All Outta Bubblegum: What I Learned from “They Live”

"I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass... and I'm all outta bubblegum." 

On the surface the movie "They Live" may seem like an average sci-fi flick with gratuitous violence. However, when it comes to John Carpenter, there simply must be several layers of meaning.

There's the "big brother as alien" message... but then there's a deeper message about finding purpose in life and the self-discovery that eventually happens as we travel that path; going inward to fight the demons in the shadows of our mind, so that we can live an ever increasing purposeful life with passion.

Putting yourself into the shoes of the protagonist, you are seeing the aliens "live it up" at the expense of all useless eaters of the world. As you fight their quiet dominance over your freedom, you can start to discover what it is you are fighting for. "They live", but are they truly living - or just skimming the surface, distracting themselves with the comforts of the material world; seeking to control others to get what they think they want? Being disturbed by their lifestyle perhaps is just a window of opportunity to see what also lives in us.

I see the fight for freedom from materialistic aliens running the show from behind the curtain as an analogy for the inner struggle to conquer that which keeps us from putting on a brave face, looking at the bigger picture, and living life from a place of honesty and discernment – with a purpose greater than chasing our own petty moment-to-moment desires of comfort.

What if we stopped judging others long enough to take a look inward and witness our motives for making "them" our external enemy? Perhaps we'd eventually tap into that well of boundless creative energy that feeds our zest for life.  Perhaps we’d discover the still quiet voice reaching out from a deeply centered part of ourselves and realize it’s always been speaking to us – our mind was just too cluttered to get most of the messages. And just maybe we’d begin to toss aside the illusion of the only option is to pick something from the continual array of “choices” shoved in our face and realize we have only but to cast aside that veil and ask in any given moment:  What do I decide? What’s next? What did I want five minutes before someone told me I had to “choose” this or that?

What if… we saw beyond our victim mentality and judgments about what the world was doing to us, and asked ourselves – “What can I do?”


That's a step on the pathless path of bhakti.  It starts from the heart - flowing outward.

As for myself – I’m all outta bubblegum.


Love and Gratitude,



Alchemist