Ander Monson - Predator: A Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession

ANDER MONSON

GRAYWOLF PRESS

Copyright 2022 by Ander Monson

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This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Significant support has also been provided by the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

Published by Graywolf Press

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Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

All rights reserved.

www.graywolfpress.org

Published in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-64445-200-4 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64445-184-7 (ebook)

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

First Graywolf Printing, 2022

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930739

Cover design: Adam Bohannon

For Megan and for Paul Monette

and for all the boys Ive been before

I ALWAYS FORGET ABOUT THIS PREAMBLE , in which we start our journey from space into the jungle and through action into horror. But here we are, seeing stars. A whole wild field of them. Then Schwarzenegger, then PREDATOR, andmy Fitbit tells me, Fat burn!my pulse is already racing. The camera pans down slowly to more space. Enter a spaceship that looks a little wonky, but not bad for the 80s, presumably done with models. This is among the worst effects the movie will have to offer. Theres a planet: Earth, we guess. The spaceship spawns a little something that looks like a space sperm, and it goes off toward the planet. We see it enter the atmosphere in a dash of orange.

Ive watched Predator 146 times, and this part always surprises me when I put it on again, because its so odd and disconnected from the rest of the movie. It provides a frame, I guess, to the action that will come, but it definitely does not feel essential. It really wants to let us know theres an ALIEN in this movie, that this is about SPACE, not only cool dudes in the jungle. Its a bizarre way to open one of the most influential, iconic, and interesting action movies of all time.

John McTiernan, the films director, forgot about it, too, as he tells us in the directors commentary for the fifteenth anniversary DVD. This whole bit was added after shooting, he tells us, and its possible hes never actually seen it, he says. Thats how little he remembers it. First, though, he complains about the 20th Century Fox logo: its distorted, he wants us to know, because he wasnt allowed to shoot the film in anamorphic widescreen because the studio wouldnt let him on account of some technical aspect of the visual effects. I dont quite care enough about what that means exactly to track it down, but he still seems bitter about it, fifteen years later. He had a lot of conflicts with the studio making this movie. This was the first big studio film hed directed after his first movie, an ambitious but low-budget horror flick called Nomads (starring an often shirtless future James Bond, Pierce Brosnan, in his first movie role). Making Predator , McTiernan tells us in a voice that can only be described as soporific, allowed him to make all his other movies, including Die Hard , his other action classic, and a whole string of movies you may recognize: The Hunt for Red October, Last Action Hero, The Thomas Crown Affair , among others. Im watching Predator again with him for the fifteenth anniversary. And Im watching the movie with you because you need to watch it. I mean, were watching it already. The world were living in watched it and consumed it, and now I see it everywhere I go.

I wish I didnt have to see it. I feel like I saw enough dudes with guns in the 1980s and 1990s for a lifetime. Or, rather, I wish I could watch those dudes only on-screen, where they can only do on-screen damage, but those dudes are now increasingly on the screen every time I watch not movies but the news. They pose a threat: it was obvious then (thats the whole point of this movie were watching, after all), but watch them pour into the United States Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC, and tell me its just a movie.

CAN WE DIVINE A CULTURE FROM ITS FILMS , especially the ones that stick? Some cops get shot, I think of Predator . Some cops shoot kids. Guns in the grocery store, I think of Dutch, Schwarzeneggers character. A firework burns down a neighbors house and I think SFX. A sexual predators elected I call him predator when I call him anything. I call him yours . I call him also mine because even though I might resent a thing it still claims me against my will. Another Black man is killed by the police I think of Predator . Another. Another. My congresswoman gets shot outside a Safeway supermarket a bike ride from my house. A nine-year-old is killed, along with five others. Its awful. A good guy with a gun fails to stop a bad guy with a gun in time, I wish for fiction. I keep reloading in the games I play and am annoyed to even have to make such a minor gesture toward realism. Predator and other drones fly low in foreign lands I cannot forget. Civilian casualtieswords that hide atrocitiesI think of it. On the disc golf course one dude joyfully cries out a line from the film (Get to the choppa!) I respond, in my best Schwarzeneggerian accent, Kill me! Kill me now! Come on! without thinking.

Only a little later I think of what that interaction meant. How quickly I was roused to respond! How well I know all these lines. How often Ive seen the movie, and what I proved by watching it.

It is a good time to invest in guns in America. It is always a good time to invest in guns in America. It will not change until the guns are gone or we are. I am from Michigan, a land of guns, after all, and now I live in another one: Arizona. I might be half a country away from home, ringed by cholla and saguaro, not mile-tall pines, but my uneasy feeling that everybodys armed doesnt change.

Im menaced by a cop. I fear traffic stops. I know its not the samemy white skin my Subaru my bad haircut my indie rock speak for me already.

Some things eat inside of youas if youve been impregnated by an alien. Its been more than thirty years since Predator . Its as if I exist to be a catalyst for this, this movie filling me, embiggening me. Its on-screen light Im seeing, not even the record of the thing itself but a secondary trace. This film is thirty years old but it still feels hot, watching it. Cosplayers meet online and at conventions to reenact scenes and compare the detail of their sculpts, not to say their sculpted abs, though that might happen in private later. The Predator Masters convention meets a few miles from my home at the International Wildlife Museum, I think of Predator . They are an online hunting club whose members specialize in killing apex predators such as coyotes and lions and bears and lynx with all kinds of expensive gear they sell to each other to dress up in and tote around.