Plenty of films are open to interpretation. Was Deckard a replicant in Blade Runner? Were Patrick Bateman’s grisly murders a figment of his imagination in American Psycho? Who was The Thing at the conclusion of John Carpenter’s The Thing? One thing was always certain, though: Carpenter’s They Live is not an allegory for Jews secretly controlling the world.
Nevertheless, Neo-Nazis and white supremacists have been perpetuating the myth that They Live has an anti-Semitic message since at least 2008. And the horror master himself must have heard about these conspiracy theories, because last night he took a break from noodling on his synthesizers and took to Twitter to call any insinuation that They Live was anti-Semitic “slander and a lie.”
Any normal person who watches They Live without the constricting sensation of a tinfoil hat (or red armband) can see that the film is a borderline heavy-handed critique of Reagan-era consumerism and conformity that also features plenty of nasty-looking aliens and the best back-alley brawl ever committed to film. It would appear, however, that the denizens of the dumbest and darkest corners of the Internet do not agree with the auteur theory, and think that director (and writer and composer) Carpenter is simply wrong about his own film.
In response to his statement, Carpenter received a number of vile tweets from Nazi jagoffs who need to find a hobby consisting of nasty memes and artwork perpetuating lies about the Jewish people—and Carpenter’s worldview:
@TheHorrorMaster then why is this in the movie? pic.twitter.com/jXfvITLtfV
— Erwin Rommeow (@Rommeow_Arises) January 4, 2017
@blackholetalos @TheHorrorMaster Current events. pic.twitter.com/Jms2wItZba
— Albatross Parsons (@bloodyseabird) January 4, 2017
Presumably, these dopes also believe that Indiana Jones was nothing more than a common grave robber, Rick Blaine a cold-hearted jerk, and Ilsa, She-Wolf Of The S.S. simply an ambitious go-getter trying to break the glass celling. As of press time, Twitter was still awful.