So many ‘Predators’
An academic who's watched the violent '80s flick 158 times sees disturbing links to our present
Ander Monson doesn't remember the first time he saw “Predator,” the 1987 action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. As he writes in his new book about the film, it could have been at a movie theater in his hometown of Houghton, Michigan, when it came out, but maybe it was on VHS a year later.
Regardless, he's seen it more times than most people.
“I'm at 158 times,” Monson says via telephone from Tucson, Arizona, where he now lives and teaches at the University of Arizona. “It was kind of self-care doing the pandemic. I had a hard time writing new stuff, but I could always watch `Predator' again.”
Monson's “Predator: A Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession” covers his longtime fascination with the film, which follows a soldier of fortune and his paramilitary team who are stalked by a terrifying alien who can disappear at will. In the book, Monson breaks down the movie scene by scene, with some detours along the way, dealing with his sometimes troubled childhood and delving into topics like masculinity, video games and the music of Little Richard.
Monson said the idea for a book about “Predator” came when he was interrogating his own love for violent media, particularly action movies.
“I watched a bunch of them, but `Predator' is the one that stuck,” he says. “I thought, `Why that one? Why not `Commando' or `The Running Man'? And I thought that the way to answer that is to start rewatching it.”
So he did — many, many times. He started writing poems from the point of view of the Predator, which were popular with audiences at readings, but he couldn't find a publisher who was interested. Next came the idea for a more straight-ahead nonfiction book: again, no luck.
“I finally rewrote it in the narrative framework that it has now,” he explains. “Which is like you're watching the movie with me, with me embedded as a narrator.”
And it's more than just observations on the acting, screenwriting and directing (although there are those). He spends pages on the only song featured in the movie, Little Richard's “Long Tall Sally,” writing, “He seems like an odd choice to soundtrack a hyper-masculine action movie like `Predator' … contains a lot more than it may seem at first listen.”
One of the book's most moving chapters features Monson discussing Paul Monette (to whom the book is co-dedicated), the poet who won a National Book Award for his memoir about coming of age and coming out, “Becoming a Man.” Monette wrote the novelization of “Predator” at the hospital bedside of his partner, who was dying of AIDS.
“I went down a bit of a rabbit hole in terms of going through papers and trying to find more about that,” Monson says. “The conditions of his life, and other gay men in the AIDS epidemic, is a very similar condition to the men in the movie, right? They're being hunted by this invisible predator, denied by their government. The more I thought about that, I thought that's a really striking juxtaposition and a very sad and powerful sort of feeling.”
While Monson is obviously a huge fan of the movie, the book starts off with more than a hint of ambivalence. “Predator” is “one of the most influential, iconic, and interesting action movies of all time,” Monson writes. But then: “I wish I didn't have to see it. I feel like I saw enough dudes with guns in the 1980s and 1990s for a lifetime … 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 (that's the whole point of this movie we're watching, after all), but watch them pour into the United States Capitol building on January 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C., and tell me it's just a movie.”
Monson believes that we're living in an age of predators — and for anyone who watches the news, it's hard to argue. This was painfully reinforced for the author Oct. 5, when he gave his first screening of “Predator” in Tucson; that day, a University of Arizona professor was shot to death on campus.
“This literally happened a building over from where I taught today,” Monson recalls. “We're watching this movie, which is about masculinity and gun violence, and it just made the point in an awful, awful way.
“But the thing that `Predator' offers us is a tool that I think that we can use if we are willing to use it,” he continues. “Most people, I think, when they watch the movie, they just think it's a cool movie about these guys who are more badass than everyone else, and they're able to kill the alien because they have the biggest guns. But it's not the guns; it's not the guys. It's the brains and the ability to see that allows us to defeat the alien. And that's the message I think we could take away from the movie. And I hope that people will.”
Monson continues to hold readings from his book, some accompanied by screenings of the movie. He says the subject matter of “Predator” has enabled him to find readers who might have otherwise not read his work.
“It hits people that maybe aren't necessarily interested in reading but love `Predator,' ” he says. “To even kind of get people involved in reading something that's out of their wheelhouse — or reading something at all — is a plus. I'm going to be talking with the Alien vs. Predator Galaxy fan community, the guys who run that site. And that's going to be a really different kind of conversation because these are super fans of the movie and of the novels and all of that. Versus most of the time, I'm trying to justify to literary people why `Predator' is even worth reading or writing or thinking about.”