Talking New Cult Canon with The Onion A.V. Club’s Scott Tobias
Scott Tobias, film editor for the satirical newspaper The Onion, is in town next week to talk about his A.V. Club essay series “The New Cult Canon.” He’ll speak at the Central Branch of the Kansas City Public Library, which is gearing up for its summer Off-the-Wall film series. The connection: This summer, the library’s outdoor screenings focus on titles with the Tobias seal of new-cult approval. To go to the talk (at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 6), RSVP here. Meanwhile, here’s The Pitch‘s e-mail interview with Tobias.
The Pitch: The library’s series starts with John Carpenter’s They Live. What’s the main thing about it that makes it a good example of canon material?
To explain that choice a bit, the New Cult Canon was inspired, in large part, by Danny Peary‘s Cult Movies books, all three of which were published in the ’80s and were a major influence on me when I was getting into cult movies. (Ditto Peary’s Guide for the Film Fanatic and the NSFC’s Produced and Abandoned anthology.) I waited very patiently for Peary to stop writing baseball books and offer up his thoughts on the current flowering of cult cinema worldwide, but 20 years was long enough for me. At this point in the project, my intention is to pick up roughly where Peary left off, so with the exception of revivals that sparked some passion within the last two decades (like I Am Cuba, for example), my loose cut-off date for inclusion in the New Cult Canon is roughly 1987.
All of which is to explain why I chose They Live over the wealth of other cult classics on John Carpenter’s résumé. It’s not a perfect movie by any means, but it’s his last great one and a fine example of how well Carpenter smuggles subversive ideas into two-fisted genre fare. As I wrote in the piece, it’s a movie that plant one last stinkbomb in the toilet of Reagan’s America, imagining a country where the rich and powerful are aliens feasting on our resources and populace has been reduced to mindless consumers who watch TV and surrender their consciences and will. The two things that make the film really stand out are the sunglasses that allow ordinary folk to see the truth (i.e., identify the aliens and read the subliminal messages — OBEY, CONFORM, CONSUME — that lie behind billboards and commercials and magazine ads) and one of the all-time great fight scenes, an endless alleyway brawl that turns the ridiculous into the transcendent. The latter is also the scene that justifies casting a professional wrestler [Roddy Piper] in the lead role.
