They Live (deep Focus): A Novel Approach to Cinema

One of the cleverest, most accessibly in-depth film books released this year … a smart-ass novelist exploring a cheesy-cheeky ‘80s sci-fi flick. -Hartford Advocate

Deep Focus is a series of film books with a fresh approach. Take the smartest, liveliest writers in contemporary letters and let them loose on the most vital and popular corners of cinema history- midnight movies, the New Hollywood of the sixties and seventies, film noir, screwball comedies, international cult classics, and more …
Kicking off the series is Jonathan Lethem’s take on They Live, John Carpenter’s 1988 classic amalgam of deliberate B-movie, sci-fi, horror, anti-Yuppie agitprop.

Lethem exfoliates Carpenter’s paranoid satire in a series of penetrating, free-associational forays into the context of a story that peels the human masks off the ghoulish overlords of capitalism. Taking into consideration classic Hollywood cinema and science fiction-as well as popular music and contemporary art and theory-They Live provides a wholly original perspective on Carpenter’s subversive classic.