Predator is a 1987 sci-fi action horror film directed by John McTiernan and written by brothers Jim and John Thomas. It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, with Carl Weathers, Bill Duke, Jesse Ventura, Sonny Landham, Elpida Carrillo, Richard Chaves, and Shane Black. Kevin Peter Hall, 7 foot 4 inches tall, played the towering Yautja, with Peter Cullen doing its voice.
Predator was written in 1984 with the working title as Hunter. It grossed $98 million worldwide. It initially got a mixed critical reception, but it has since been regarded as a classic sci-fi/action/horror film, and one of the best 1980s films. It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Visual Effects.
The Predator franchise includes films (including three sequels, a prequel, and a crossover with the Alien franchise, including Alien vs. Predator and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem), novels, comic books, video games, and toys.
Here is a link to quotes from the film.
The Thomas brothers’ original concept for Hunter centred around the idea of “what it is to be hunted,” with a band of alien hunters of various species going after various kinds of prey. This concept was eventually streamlined into one of a singular alien predator hunting man, the most dangerous species, and in particular, the “most dangerous man,” a soldier.
Things really started to get interesting when the setting chosen for the film became the Central/South American area, where so many Operation Condor activities were going on when the story takes place.
The central theme of Predator is, well, predation, of course; but we’re not limited to the predation of the Yautja. Significantly, the film begins with the Yautja’s spaceship flying to Earth, and this is juxtaposed immediately after with a shot of a US Army helicopter flying into a Central/South American country…Guatemala? Colombia? Val Verde? The predator of the film’s title is preying on other predators, those of US imperialism.
While imperialist propaganda would have us believe that these American troops are ‘the good guys,’ fighting off those ‘filthy, rotten, godless commies’ and protecting ‘freedom and democracy,’ anyone who knows what it’s like to be victimized by troops like these can see the lie of such a narrative. The American government arrogantly believes that Latin America is essentially their backyard, of which they think they have the right to determine its collective political destiny.
And since the American ruling class won’t abide a political system other than ‘free market’ capitalism, then any Central or South American country that has a leftist government come into power must have an intervention, typically in the form of coups d’état or other forms of political repression, to ensure the ascendancy of a right-wing, authoritarian strongman to beat the working class into submission. The American troops go in to facilitate just such an intervention. They’re the predators of the Global South poor.
Major Alan “Dutch” Schaefer (Schwarzenegger) flies in with his team of troops to meet with his old Vietnam War ally Dillon (Weathers)–who’s now a CIA agent (this alone should tell us he can’t be trusted)–and General Phillips (played by R.G. Armstrong) to be briefed on their mission: to rescue a local cabinet minister whose helicopter was shot down in a Central American jungle. He’s being held by local guerrillas.
What is not taken into consideration, as far as the pacing of the plot is concerned, is that the guerrillas wouldn’t have engaged in any of this aggression had it not been for the imperialist encroachments on their land, as discussed above. Furthermore, Dutch learns that Dillon’s story about the kidnapping of the cabinet minister is a lie: during his team’s attack on the guerrilla camp, it turns out that the hostages are actually CIA agents like Dillon.
Among the men that Dutch’s team are fighting are the guerrilla’s Russian military allies. The real mission has been to prevent a Soviet-sponsored invasion of the area. Translation: the USSR is here doing what it had done many times during the Cold War–giving aid to national liberation movements. The ‘commies’ aren’t the predators here; they’re helping to fight the American imperialist predators, who in thinking of this fight as a ‘Soviet-sponsored invasion’ are really just engaging in projection.
It’s interesting to note how multicultural the team of American fighters is. Along with the three whites, Dutch, Blain (Ventura), and Hawkins (Black), this third one providing a few bad “pussy” jokes, there are two blacks, Dillon and Mac (Duke), an Hispanic, Poncho (Chaves), and a part-Native American, Billy (Landham). My point in bringing this up is how, in including mostly people of colour in the team, those whose ancestors were victimized by imperialism, colonialism, and racism, we can see in Predator a blurring of the line between military predators and prey.
This blurring can also be seen in the Yautja, who seems to have dreadlocks, and whenever we know it’s around, in the soundtrack we often hear an eerie, undulating, echoing set of fast drum triplets, suggestive of African music. When Dutch has to face the Yautja at the climax, he’s covered in mud, associating his appearance with the darker skin of indigenous people, and he has to fight the alien with primitive weapons, like the Ewoks against the stormtroopers.
Of course, one cannot have imperialist troops without them being über-manly, and Blain gives us the ultimate macho line when wounded. But the blurring between predator (the Yautja bleeding a glowing yellow-green when wounded) and prey is established not only when all the men except Dutch get killed one by one, but also when he confronts it at the climax, when its superior size and strength make him look small and slight. This is an interesting contrast to the virtually invincible men Schwarzenegger had played (Conan, Matrix) up to this point.
Another blurring between predator and prey is, in a symbolic sense, how Anna (Carrillo) claims that the jungle has come alive and attacked people. We would normally notice how the predatory imperialist soldiers (especially those of today–the US military being the world’s biggest polluter) have damaged the natural environment. Her observation, however, reverses the soldiers and the environment as prey and predator, even though its actually the Yautja using its cloaking device to hide in the jungle, like a kind of high-tech camouflage.
There’s also the blurring between predator and prey in the form of animals in the jungle. Blain hears something in the bushes, thinking it’s their predator, and only just after he realizes it’s just a little mammal crawling about, the real Predator shoots and kills him. Mac finds a scorpion crawling on Dillon’s shoulder and stabs it with his knife. The Yautja later finds the killed scorpion.
After the trauma of having seen his good friend, Blain, killed, Mac flips out that night and uses his knife to stab to death something moving around in the dark, what he thinks is the Predator. It turns out that a large pig is what has scared him.
Now, how should we interpret the meaning, the political implications, of this blurring of the boundary between predator and prey? I see three possible interpretations here: a right-wing conservative one, a mainstream liberal one, and a Marxist-Leninist, anti-imperialist one.
The right-wing interpretation, probably felt by the average moviegoer who is just entertained by the film without giving any thought to its political implications, is just a straightforward sense that the Yautja is the bad guy, and the soldiers–for all their faults–are the sympathetic victims. Their faults are negligible; their imperialist acts are not even an issue. Their predation is projected onto the Yautja, one hundred percent.
The centrist liberal view acknowledges the troops’ guilt, which is an extension of liberal guilt in general. Nevertheless, the troops are seen as sympathetic. The operation, purportedly to go into the Central American jungle to rescue the cabinet minister, is seen as legitimate (even though the alleged minister would just have been part of the puppet government the US had installed anyway, and so kidnapping him would have been part of the guerrillas’ plan to liberate themselves from US imperialist exploitation). Dillon’s deceit, to get Dutch to agree to rescue the former’s CIA colleagues and to stop the Soviets, is considered going too far. Therefore, the American soldier and the Yautja are predators. ‘There is bad on both sides.’
As for the leftist, Marxist view, it’s the US troops who are the relevant predators, while the predation of the Yautja should be understood as a matter of getting those troops to understand how it feels to be the prey. We hope this insight will inspire actual US troops out there watching the film to reflect and show true penitence.
It’s significant that Billy, being at least part Native American (as Landham was), notices early on the terrible danger that the Yautja poses to all the troops. The collective unconscious of the aboriginal of the Americas, having the memory of the predatory white man’s incursions on his land and genocide, would give Billy an instinctive sense of the movements and intent of the alien Predator.
Elsewhere, there’s the curious friendships between white and black soldiers in Predator. I say ‘curious’ because, while there’s the historic racist animosity caused by the former group against the latter one, there’s also the neoliberal accommodating of the latter group into the capitalist/imperialist structure. Consider how, since this film was made, we’ve seen blacks rise in the ranks of that structure (Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Barack Obama, Karine Jean-Pierre, etc.) instead of attaining parity with whites in a meaningful, socialist context, in which those at the bottom would rise, instead of just a few of them rising and joining an elite who all tower over the rest of us and bestride the narrow world like a Colossus.
Apart from the black/white friendship we see between Mac and Blain, the former mourning the latter’s death in a particularly traumatic and revenge-seeking way, there’s also the shaking of hands between Dutch and Dillon at the film’s beginning, an iconic moment parodied in many satiric memes since, and a handshake that quickly turns into an arm-wrestling…with Dillon losing, of course.
This superficially liberal white/black friendship is a pretense of racial equality that masks the white supremacy inherent in Western imperialism. Dutch wins the arm-wrestling because Schwarzenegger gets top billing, not Weathers. Most of the heads of the CIA have been white men, but CIA-man Dillon gets the blame for the deceitful mission, not his superiors. His death includes the dismembering of his arm, a symbolic castration, and he’s killed before he can get the use of his other arm to fire a phallic gun at the Yautja.
Billy, instinctively knowing the invincibility of the Yautja as mentioned above, has no illusions about the ability of the surviving members of the team to kill it. Allowing the alien to kill him isn’t just a sacrifice to help Dutch, Anna, and wounded Poncho to get farther away from it; despairing over what he feels is the impossibility of defeating the Predator, Billy is essentially committing suicide. Since the Yautja is an interplanetary imperialist/colonialist, Billy finds it to be far more impossible to kill than even the white man who settled in what’s now the Americas.
One would think Anna would know that her only hope of protection from an alien that flays its victims is this group of American soldiers, but she has no illusions about her ‘safety’ among them. As a member of the guerrillas, pretty much the only survivor of the Americans’ raid of their camp, Anna attempts to escape her captors, for she knows, as scary as the alien is, the American troops are the real predators. Besides, as Dutch observes, the Yautja won’t kill her because she’s unarmed–there’s no sport in hunting her.
She calls the Predator “the demon who makes trophies of man,” since it not only flays its victims, but it also collects their skulls, like a headhunter. We associate this kind of heinous, barbaric behaviour with ‘primitive’ peoples, but since there’s been a blurring between its predatory behaviour and that of the US troops, we can see its prey as not being all that civilized, either.
Finally, of course, Dutch has to face the Yautja alone. There are such levels of irony here. A predator has become the prey. A tough guy is made to be vulnerable. He is left to fight with primitive weapons (i.e., booby-traps) against a technologically advanced alien, just like an aboriginal against the white man. He’s covered in mud to hide himself, and the mud–his ‘war paint,’ if you will–makes him look like a ‘filthy, dark-skinned native’ who shouts out a war cry to attract the Yautja.
On the other side of the coin, the Yautja’s dreadlocks make us think of such groups as the Rastafarians, inspired by, among others, the Mau Mau freedom fighters who resisted the colonialist British authorities in the 1950s. Its face, with the arthropod-like mandibles–which provoke Dutch to call it “one ugly motherfucker”–suggests a predatory crustacean…or an animal that we may eat. We always call ‘ugly’ those who resist imperialism, while also projecting our imperialism onto them.
Since we naturally sympathize with Dutch, though, the irony–of a predator fighting for survival against a predator whose appearance in a number of ways can be associated with those fighting off predators–is lost on most moviegoers. Conservative members of the audience can be smug about the American ‘good guys’ fighting off an evil alien invader…rather like all those…foreigners…who are ‘invading’ our country as refugees.
Liberals, on the other hand, can have their cake and eat it, too: while acknowledging the irony of predators fighting off a predator to survive, they know the average moviegoer will miss this irony and cheer for the first set of predators with a clean conscience.
It is the leftist viewers of the film who will recognize the Yautja as the ultimate imperialist and settler-colonialist, personifying all that is evil, ugly, and horrifying about those US troops who, let’s face it, deserve to be hunted.
