Idea IS the format

“From November 1969 to June 1971 a coalition of American Indian students and urban Indians, calling themselves ‘Indians of All Tribes’, occupied Alcatraz Island off the coast of San Francisco as a call to resistance against US domination of native peoples and land. The coalition publicized the occupation through a widely distributed newsletter and a radio show broadcast in multiple cities. This action sparked years of Native resistance, including the 1972 takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs Headquarters in Washington D.C. and the re-occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973.”

(From Josh Macphee’s ‘The Occupation of Alcatraz’ print (above), part of the Celebrate People’s History series.)

Released in 1988, John Carpenter’s THEY LIVE finds honest, hard-working Americans – personified in this case by the muscle-bound mullet that is ‘Rowdy’ Roddy Piper – on skid row, under the thumb of a kleptocracy of aliens masquerading as decent, clean-living human beings in cahoots with a power elite of Reagan-era Republicans doing much the same thing.

Los Angeles offers the perfect backdrop to THEY LIVE. Wall Street might be America’s financial capital, but LA is its epicentre of conspicuous consumption, the natural point of origin for the TV signal being used by these intergalactic free-enterprisers to addle and exploit the collective human consciousness.

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