{"id":335,"date":"2015-08-03T18:42:00","date_gmt":"2015-08-03T22:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/2015\/08\/03\/in-honor-of-rowdy-roddy-piper-a-look-back-on-they-live-from-slavoj-zizek\/"},"modified":"2015-08-03T18:42:00","modified_gmt":"2015-08-03T22:42:00","slug":"in-honor-of-rowdy-roddy-piper-a-look-back-on-they-live-from-slavoj-zizek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/2015\/08\/03\/in-honor-of-rowdy-roddy-piper-a-look-back-on-they-live-from-slavoj-zizek\/","title":{"rendered":"In honor of Rowdy Roddy Piper, a look back on They Live from Slavoj Zizek"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rowdy Roddy Piper’s death last Friday leaves a very unusual hole in the film world. Though he made occasional guest appearances in TV shows and movies \u2013 usually either playing himself or a similarly hard-knuckled character \u2013 Piper is best known even beyond his wrestling career as the star of They Live<\/i> (HU DVD 9020<\/a>), John Carpenter’s cult 1988 sci-fi thriller. Piper plays a construction worker who finds mysterious glasses that allow him to see the hidden mind-controlling messages throughout society. It’s a bizarre but deeply loved film, and Piper’s death has prompted plenty of media retrospectives about it.<\/p>\n

Our favorite comes from Slavoj Zizek’s documentary A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology<\/i> (available in the collection, HU DVD 11194<\/a>). Zizek uses the film as a critique of the concept of moving outside ideology. It’s complicated, and we’ll let him explain it; the video is embedded above. He even discusses the over-extended fist-fight midway into the movie, calling it “the extreme violence of liberation.”<\/p>\n

They Live<\/i>‘s second life in the cult film canon isn’t surprising given its total weirdness, and we like that critics are revisiting its ideas with a little more acceptance. And even though Zizek’s analysis is a few years old, it speaks to what a special movie Piper contributed to.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rowdy Roddy Piper’s death last Friday leaves a very unusual hole in the film world. Though he made occasional guest appearances in TV shows and movies \u2013 usually either playing himself or a similarly hard-knuckled character \u2013 Piper is best known even beyond his wrestling career as the star of They Live (HU DVD 9020), […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[377],"class_list":["post-335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-obituaries","tag-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}