Osmola Szymon, They Live... and They Make Consumer Law a Poor Instrument of Distributive Justice

The titular „they” stands for zombie-like aliens controlling the Earth in John Carpenter’s iconic film from 1988. They Live is one of the bluntest and – at the same time – one of the funniest cinematic depictions of the perils of consumer culture, the others being David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, David Fincher’s Fight Club or, more recently, Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You. All of these films show, often in a somewhat exaggerated way, how excessive consumerism may lead to insensivity, alienation, indifference to people’s suffering, and paranoia. Nada, the protagonist of They Live, accidentally comes into possession of a pair of sunglasses that reveal to him the truth about the true masters of our planet, who use media and consumer goods to send subliminal messages to people in order to make them docile and obedient. The film, originally intended as a critique of Ronald Reagan’s neoliberal economic policies, remains scarily valid: consumerism, and consumer culture in general, even...