If the author had not been Jonathan Lethem—award-winning novelist, brilliant essayist, recipient of a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation—I might not have opened They Live, a slim critical monograph published last year concerning a late-1980s science-fiction-horror film I had never seen. When I did open it, I found epigraphs from Roland Barthes, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mystery Science Theater 3000, and short, suggestive chapters with titles like “Note on Diegesis and Ideology and Peek-A-Boo” (on the film-theory terms Lethem finds indispensable) and “The Black Guy and the White Guy, Together Again for the First Time” (on a certain casting cliché in late-20th-century Hollywood action movies). I found shrewd and funny insights concerning the movie's key device, “a pair of sunglasses that reveal yuppies as alien ghouls.” And I found a way of thinking about movies that was thorough, thoughtful, populist, and personal, all at once.My appreciation of the Deep Focus series published by Soft Skull is up at the Barnes & Noble Review. Read the rest.
