John Carpenter, American horror film master, B-grade film master. The films he directed were poignant in style and prominent in genre, often dark, gloomy and with some cold humor. He is good at creating a terrifying and mysterious atmosphere, creating psychological fears, not relying on tradition to threaten the audience at first glance, but in a slow and hot way, luring the king into the urn, gradually tearing apart its psychological defense line. The stunning "BloodsplatterEd ThirteenTh police station" created a new popular style for B-movies, and the blockbuster launch of Halloween in 1979 completely established Carpenter's unshakable mastership in the field of horror films.
"Strange Shape", which is the most watched by Chinese film fans, with the creation of an oppressive atmosphere, the special effects model of the ancients, and the script story of the explosion of the sky, is called the greatest third type of contact horror film in the history of film by science fiction fans. His "Heavenly Devil Returns" and "Shuddering Black Hole" are even more easily squeezed into the list of the top 100 horror thrillers in film history. In addition to his paranoid quest for stunt effects, John Carpenter's films are also ideologically extremely left-leaning, often presenting another side of social reality in a deconstructivist way. His most defiant film was the 1988 film "They Live."
Extreme Space is based on Ray Nelson's novel 8 O'Clock in the Morning, which deals with aliens' potential control over Earth and humans. Don't think that this is the emergence of american invasion films in the 50s, similar to "The Magic Flower", which no longer expresses the fear and concern about the infiltration of the East into the West, but the irony and catharsis of totalitarianism and consumerism like "1984".
"Extreme Space" tells such an absurd, comedic, and terrifying story. The male protagonist wanders the streets unemployed, full of low-level people who are worried about finding a job.
With his strong body, he found a temporary job at the construction site. With the help of his black friends, he went to the makeshift gathering place by the church to rest.
One night, the police system, the violent apparatus, searched the church, arrested the priest and related personnel, and bulldozed the entire low-level homeless crowd gathering place in the name of the search.
The greedy and cheap male protagonist went to the empty church, found several large boxes of boxes, and opened them to see that they were just some sunglasses. He took one away in disappointment, but when he put on his sunglasses, the whole world changed.
The assortment of advertisements, magazines and merchandise has all changed under the perspective of sunglasses. Everywhere are written eye-catching words such as "obedience", "consumption", "possession", "work" and so on. What is even more frightening is that some pedestrians on the road, under the perspective of sunglasses, are exposed to their original shapes, and it turns out that they are not humans at all, but alien creatures.
They connected with each other by carrying a precious watch on their wrist, using the control of the police system to eliminate the "rebels" who discovered this secret.
The story suddenly enters into an interesting and fierce conflict. "Extreme Space" arranged two scenes for the male protagonist with sunglasses to "rebel" and violate the convention. One is that the male protagonist, who wears sunglasses, is emotionally excited, and has a restless blood vein, knocks out the police officers who come to arrest him, and then goes to the bank with a weapon and kills the aliens.
Under the sunglasses, it seemed that all the upper classes were alien creatures, and those who dressed richly were defined as non-human, or alienated.
On the walls of the church, there are warning words: they live, we sleep (they are omnipresent, we can't sleep).
Extreme Space uses exaggerated and imaginative stories as metaphors for the means and methods of centralized control. In the film, the role of television is extremely important. At the end of the 1980s, it was the era of the rise of television, "Entertainment to Death", "Consumer Society", "Television", McLuhan's media theory was popular, all of which were concerned about the impact of television as an emerging medium on human beings and society. In the film "Extreme Space", television becomes a tool for brainwashing, and it is also a communication channel for this group of rebels to expose the truth.
But the alien creatures that control the right to spread are strictly guarded and attach great importance to this. At the climax of the third act, the protagonist and his party arrive at the headquarters of the alien creatures, where the TV media department occupies a considerable space. In the end, the male protagonist also exposed the "truth" by destroying the TV signal transmitter, so that all aliens could "manifest" in human society. In "Extreme Space", television communication is used as a method of centralized control, and control is no longer simply reflected in violent suppression, but in the form of ideological propaganda and mind control, and the subconscious mind plays an effect.
The proposer of the ideology theory, Herbert Marcuse, in his classic The One-Dimensional Man, points out that
In various ways, advanced industrial societies have succeeded in suppressing the negative, critical, and transcendent dimensions of people's hearts, making this society a one-dimensional society, and those who live in it become one-dimensional people, such people lose their freedom and creativity, and no longer imagine or pursue another life that is different from real life. It reveals the totalitarian characteristics of the contemporary developed industrial society type.
There is a scene in "Extreme Space" that has been complained about by many fans. In order to prove that he can see the real world with sunglasses, the male protagonist fights with his black friends, and the two fight back and forth for nearly 20 minutes.
This can be described as a representative scene of anti-genre in the films at that time, and this exaggerated way is not only a rebellion against the film form at that time, but also to remind fans of how difficult it is to wake up the controlled people. The hero's black friend repeatedly reminds him not to disturb his life at the beginning of the period, he only hopes to make money at the construction site, but on weekdays, he is worried about a life that does not see hope. But when he came to the alien headquarters, he had a complete epiphany.
Aliens have co-opted the upper echelons of society in exchange for money and fame, allowing them to help them control other human beings and monopolize the resources of various industries, and people like him have almost no time to emerge, just cheap labor.
Through television propaganda, consumerism is rife, coupled with the social atmosphere of entertainment to death, most people live with the black thinking in the film, becoming Marcuse's one-dimensional people. Marcuse argues that it is advanced capitalist societies that create one-dimensional people. Such a society is a totalitarian society that suppresses dissenting opinions and voices, suppresses people's denial and criticism of the status quo. In advanced capitalist societies, the masses of the people have lost their revolutionary character, and this is the best proof of totalitarianism. In the film, American heroism saves society, eliminates mimetic reality, and allows aliens to manifest in various fields.
But when reality enters the network society from the television society, a new "extreme space" may be quietly forming. In John Carpenter's "Extreme Space", there is the social nature of class division, the embodiment of the centralized method of upper control, and the collusion of the powerful and violent institutions, and it is self-evident who the aliens are metaphorical. "Extreme Space" is the most ideologically oriented work in John Carpenter's work, the aphorism of "they live, we sleep", which can still interrogate the heart and echo through decades.