Mar 19th 2024

They Live + O.C. & Stiggs a part of Highs & Lows – A Film Series

@ Music Box Theatre

3733 N Southport Ave, Chicago, IL 60613

Opening Tuesday, March 19th, at 7PM

Summertime in mid-80’s America – – Reaganomics are in full swing across the nation, as illegal arms deals are significantly escalated, tax cuts for the wealthy hit their modern zenith, and insidious commercialization is at an all time high – – all seems hyper-normal and well inside the soft, insulated, billowy bosom of the United States.

As the golden era of the 70’s filmmaking had taken its last gasp, many filmmakers with bold visions were left wondering what to do. Enter two filmmakers by the names John Carpenter and Robert Altman, filmmakers who had made a significant number of films for the studio system (a couple which became moneymakers) and found themselves at odds with this new model of box-office driven productions. Altman, no stranger to pushing the envelope, took the first plunge into the unknown with his MAD Magazine short story adaptation, O.C. & STIGGS in 1983. This full on-assault against the burgeoning teen comedy exploitation trend, couldn’t resemble films like PORKYS, or PORKYS 2: THE NEXT DAY, any less. On the surface, its plot suggesting the antics of two mischievous teens, is turned all the way to the right on the negativity dial, resulting in one of the blackest comedies of the era, a nihilistic napalm drop on the mores and attitudes of 1980’s society, where the idea of proper adulthood finds itself assaulted from all sides. Altman’s satire (an almost retelling of M.A.S.H.) didn’t find distribution until 4 years later.

Just across town in Los Angeles, John Carpenter was adapting a short story of his own (written by the inventor of the propeller beanie), this one from a science fiction magazine, which became the 1987 film THEY LIVE.

Less covert than Altman’s acidic expose of America, Carpenter lets his middle finger extend pronounced, as his unsuspecting anarchic duo of Roddy Piper and Keith David, descend on L.A. armed with special sunglasses that reveal the invisible dictatorship lurking behind every advertisement, billboard, and sometimes, the people around them. As they uncover an alien plot to drain America of all of its mineral, cultural, and economic resources, they decide to wage full on war with their surroundings.

Carpenter and Altman may have cloaked their very personal visions under the guise of “adaptations”, but modern audiences today can feel their burn scorching hotter than ever, revealing cauterized scars across the vast belly of America, between the people at the top and the rest of us.

 

About the Series

Films of a higher tier, those stamped with the seal of Art, usually accrue a more serious following than many of the movies being made on a supposedly lower tier – those branded with the scalding mark of the “mainstream.” As we create and bolster these tiers, in the shadow of a class system curiously similar in construction, the public risks being further and further from our own desire for liberation, for enlightenment, and for pure, unadulterated entertainment. Cinema was born with the intention to fulfill the needs of spectacle for the working classes – the mainstream. Yet, as time pressed on, and the cinematic form grew, so did the separation of cinema from its origins, from the people and their governing reality. As Walter Benjamin put it, higher art sought “concentration” while lower art fostered “distraction,” an idea so preposterous to the German-Jewish philosopher, that he went on to say: “…all of this in order to distort and corrupt the original and justified interest of the masses in film – an interest in them understanding themselves and therefore their class.” It is with this thought that we present, ‘Highs & Lows’: a film series questioning, bridging, and destroying the gap between the idea of bad vs. good, high vs. low, and art vs. pleasure. ‘Highs & Lows’ is an experiment in coupling mainstream pop culture with canonical arthouse classics. Each of the films being presented are made-to-order for every persuasion of the modern-moviegoing scene, steered towards a horizon hellbent on canonical and hierarchical obliteration. This series illuminates the often surprising thematic connections and motifs between supposedly antithetical films. Highs & Lows is a series designed to highlight the spectacle of the cinema.

Inspired by the City of commerce drive in’s screening of all eyes on me + 47 Metres Down & The Mall’s original series, Highs & Lows

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