Dedra, a novice ISB Supervisor, wants victory and enforcement of the Empire’s authority, but office infighting and backstabbing stymie her attempts to break a system that rewards staying within the line over creative imagination.

Vincent needs to show his boss’s wife a decent evening out, to make her happy, but their unmistakable chemistry and sensuality provide a temptation that is nearly irresistible to the couple and once she overdoses on his drugs, well then he has to save her life to save his own.

Louis desperately needs to prove to himself and the world that he is worthy, to find that success he is certain that he deserves as rivals and the police forces move in on him from every quarter, threatening to thwart his actions.

There is the key to why the characters are compelling. Each of them is facing off against forces larger than themselves and that struggle to overcome, to win, is that magic sauce that makes us sit forward and care.

Twenty years ago while at a Bay area SF convention and before the events of a convention had started, I caught a fragment of a World War II training video on television. An air crew of a fictional bomber had been captured by the Nazis. In captivity the Germans employed trick after trick, device after device to pry from the airmen the secrets that they kept in their heads. By the end of the video, I found myself on the side of the Germans, anxious to see if they were going to manage to get the information that they so desperately needed. This was a training film to teach our forces all of the many ways that the information might be gained, and yet there I was feeling for the enemy and not our boys.

The Germans were the characters with a clear, active goal. The airmen’s goal was a passive one, keep quiet and say nothing. It is the active character, fighting against the odds to claim some prize that hooks us as an audience and as readers. That is the lesson from the training film and all those movies, your characters need a goal and the odds against them getting it must be great. Syril and Dedra are both fighting to make something of their lives, to prove something to themselves and the doubters who surround them and that is why they become characters we can’t tear our attention away from.

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And After the Credits?

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Spoilers for Obsession, Longlegs, & Immaculate

When a movie ends, the credits roll, I often find myself wondering about the characters and their lives that follow. For the vast majority of the movies I have watched there is actually little imagining, the story has wrapped up and while life will have its ups and downs, there isn’t a great mystery to what might happen next. But for some, the next phase of the character’s lives seems to hold more trouble than the sequence of events that we had just witnessed.

I recall going to a local art house theater with a friend and watching Blood Simple, a neo-noir from the early Coen brothers’ catalog. It has all the hallmarks of a film noir: love triangle, complicated schemes, betrayals, and of course murder. As we walked out of the theater, we both were amused by the concept of the local sheriff the next day trying to understand and unravel the events from the trail of confusing and inexplicable clues left behind. Beyond the mysteries and noir sub-genres, it is the horror film that more often than not has the most complicated relationship between its resolution and what the characters are likely to face in days following their harrowing experiences.

Neon

Consider Longlegs (2024). At the end of the film, poor FBI Special Agent Lee Harker is at the scene of a mass murder that mimics the scenes blamed on the now deceased serial killer ‘Longlegs’ and with her having been used to murder her superior and her own mother.

 

 

Black Bear Pictures

Another example of the troubles that will follow the survivor of a horror movie is Immaculate(2024) with the physical evidence showing that Sister Cecilia not only murdered at least two of her priests but that she also used a large stone to kill her newborn child, a crime that Italy is unlikely to be compassionate about.

 

 

Focus Features

But it is Obsession’s character of Nikki Freeman that may escape legal jeopardy for the multiple deaths over that terrible night.

After Baron ‘Bear’ Bailey unleashed the enchanted wish-powered date rape magic on poor unsuspecting Nikki Freeman, plummeting the poor woman into unhinged behavior, obsessive need to satisfy Bear’s whims, and a corrosive need for his affection to equal her own towards him, the tale ends with two of their friend group murdered, Bear dead by suicide, and Nikki finally freed of the compulsions but injured, covered in blood, and surrounded by corpses.

What is law enforcement to make of this strange and bewildering scene? A young man, Ian, dead with a gunshot wound to the head, a young woman, Sarah, beaten to death with a brick, and another young man, Bear, dead from a massive overdose of sleeping pills.

The physical evidence will be of actually little help in creating a decent case for the courts. There’s more than enough to put Bear, Sarah, and Nikki together in her car in the park and to establish that the automobile is the place where she was murdered. The blood-splattered trail will clearly show that the pair moved her body but can you build a case that slight, small, Nikki physically overpowered Sarah and pummeled her skull with a brick? A case airtight enough to convince a jury of that?

What of Ian’s murder?

Both Nikki and Bear’s prints are on the pistol that killed him, but only Nikki has the powder residue indicating that she fired the weapon. So, you can establish that she shot the gun, but can you convince a jury of why she murdered her former lover? And why the overdose?

You know what is too terribly common in America today? Murder-suicide.

There’s no need to build a complex and rickety case to try and convict a poor severely mentally disturbed woman like traumatized Nikki if you just put all the blame on the unhinged young man who died by his own hand. Never underestimate the lure of making troublesome issues just go away. The unknown municipality where Obsession takes place is in my opinion far more likely to blame everything on Bear, the ‘quiet’ man who kept to himself, over trying to drag to trial the woman that the physical evidence points to.

It is questions like this that dog me when I finish writing a horror novel or short story. There is rarely a clean answer for how to handle it but I shall never stop trying.

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Exposition is Hard; Obsession does it beautifully

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When Obsession played earlier this year it was one of my best times watching a horror film in the theater in quite a while. Oh, there have been enjoyable horror movies this year and in recent years but the simplicity and execution of Obsession places it far above not only other horror films but many other films in general and one of the key elements in that beauty is Curry Barker’s deft exposition.

All stories be they fantasy, horror, science fiction, drama, romance, comedy, whatever require some exposition, that element where things are explained to the audience. More fantastical stories have a different set of expositional goals to meet, to not only help us understand the character, their lives, and their story before the one we are experiencing unfolds before us but also how their entire world works but stories set in the here and now also have to explain the story before the story to us even if they are free from explaining the greater world because the character world is one we can accept as being like our own.

Focus Features

Barker, quite wisely, actually doesn’t spend any exposition at all on the history of the fantastic and magical aspects of the world of Obsession. Where the ‘One Wish Willow’ items come from, who makes them and why are mysteries beyond the scope of the story of Baron ‘Bear’ Bailey and his fixation on Nikki Freeman. What we learn about these cursed items are the same things Bear learns about them as he struggles to fix the disintegrating situation to his own satisfaction. No, the brilliant exposition of this script is in subtle quick asides from the characters and that amazing monolog delivered straight down the barrel of the camera lens at the film opening.

With the exception of only a couple of reaction shots back to the young woman listening to Bear spill out his heart’s secrets we are fixed on Bear’s face as he practices the speech he will reveal to be too timid to actually say to Nikki. This one speech serves so many expositional masters and all while staying firmly within character. At the very surface level this informs the audience, directly and immediately about Bear’s depth of feeling for Nikki, how in his own words ‘she is in every song’ he hears. Secondly, it gives us vital backstory on Bear himself, but framed in relation to his history with Nikki. He moved to this town and Nikki was the only person ‘nice to him.’ Bear says that when his grandmother died Nikki was the only person who called. From these pieces of information, we can understand that Bear was displaced, never fit in, and was somewhat socially isolated. But there is an even deeper level of exposition that is vital to everything that follows for the rest of the film. Bear is confusing fascination and obsession with serious emotional investment.

This lengthy monolog, this spilling of his heart’s desires and secrets, has not one word about Nikki as a person. Bear speaks only about Nikki as the subject of Bear’s fixation. There is nothing about Nikki the writer, something we learn quickly about in the course of the first act, nothing about Nikki’s kindness to strangers, which we see her demonstrate to the unhoused person outside of the bar, nothing about Nikki’s own tough time in school when she was bullied. The entire monolog is about Bear and how Nikki was nice to him and how he sees her without anything about Nikki as a person. It is a subtle, and many people, myself included, missed this red flag that Bear is a terribly selfish person. But the effect is there and the seeds had been planted so that later, when Bear learns much of the truth of what he has called into being and that it isn’t Nikki that is obsessively in love with him, his thought isn’t to correct his deed, to free the real Nikki from her body’s enslavement and her soul’s torment, but to make it still all about him and getting what he wants. Bear is the ‘nice guy’ whose heart is truly black and whose thoughts right up until the end stay centered on himself, all of which was exposited in the film’s opening monolog.

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Friend-Zoned in the QueryTracker Meat Market

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A common metaphor used in the writing community for those of us on the hunt for representation by a literary agent is that we are ‘in the trenches.’ I can see the appeal of this device and have even used it myself. The trenches of World War I seemed like an impossible-to-win and impossible-to-escape situation for the poor men trapped in that years-long stalemate. Sending out endless queries about your novel to overworked and overwhelmed agents has a distinctly similar vibe to it. An agent can easily get hundreds of queries each month, thousands by the year, and of those they might sign up as new clients less than a dozen. I can see how that feels, from the author’s perspective, like going ‘over the top’ and into ‘no man’s land’ to face mounted machine guns of which very few survive.

But lately, particularly with the passes I have been getting from agents, I wonder if such a violent and combative metaphor is the right one for the process. After all, we authors are not trying to take the ground from the agents, we are not trying to annihilate them as an enemy but hopefully find an artistic partnership that can grow and flower for years and years to come. Perhaps it is more akin to romance than warfare.

Instead of the corpse-littered fields of France and Belgium, this is the crowded discos and singles bars of the 1970s. The agents are like the single attractive women who have high hopes of finding that special person, that match that works on every level. Authors are the swarms of men, dressed as snappily as they are able, deploying their practiced ‘lines’ in hopes of gaining that look, that, as Dolly so eloquently put it in her song, ‘when a glance becomes a stare,’ desperate to find some way, some ‘trick’ that can make them stand out from all the hustlers vying for that woman’s attention.

And if that metaphor works, then we can see its applicability over the death and destruction of the battlefield. Between the firm rejection and the exploration of a relationship there is a netherworld derisively labeled ‘the friend-zone.’ Now, this metaphor should not be pressed too far or adhered to too devoutly. In relationships far, far too often men are seeking a simple sexual ‘conquest’ and are not seeking a partner to share life with. Such men, with their fragile and brittle egos bruised when rejected by a woman who has proclaimed that they see those men as ‘only friends’ or ‘like a brother,’ vanish, never seen again because all that they wanted was the physical and not the emotional. Writers seeking representation are very, very rarely seeking it for just one book and as such this metaphor breaks down in its analogy. Agents are not conquests but partners, and no one is looking for a ‘one-night stand.’

But it is not without some service and, in my opinion, some emotional value.

This has come to me because lately I have been getting a different style of ‘pass’ from some agents. In these emails and responses, the agents are making it clear that while they did not ‘fall in love’ with the submitted project, they know that someone out there will and encourage me to continue querying and submitting.

Oh, how this feels precisely parallel with ‘I like you as a friend, but there’s some girl out there who is perfect for you.’ This is the rejection I have felt many times before I was so fortunate to find the woman who became my sweetie-wife and the way these passes rhyme with those failed dates of yesteryear is powerful. It fits so much better and resonates so much more truthfully than a battlefield strewn with artillery craters flooded with water and bodies that lay nearly half a century before my time.

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Rejectomancy

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When writers are in the process of submitting materials to agents, who are swarmed with submissions seeking representation, the writers will attempt to glean any hint at all of what was hidden in the pass or rejection sent by the agent. Because the agents are terribly overworked with those submissions, it is the rare pass that is actually composed by the agent with the vast, vast majority being form letters that are dispatched. It is on those form letters that writers engage in the black art of rejectomancy, the usually vain attempt to discern information that is in all actuality not really there.

Many, but certainly not all, agents actually possess a tiered system of form letter passes and while each agent has their own determination of their tiers and how those progress, and very few publish this information. The existence of these levels and what information that they might possibly contain is the rejectomancer’s true goal.

Because I have more than a decade’s worth of emails from agents passing on numerous projects, it occurred to me that I had a resource that might be worth investigating. Recently I have been noticing an increasing use of the ‘subjective’ in the passes coming back to me, a word that I did not really have a strong memory of being used a lot in the past. Now, this business of publishing is very subjective, hence the nearly endless stories of fantastically successful novels having collected a large number of rejections before finding publication and fame. (Dune, passed on by all the SF publishers, was actually acquired and published by a house that did auto repair manuals.)

Were more and more agents passing while encouraging me to keep trying because this business was ‘subjective’ a real trend, or something my mind was just noticing but had always been there?

Well, there were far too many emails to go through manually and I never learned to code, but now there was Claude. So, with help from that A.I. agent, I created files of all those emails and scrubbed them for the word ‘subjective’.

 

Yup, it was a very real trend, one that has become quite clear in the last few years. Does that information produce any actionable plans? Hell no. And right there is the trap of rejectomancy: you think you are learning things, but you are not. What you are doing, and it may not be entirely without merit, is providing a balm to the wounded ego. It doesn’t tell you why their subjective opinion yielded the result that they feel that they are not the right agent for this project at this time. Perhaps it can give you that little bit of encouragement to keep at it, to keep submitting and to keep writing.

In the end that is the only thing in your control.

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Not a Very Productive Year

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I had hoped to have another novel completed by the end of this month, August, but instead I have absolutely nothing finished and nothing even started.

I started out with an idea for another folk horror, this one set in the present day in the mountains of eastern Washington state with an isolated community of woodworkers and the outsider who came there for lust mistaken for love and commercial profit but who instead encounters the thing under the mountain. I worked on that idea for several weeks: careful planning, character design, my beloved 5-act structure. And yet when I went to outline the project all of my passion just drained away. I still have all the notes, a spreadsheet with color-coded characters and their events, and yet I can’t seem to find the enthusiasm that started the story when it first came to me.

I shifted to another idea that came to me in the middle of the night. A horror novel that was also a noir. This one would have been set in the years following World War II, a great setting for noir, and it would deal with an airman returning to his west Texas town, the people there who hold him in deep suspicion, and his dark desires that were awakened by something he had encountered in the high cold air.

But that story is finding it hard to reach takeoff speed.

There are only four months left to 2026 and several of those months will be stressed with the busiest period of work for my day job. Work that will bring overtime and its blessing of extra money but that will make writing much more difficult. Still, I shall try to get a book out before this year closes.

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Still Not My Skill Set

Let me make this clear with upper case characters in bold:

I WOULD NEVER USE AN A.I. GENERATED BOOK COVER.

What I will do is use A.I. to mock up an idea for a cover, one I would use as an example of my thinking with a human artist who could then help me realize my vision or dissuade me from making a noob mistake. So, should I be so fortunate as to work with an artist to craft a cover for my ’80s, cinephile, gay, ghost story, here is a starting point for something that might work as a cover. (Note, A.I. added the text ‘A Novel of Old Hollywood’ which this is not, despite a passing reference to ‘Poverty Row’ studios .)

A.I. Generated

To prompt this image, I used a photograph of the now retired Ken Cinema located here in San Diego California which served as inspiration for the fictional Kensington Theater the main character’s joy and life and the source of his terrifying troubles. I think if I were working with an artist, I would ask them to remove the generic city skyline from the background, give us more of the sky, and make it night with nothing but stars overhead. I would also ask that the sidewalk in front of the Kensington be lightly populated with people in costumes waiting for the midnight screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. But, in general, I kind of dig this concept for a cover.

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AI and My Latest Novel

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Generative ‘Artificial Intelligence’ or A.I. has been quite the controversy of late rearing its head in everything from environmental issues to space flight and theoretical orbital data centers. For the creative fields the fights and arguments have been very intense centered on the data that had been used, without permission of the owners or creators, to train the machine learning systems. This has led to swaths of ‘novels’ being produced by A.I. and a deep and powerful backlash against any art that has A.I. as part of the process. Like all backlashes, it is far too easy for things to escalate to proportions all out of measure.

Now, I myself have absolutely no interest in any ‘art’ that is A.I.-generated. The entire point of a poem or a story is that you are experiencing another person’s viewpoint, that, for the time you are immersed in that piece of art, you are seeing, however dimly, through another person’s eyes and experiencing the world as they interpret it. This is something that cannot be achieved without self-aware consciousness. It requires the ability to wonder, to dream, to imagine and A.I., outside of science-fiction, cannot do that.

That does not mean that A.I. has no place, it is a tool and a powerful one. Let me show you how I used A.I. to solve a problem I had while drafting the novel that is currently trying to find representation.

After getting some feedback on the book’s opening pages I started revising the first scenes where the reader meets the protagonist. The novel is set in San Diego, 1984, at the start of summer. To show Dave’s nature and to give him an early goal before horror derailed his life I decided that he would have a plan to acquire a second theater, opening it as another art house and as a sanctuary for gay and queer young people.

I have lived in San Diego since 1982, and I wanted the novel to be grounded in the city I knew. I was not interested in inventing businesses or locals that did not exist. The theater that Dave owns in the novel is a real one, and one that was beloved to me, the fiction was that this character owned it, not its existence. So, the second theater would also need to be something that was real in San Diego of 1984.

In the early 80s at the corner of Park Boulevard and University Ave sat an old movie palace that had been converted into an ‘adult’ theater. I visited it while I was still in the U.S. Navy, found the pornographic films not to my taste and did not visit that theater again until the 1990s when Landmark had acquired it and transformed it into an Art House showing foreign and revival films. This would be the perfect acquisition for Dave. He could rescue the theater from its degraded state and make it into something glorious and elevated.

My problem, I could not remember the name of the theater as it operated in the 80s. As an Art House it hadn’t survived past the 90s, home video had killed the revival market in San Diego, and even the building was gone, replaced with mixed use residential and retail spaces. I could simply invent the name of the theater and what it looked like but that flew against the way I wanted this novel to work. Simply ‘googling’ for the movie theater at that location provided very scattered and not at all helpful results.

Here is where A.I., specifically Claude, came in very helpful. I asked Claude to find information on the history of the theater at that location and it returned the name that it had operated under both as a movie palace and as an ‘adult’ theater, The Capri.

Ah, but A.I. can very confidentially give you answers that it has invented out of whole cloth. So you cannot trust its responses alone. But now, armed with the name of the theater, I could make my own much better targeted search for information. That yielded a wonderful KPBS article that not only detailed the history of the place, the names of the people who owned it as an ‘adult’ theater, when Landmark acquired it, but also had photographs that revived my memory, allowing me to picture it in my mind.

Armed with this, much more than what I required, I crafted the scene, achieving everything I had wanted in it. A.I. made writing the scene as I wanted it to be possible but every sentence, every word came from my brain and my desire to paint a picture for the reader. There is a use for A.I. but it is not to create but to assist in creation.

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Taking Feedback — A Necessary Skill

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With my query letter to agents hoping to gain representation for my paranormal horror novel Outrageous Fortune failing to entice interest, I turned to some help getting a review and feedback on the letter and the first 5000 words of the manuscript.

I have never been one of those writers who is terribly precious about their work. I want people to like the stuff, and I sincerely hope that people who read my work are entertained, perhaps moved, and maybe even come away thinking about the world in a slightly different manner, but critiques and criticisms are a part, an unavoidable part, of any creative’s journey.

That said, one should not blithely ignore feedback, nor should one accept it uncritically either. There is a skill, a vital one, in interpreting feedback and knowing what it might be saying about the work and just what might not be successfully coming across to a reader.

When I got this particular piece of feedback, I could see what the person had in their mind and why in their professional opinion the pages were just barely below the threshold that they would need to have more requested for an agent’s review. They read the character as having no immediate goal, no forward drive. Which is fair, the character at the start of the story is floating in a charmed and blessed life where everything goes their way. Their dice rolls always comes up ‘sevens’. the story is the disruption of that life and what it reveals to be the truth behind it to the character. I can’t say that were wrong, their opinion seemed valid and their concern genuine, but I also saw difficulty in implementing any revision that might address this perceived shortcoming. Mind you they made no specific suggestions as to specific revisions, no goal for the character to chase or inner conflict that might be driving them, only what they saw as feature lacking that agents required.

Then, while playing Dominion online with my sweetie-wife Tuesday evening, a possible solution exploded in my noggin. It would not require a new scene but an alteration of an existing one very early on in the first chapter, it would bequest to the protagonist some forward momentum with a concrete goal for him to strive for, expand a little more on the environment of 1984 San Diego, and expound on the character’s moral grounding. All with what promises to be just a few short paragraphs. Between an A.I, powered search and a KPBS article from a decade and a half ago, I found the information I required to execute the idea. Fixing this issue and possibly breaking through to the next level of interest from agents would make a terrific birthday gift to myself.

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A Lethal Literary Trope

Tropes, in prose and in cinema, are commonly used ideas or conventions that are at once familiar and if overused trite and cliche. Enemies-to-Lovers, The Real Enemy is the Best Friend, The Chosen One, The Hidden Society or World, are but a tiny sampling of well-worn tropes. The Harry Potterfranchise makes extensive use of two, Harry is the Chosen One, destined by prophecy to end the villain’s reign and life, and the entire ‘Wizarding World’ is hidden from the rest of humanity, existing in a secret space just outside of the public’s knowledge.

Used correctly tropes can make the world building of a piece of fiction faster and more easily grasped by the reader or audience; subverted they generate surprise and a fresh perspective that can illuminate actual reality; and badly deployed or overused they become cliches that tarnish and degrade a work. But something that is less considered is the danger a trope can present to the world that the reader or audience lives in, when a trope ceases to be a device for fiction and is taken on as a representation of reality.

The hidden but vast conspiracy, such as vampires, aliens, or a cabal of ultra-wealthy Satanists, who manipulate the world’s events, is, in my opinion, a terribly dangerous trope because it aligns so closely with actual paranoid delusions held by far too many.

In 1988’s John Carpenter’s They Live, adapted from the short story Eight O’clock in the Morningby Ray Nelson, a down on his luck itinerant worker, Nada, stumbles onto the fact that human society is being managed by extraterrestrial aliens who keep humanity in a perpetual state of perceptional blindness in order to craft the global capitalist culture by which they extract the world’s resources with the assistance of a small cabal of quislings that have betrayed the rest of the world for personal wealth and power. Nada, after a brief spree of killing the aliens as he encounters them, joins a band of resistance fighters and, in clear trope fashion, succeeds in revealing the vast conspiracy to the wider population.

Carpenter, whose political leanings are clearly on the left side of the accepted spectrum, intended his film to be a critique of capitalism and specifically the culture around the American Republican Party and the head of that party at the time President Ronald Reagan. However, not everyone interpreted his satire in the manner that Carpenter intended.

American neo-Nazis saw a very clear metaphor in the film, one that reflected and validated their own twisted conspiratorial delusions. To them the movie was very boldly speaking about the international influence and control exerted by ‘the Jews.’  Carpenter augmented this interpretation by not only having the aliens occupying the very top of American society, including the presidency itself, but they also lived and worked in the most common of professions, putting in their hours as beat cops and random businessmen on the streets — a bit of clumsy worldbuilding that validated the delusional and evil beliefs of the neo-Nazis and their ilk.

I do wonder just how much of the conspiratorial culture we suffer today was fertilized by the paranoid political thrillers of the 1970s. The movies that espoused the idea that the CIA manipulated events, that every assassination is evidence of secret plots operating behind the scene. Hell, how much of the moon landing hoax was supercharged by Capricorn One and its faked Mars mission plot? What looks ‘popcorn movies’ that only existing to pass a few hours are really ideas. Ideas that in the true sense of the word ‘meme’ take hold in people’s minds and spread like a virus.

This goes beyond the poorly thought out worldbuilding of They Live and into the heart of the story conceit, that, in the face of all reason and evidence, it is possible for a vast and all-powerful conspiracy to exist in the world. It doesn’t matter that in the end this is a silly and overly simple adventure story, the foundations of that story validates the very concept of that vast conspiracy. People may come away knowing that aliens aren’t real, but they ‘know’ that conspiracies are and the subtle effect of such tales is to reinforce and nurture such fantasies that are mistaken for reality.

Antisemitism is a live and terrible thing in our world. It is not a thing born of fantasies but one that is driven by dark and twisted ones, clumsy and ill-considered employment of conspiratorial tropes feeds into and reinforces it. There is not a direct line between stories like They Live and events such as The Tree of Life mass murder, but because the line is not straight or easily seen doesn’t mean that no connections exist. Stories shape how we see the world, what we believe to be true and what is false and they also instruct us how to fight the evil that they present. Because of this I think that vast and all powerful conspiracies need to be used in fiction with extreme caution and perhaps best of all, never.

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