THEY LIVE! (Part III)

British School is not like a Frankfurt School, people think that Frankfurt School is more pessimistic rather than British School but I believe that it is just more realistic. British School intellectuals deny any hierarchical classification of cultures, arguing that culture is life or a particular way of living. I agree that culture is a way of living, also it is a way how to see the world just like ideologies. George Nada lives in a capitalist American society and capitalism was his window but he was unaware of how much the framework constrained him. He was unaware of the messages behind the commercials, products, broadcasts on TV even texts in newspapers/magazines. Stuart Hall developed an encoding-decoding model of mass media. “In this, the meaning of the text, which is located somewhere between its producer and the reader, is framed (or encoded) by the producer in a certain way, and the reader decodes the text’s message slightly differently, according to his/her personal background (This made me think, the movie shows that capitalism gives an image like you’re free to you but this image is not real, it binds you itself in a way), and the various social situations and frames of interpretation” Implied in the model is that the masses only want to see and accept things that they find to be agreeable. Although at the first sight, the “Hall Model” seems rather simple, it is the simple model that solves an important problem the meaning of mass media text is not transmitted by the producer (encoder) but produced by the reader (decoder).

At the end of the movie, Nada and Frank find the aliens’ secret place and they tried to destroy the antenna to stop signals, people should learn the aliens’ real faces when they find a way to go up on the roof, they found a club which is made up of people who funding by aliens and alien. Until the movie explains that people are in different forms, I assumed that it is a metaphor and that the glasses show them like that because they are blindly subordinate to authority. Somehow, when they try to go up on the roof, they meet the woman who beat Nada before. First, they think she is on their side but is not. She is from the persons who funding by aliens, she kills Frank but Nada could shoot the antenna and he managed to interrupt the antenna’s signal transmission. It appears to me, aliens in the film are a symbol as I mentioned. It is a symbol of alienation of people themselves, the people who progress with scientific developments also aliens in the movie dominate nature and humans just as Critical Theoricians said.

According to Slavoj Zizek, They live! the movie shows us that we look how at our lives through the ideologies we live with. 

- The End -

References

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Zhen, L. (2016). Relationship Between Mass Media and Mass Culture: Frankfurt School and Cultural Studies School. Canadian Social Science, 12(1), 23–28. https://doi.org/10.3968/8097

Sophie Fiennes (Director). (2012). The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology [Documentary]. 

Slater, P. (1998). Origin and Sigıifance of the Frankfurt School A Marxist Perspective (1st ed.). Kabalcı.