: The film features a legendary, six-minute-long back-alley brawl between Nada and Frank, which John Carpenter designed to show the grueling difficulty of convincing someone to see an uncomfortable truth.
: The film’s visual style—black-and-white "truth" vs. colorful "illusion"—critiques the neoliberal ideologies and mass media manipulation of the 1980s.
Los Angeles, Nada (Roddy Piper) finds a pair of special sunglasses that strip away the "mask" of reality.