Part Two: Anatomy of a Scene That Explicates The Predicament Of The Creative consciousness

There’s a subtley audacious and nearly ridiculous fight scene in John Carpenter’s under-appreciated sci-fi horror film, “They Live”

The film is from 1988 so if you haven’t seen it I’m sorry to say that the statue of limits for warnings about spoilers has long ago expired.

In the scene, the main character John Nada is trying to get his friend and comrade to put on a pair of sunglasses.

The sunglasses of course representing a view on the world, a way to see the world in a different light, to see the world differently from those who don’t have sunglasses.

The use of an instrument of seeing is apropos to the discussion here about the relationship between the Creative Consciousness, which I refer to here allegorically as ‘Imagination’, and the Rational Consciousness, which I refer to as ‘Structure’

John Nada, wants his friend to see the world through these glasses which possess a unique and sci-fi value in the film in that they show the world ‘as it is’. They make sense of the world by showing it to the eyes of those who would wear them — and what we are able to see indicates that we have not been living in the world as we thought it was.

Rather, we have been blind to its true nature.

And this is the realm of the Creative Consciousness as the artist — those who would make sense of the unseen, the unexpected, the unanticipated. Who are able to Imagine the world otherwise.

What I find fascinating about this scne is that the struggle that the Artist, John Nada goes through to get his friend to see the world the way he sees it.

In my mind this is representative of the struggle of the artist.

See the world the way I see it.