Outside Your Heaven

Is It Possible to Make a Progressive Predator Movie?

Posted: 13 Sep 2018 02:34 PM PDT

I caught Predator on television last night. I hadn't seen it in decades. It was one of my favorites when I was a teenager, a real typical male nerd movie to like. A lot of the movies I loved back then I don't love anymore, but I'm enough of a cinephile to still appreciate the craft that went into Predator. It has a sober quality -- typical of all director John McTiernan's work -- that's strange for an otherwise bombastic 80s action film. McTiernan would bring the same sobriety to Die Hard a few years later, grounding its over-the-top action in a grittiness and believability that would set it apart from the cartoonish ubermensches of the Reagan era and pave the way for action cinema of the 90s.

Consequently Predator's loopy cartoon premise -- a bunch of meaty man-mountain commandos get ambushed by an alien in the jungle -- attains a down-to-earth gravity, a blending of tones similar to Cameron's Aliens, with charismatic characters trapped in an increasingly dire situation. It's a movie about watching a series of alpha males go to pieces emotionally, and it's effectively scary. I was struck watching it again by, as effective and serious as it is, how much more effective and serious it would be -- a true horror film -- if you were to edit out all the shots of the alien itself. The film creates suspense through deft filmmaking around a threat you almost never see, similar to Spielberg's Jaws. If you really did never see it the film would function as pure metaphor: America's crisis of masculinity brought on by the emasculation of Vietnam made manifest as an invisible roaming jungle force that eats men alive.

I have not looked, but I am 100% certain there are countless academic papers and probably more than a few journalistic articles on Predator and American masculinity. In film studies it's often cited in the pantheon of 80s movies that are attempting to process America's loss in Vietnam. These are all films where forgotten soldiers find themselves trapped in another jungle of some sort, either reliving the defeat of Vietnam all over again or processing the trauma by achieving victory. "Do we get to win this time, sir?" Rambo asks his CO in First Blood Part II, before he's literally sent back to Vietnam in the 80s to kick the ass he didn't get to kick in the 70s. The idea is that American masculinity died in the jungle, and the soldiers -- back home, traumatized -- have to return to the jungle, either literally or metaphorically, to reclaim it.

Rambo is the most literal of these. Aliens and Predator are sci-fi horror variants on the same idea. In Aliens the (mostly male) soldiers suffer a traumatic defeat at the hands of an unseen "savage" enemy, and Ripley has to step in and save them. In Predator the same thing happens, only Dutch (the Schwarzenegger character) wins by becoming "more male" than the alien, which itself is coded as a hypermasculine threat from outer space, from an alien planet that has taken masculinity beyond anything we can imagine.

The best review of Predator I ever read was a short capsule from Total Film back in the late 90s. It described it as a slasher film with the gender inverted: a slumber party massacre movie where instead of women getting naked and being killed one by one, men get naked and are killed one by one. This happens in the movie. The men, initially shown as macho badasses, slowly become unhinged as they realize they are all going to die. They begin to cry, scream, and show emotion out of character for the genre. One of them goes to pieces over his friend's death, a friend he survived Vietnam with. He spends all night staring at the moon talking to is dead friend. "You know, bro, I've go you." he whispers, tears in his eyes. He is broken up like a lover. Increasingly, the soldiers have to remove their clothes to make equipment and traps for the alien, and there are many shots of rippling muscles upon muscles flexing and glistening. All these men die, and we see their massive, iron-pumping, leading man bodies -- the bodies usually reserved for superheroes -- ripped to pieces. You see Carl Weathers's perfectly sculpted arm ripped off while he screams, its fist still convulsing in spasms as it fires its gun, like a dick that's been cut off mid-ejaculation.

In the 80's feminist film scholar Carol Clover coined the term Final Girl in her influential book Men, Women, and Chainsaws. Dutch is the final girl in Predator. He's Jamie Lee Curtis from Halloween reimagined as an ubermensch commando. While I wouldn't call the film progressive -- it's still basically about Dutch become more of a mensch than the space mensch in order to win -- the way the film leverages symbolism surrounding gender and race says a lot about America's subconscious. You could go nuts on the symbolic dimensions of the jungle being a locus of racial and sexual anxiety in America's view of the cosmos. The Predator's design has all sorts of unsubtle racial coding, like scary-but-also-cool space dreds, and even though its body is absurdly masculine it has feminine flourishes like ultra-long fingernails and a mouth that looks like a vagina. The overall effect is hypermasculine, yet it embodies a racial and gendered uncanny as well: dredlocks with pasty white skin, a muscle-bound masculine frame with feminine appendages and orifices. This is ultimately (according too the logic of the film) what makes its masculinity unattractive, undesirable, and, well, alien. Most importantly, it comes from a society of hunters that views hypermasculine humans as prey -- as objects -- because of their hypermasculinity. Alpha males are the best game, the biggest challenge, the best trophy. Women are safe from it, as are less masculine men.

In the historical narrative of American progress, men conquer nature -- it's a supposed sign of our masculine manifest destiny that we learned to survive and control the continent, to subjugate, enslave, and/or kill its inhabitants. The jungle, the wilderness, the woods -- and what lurks in them -- are our first fear. The Predator is the Indian, the alien gender, the alien race, with its alien sexuality -- the hunter the white man needed to destroy in order to copy, to become, in order to conquer the continent. This is why Dutch has to become "primitive" at the end to survive -- he has to find his inner hunter, his inner savage, but still retain his white "civilized" nature to be truly superior. The Native American soldier in the film is the first to notice the Predator, but in the end he stops fighting and offers himself up to the beast, like he understands that he is prey, that his place in the ecosystem is to die. Dutch, arguably because of his whiteness, resists this. The natural world can go fuck itself. He insists on reordering the food chain with him on top. I was intrigued to learn that in the original script, before Arnold was cast, the Native American character was the protagonist and the lone survivor at the end. That would have been very different movie.

This is why all attempts to remake or update Predator seem a bit off. Regardless of how well-made they are or aren't as films, they are out of step with the zeitgeist. Predator was squarely about Vietnam, and it's more limited, more specific in its symbolism, than the xenomorphs of the Alien franchise. There are not a lot of things it can represent, at least not if you just lift it wholesale and drop it into a modern context. The new Predator film seems typically oblivious to all these zeitgeist details of the original character. The main new thing it appears to be bringing is a bigger, badder Predator. How alpha male can you get? Alpha Alpha Space-Alpha Male x10?

Whether it's a good or bad movie is sort of beside the point. It's an old symbol representing American masculinity in crisis 30 years ago. If you really want to update the Predator, you don't just make him taller and meaner. You don't just make the Predator version of Indominus Rex. You ask yourself what is American masculinity afraid of today? What blow did it suffer collectively, at a broad cultural level, in the past generation?

What invisible force is coming for our men now?

It's always hard to know the answer to these things in the moment. Historical hindsight is 20/20. But we can try by asking ourselves what Afghanistan and Iraq mean today, how similar or different the trauma of those wars are to the collective trauma of Vietnam, and how the trauma of these current wars fit into America's historical obsession with subjugating nature, of conquering the "savage" wilderness to achieve manifest destiny.

In a way Predator 2's urban setting was a savvy zeitgeist gesture, even if the 1990 film itself wasn't very good. Putting the space alpha male that out-alpha's our alpha males in the context of a dystopian Los Angeles ripping itself apart with racial tension was looking in the right place to find American anxieties post-Rodney King. It also focused on the right hero archetype as the prey: the alpha-male cop, the 90s John McClain ubermensch, as opposed to the 80s commando ubermensch. If we follow the cultural logic of (white) civilization retreating from danger, but the danger always following it, we move from the scary wilderness, to the scary cities, to the scary suburbs. The suburbs are the last bastion of whiteness, where whiteness builds its fortress to protect itself from the rising tide of racial ortherness swallowing the rest of the country. This is of course where the slasher film genre takes place, as Clover describes at length in her book, in a domestic safe space threatened by a invasive masculine force of destruction.

I wonder what it would mean for the Predator to come to a quiet suburb to collect the skull of an Iraq war vet trying to adjust to everyday life, like the Predator vs. Jeremy Renner from The Hurt Locker. Wouldn't that just be like war trauma following you home? What if you destroy you family and your neighborhood to fight it? Are you really fighting it? Or are you fighting yourself?

Perhaps this is the anxiety now, that Americans aren't safe in their own homes, not safe from their neighbors, and not safe from themselves. Maybe that's the post-9/11 Predator. You don't have to go to the jungle to find the monster. You wake up one morning and its outside your front door. Or you wake up next to it in your bed.

We have the wounded masculinity of war trauma. We also have the rising tide of toxic masculinity, the alt-right, fascist, and white supremacist masculinity. What if the Predator went after racist cops? What if a Predator film began with a dashboard cam uploaded to Youtube of a white cop savagely beating a black driver he pulled over, only to have the Predator rip his head off out of nowhere and take it back to his trophy room so he could mount it next to his Isis member?

To say American masculinity is currently in crisis is an understatement. It's now facing a crisis that cuts much deeper than the defeat in Vietnam did. You'd think a figure like the Predator could be used to address this in a resonant way. The lazy thing to do would be to use the Predator to assert some traditional form of masculinity, like the original film does. But things could get interesting if you used it to redefine what masculinity is. Do the Predators accept changing definitions of masculinity? Does the hypermasculine ideal they look for in their prey ever change? Are they gender essentialists? What if they aren't?

There's a real opportunity here to blow masculinity wide open. But given the accidental/subconscious nature of the original film's gender commentary, combined with the 100% unironic male fanbase that worships the Predator for being the ultimate space mench, makes that seem unlikely. There is a Mad Max Fury Road treatment of this character, of this concept, buried in there somewhere. Capitalism dictates we'll probably never see it.

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