Dictatorship In John Carpenter's They Live

Liberal society typically exalts individual liberty as one of its most fundamental values. However, a portion of contemporary media and political thought argue that since we are steeped in dominant ideology, this individual liberty is only ostensible. On film, John Carpenter’s They Live depicts a population entirely controlled by an alien elite, the true indoctrination and oppression of which can only be seen through special sunglasses most don’t have access to.1 In his essay “Denial, the Liberal Utopia,” philosopher Salvoj Žižek writes of the ideological mechanisms of the film, “…through the critico-ideological glasses, we directly see the Master-Signifier beneath the chain of knowledge: we learn to see dictatorship in democracy.”2 This concept is dominant in Žižek’s other works, namely another essay, “How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?” A key feature of his argument remains our awareness of this “dictatorship in democracy,” but Žižek takes this idea a step further, asserting that even though we may be aware of this veiled …show more content…
For Althusser, there is no life without ideology. There is no truth behind the ideological veil; there is only a series of veils. But, for Žižek, behind the veil there is a “hard kernel of the Real” of our desire, that which we would choose to do in absence of the structure and domination of ideology.14 While he doesn’t believe simply thinking will achieve anything, Žižek allows his subject the experience of formulating his or her own thoughts and then making the choice to fit into the dominant