num_pages: 163
description: 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. Passionate and idiosyncratic each volume of Deep Focus is long-form criticism that's relentlessly provocative and entertaining.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. His field of reference spans classic Hollywood cinema and science fiction as well as popular music and contemporary art and theory. Taking into consideration the work of Barbara Kruger Jenny Holzer James Brown Fredric Jameson Shepard Fairey Philip K. Dick Alfred Hitchcock and Edgar Allan Poe not to mention the role of wrestlersincluding They Live star Rowdy Roddy Piperin contemporary culture Lethem's They Live provides a wholly original perspective on Carpenter's subversive classic.
language: English
title: They Live: A Novel Approach to Cinema
publisher: Soft Skull