[Spoilers abound]
This is the central premise of the Predator movies: Earth is occasionally visited by giant, seven-foot tall aliens with flowing and very dramatic locks, impenetrable face shields that hide incredibly ugly (to us) faces, and entire artilleries of deeply sophisticated weapons — including suicide bombs — embedded in various parts of their bodies. Why they choose to visit Earth so often is unclear. Perhaps they’re simply scoping it out for a future invasion (and, presumably, on every visit, realise that we’re doing their work for them by self-destructing at a rapid pace). There’s something oddly sweet about the initial setup: the scout is like a child being dropped off at summer camp, his parents fussing all the while and asking him to make absolutely sure and for the last time if he did in fact pack all his shoulder cannons and beheading discs and does he have his cellphone in his right pocket and don’t forget to write. And, oh, yes, if it all goes to hell: blow yourself up, honey, there’s a good boy.
The plot is always the same: Predators run into resistance and are either defeated or, as in Alien vs. Predator (a shameless attempt to profit off two profitable franchises) return with their dead from whence they came. A Predator’s most dangerous weapon is that he can blend into the background but he never completely disappears — if you look closely, you can see his outline within a jagged energy field. This is somehow far more terrifying than if he were actually invisible, and the representation of this not-quite-disappearance — along with a scary rattle just before a deathly strike — has become a signature element of the movies.
The latest in the series, Prey, takes the plot to the 1700s and the person who resists a visiting Predator is a young Comanche female warrior named Naru. Critics have widely praised the movie as the best of the lot but though Prey painstakingly recreates life in the eighteenth century and creates heroes out of its Indigenous characters, it’s ultimately just boring. As for its politics: while it seems progressive (you can, if you wish, even watch the entire film dubbed in Comanche, as I did), it’s deeply embedded in an ahistorical and ultimately stereotypical idea of the elemental Native American fused with nature. Prey forces viewers to swallow a boring plot line (albeit one set in spectacularly beautiful landscapes) in favour of what is widely praised as a radical change in Native American/Indigenous representation. The message is clear: you can have diversity and you can have representation but don’t you dare ask for an actually interesting story. Movies with nonwhite protagonists are, too often, like the oatmeal we are told to consume: bland but good for you, damn it.
There are so far seven films in the Predator franchise, counting the AVP crossovers, starting with the 1987 original Predator starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and a merry band of men who show up in some Central American jungle (here, I wave vaguely in that direction, as does the film) to save American hostages. Coming at the end of the Reagan era, Predator represented the essence of American foreign politics: there are bad, bad guys in the jungles out there (insert vague hand waving gesture again) and the world needs American good guys to go in and blast them to hell. This elite, vaguely Navy-Seals-y lot is led by a guy named Dutch (Schwarzenegger) with an accent best described as Schwarzeneggerian (foreign, yes, but reassuringly white). The crew includes Billy Sole, played by the late Sonny Landham who was part Native American. Sole is clearly marked as the quintessential Native American character popular then and now: elemental and somehow possessed of an unearthly instinct about the natural world around him because, Native American.
Until the counter-cultural 1960s, when Native American culture (as understood by a subset of white people) was voraciously devoured as an alternative to Western capitalism, Native Americans in film and television were mostly indistinguishable feral characters, whooping and engaging in carnage, always a threat to white settlers. The Crying Indian featured at the centre of a 1971 public service advertisement (PSA) by the organisation Keep America Beautiful was typical of the fetishised, decontextualised, and commodified Native American who remains a figurehead of the contemporary environmental movement. In the PSA, a man dressed in what looks like traditional Indigenous clothing paddles a canoe upstream. We imagine him in an unpopulated area, near a forest perhaps, but we see that he is in fact moving towards a highly polluted city. As he walks onto the shore, someone throws a trash bag from a car and it spills its contents at his moccasined feet. A voice intones, “Some people have a deep, abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country. And some people don’t.” At this point, the man turns around and we see a single tear making its way down his cheek. The message, unencumbered by subtlety, is that Native Americans respect the earth, the rest of us don’t, and we ought to be ashamed of ourselves and send away for a pamphlet that tells us of “71 Things You Can Do To Stop Pollution.”
This PSA has long been criticised (and endlessly parodied). The actor at its centre was a man who claimed Native American heritage and called himself Iron Eyes Cody but who turned out to be an Italian American, Espera Oscar DeCorti. And Keep America Beautiful was lambasted for a message that prioritised individual acts to prevent pollution (“Don’t litter”) while remaining silent about the large corporations and industries ruining the environment, part of what critics have called its greenwashing tactics.
There’s a historical line to be drawn from the 1960s, the appearance of the Crying Indian in 1971, Billy Sole in 1987 and now Prey with Naru and her tribe members and family, including her brother Taabe whose bravery and hunting abilities allow him to become the War Chief of their tribe. Filmed mostly in Stoney Nakoda First Nation land outside the city of Calgary, Canada, Prey stunningly shows what the region might have looked like without the devastation brought in by the first French settlers.* Pristine mountains and meadows unfold around Naru and her tribe as they go about their daily lives and rituals. A gender renegade, Naru resists the pressure to conform to the expectation that she should stay and literally tend to home fires while the men go out and hunt. She roams the surrounding landscape accompanied by her dog Sarii (a star in her own right), practising her skill with a tomahawk while clothed in the same attire as her brother and the other men.
Naru encounters the Predator one day when she hides from an angry bear: the Predator doesn’t see her as she cowers behind some rocks. He plainly needs to keep practising his craft, so he — recognising a fellow predator — sets upon the bear. She tries to warn her tribe about the new danger, but is ignored. For this, of course, there is suffering and nearly everyone in a scouting party that she joins is killed by the alien. In the meantime, French settlers, comically played as buffoons who barely know what they’re doing except when killing and skinning entire herds of bison and laying traps, also show up and capture Naru and Taabe. Unsurprisingly, the Predator shows up at their campsite and kills all of them, including Taabe. Naru, with Sarii’s help and her own ingenuity and hunting skills is, of course, able to bring down this new enemy and marches back to her tribe with his head in her hand. The film ends with her being installed as the new War Chief in a suitably impressive ceremony.
Watching Prey reminded me of reading certain stories as a child, fiction that recreated what it must have been like to live as Native Americans and especially as young girls before colonisation or just as it began. I loved these narratives, which were calm and purposeful and in some ways soothing, filled with tiny details about food and clothing and the rituals of everyday life in a world I would never experience. But that’s not what a movie for adults should be like. Prey offers a lot to stimulate the eye and imagination, certainly: the fight scenes are arresting, there’s a quiet fidelity to the recreation of pre-colonial life and, in case I haven’t mentioned this before, the setting is spectacularly beautiful. As a technical achievement, there’s nothing to complain about and the film uses natural light to great effect.
But Prey functions much like those tales I read as a child, as a soothing bedtime story embellished with colourful details. It doesn’t challenge and is a reenactment of the entire discourse that allowed the Crying Indian PSA to become the heart of the faux-environmental movement: at each step, we are shown how the Comanches know their land and how to reap its benefits without killing it. Naru may rebel against gendered expectations but she does use her knowledge of medicinal herbs. She’s horrified at the senseless killing of the bison, an act that presumably runs counter to the Comanche practice of only hunting and killing what one needs to eat and survive. She would never use the metal traps that injure animals (and humans). And so on. Prey has many Good And Useful Points to make, and it makes them all. The message here is simple and simplistic — recall, if you will: “Some people have a deep, abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country. And some people don’t.”
In contrast to Prey, 1987’s Predator gives us more to chew on. Sure, its pro-American politics are as plainly in view as Schwarzenegger’s muscles rippling and gleaming with sweat in the Central American sun. But it’s also consequently a richer text in its contradictions: Dutch will happily fly into a country to save Americans in a plan he knows is funded by the CIA, but alludes to having refused another prime assignment because it would involve an assasination, something he and his group will, it seems, never engage in. It’s a strange principle to hold given that all of American foreign policy has been, from its inception, about getting rid of foreign leaders by any means necessary, including casually hiring people to kill them. And Dutch, who rolls a giant truck into an enemy camp to blow it up clearly has no problem with actually killing people. Predator is, in this sense, both an explanation of and an attempt to whitewash the ways of the American state; it inhabits and clarifies all its internal contradictions and brutality.
Some have described Prey as a prequel simply because it’s set in the eighteenth century, but that makes little sense and locates the Predator franchise within human history when, in fact, Predators were Predators long before “man was only a burbling whatsit,” as Archy, the famed and very literary cockroach, might put it. And there’s frustratingly very little of the Predator himself in the movie — the emphasis is clearly on Naru and the rest of the Comanches and the movie’s point is simply, “Look how amazing and perfect these humans, not the nasty white settlers, are. And, oh, yeah, there’s a Predator dude over there so maybe just watch out for him?” It’s no accident that the movie is set in such a distant time period. After all, if the Predator had to interact with contemporary Native Americans, the story would have to deal with the many contradictions of their lives today. Ecological fashion demands that “The Native American,” to be a successful symbol of today’s environmental justice movement, should be seen outside of capitalism, not within it. As I wrote in 2013, “Such a figure, the product of decades of white guilt coming after centuries of brutal genocide, persists in North American nature writing. It’s not that Native American relationships to nature should not be noted or praised. But it’s discomfiting, in the 21st century, to fix Native Americans in this by now limited role. Instead of constantly dwelling upon them as elemental caretakers, what might it mean, for instance, to consider the history of reservation ecology or the creation of Indian casinos in cities and deserts, and the subsequent effects on our relationships to animals? What might it mean, in other words, to think of ‘the Native American’ not as outside but within capitalism?”
In a 2017 op-ed about the many problems with the Crying Indian PSA, Finis Dunaway points out that this figure stood in stark contrast to the “actual Indians [who]occupied Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, the very same body of water in which the actor paddled his canoe” and who, from 1969 to mid-1971, attempted to gain Indigenous control of the land. Unlike the Crying Indian, they did not weep helplessly but placed the struggles of contemporary, real-life Native Americans in front of the world, demanding absolute change, a re-ceding of stolen land. Dunaway notes that contemporary Indigenous Rights movements reject the figure of the Crying Indian, demanding structural solutions but I have to disagree with that part of his analysis: today’s Indigenous movement also relies on a narrative about the elemental Native American who has some mysterious connection to the Earth. Indigenous activists are still, literally and figuratively, required to show up in headdresses to have any attention paid to their causes.
Consider, for instance, this 2021 episode of the left-leaning news show Democracy Now that features an activist in Native garb, including a headdress, saying, “We are the voice of the animals, we are the voice of the trees, because they don’t have the voice. Creator, to us, gave us stewardship over the land, so that’s what we are doing. We are fighting for clean water for future generations, for Mother Earth, for the world.” (“Could you please be sure to wear a headdress,” we imagine television liaison staff awkwardly asking Native American guests, hours before they’re due to go on, “And some warpaint would be nice?”) And later, Joye Braun of the Indigenous Environmental Network criticises Joe Biden in language straight out of some old mvoie, “You need to be held accountable. You made promises to the Indigenous communities across this land that you were going to uphold. But you haven’t upheld those promises. You’ve been speaking with a forked tongue, just like that one that was before you.”
Headdresses, mysterious connections to Mother Earth, and forked tongues. Which century is this?
Prey’s narrative arc essentially dramatises such speeches and there are no surprises because the point is not the story but the people at the heart of it (the Predator is simply an accessory). As a movie, it’s lushly enticing on the surface. If you watch the show dubbed in Comanche, it makes for at least an interesting aural experience, certainly. But Prey, with its resolutely deterministic story, is boring in every other way. Some people will die, but good will triumph over evil that includes both the earthly, in the form of white settlers, and the alien. The biggest tension for most of us might be, will Sarii die? (No). Beyond that, Prey is interesting and pretty but offers no contradictions or much to anticipate.
What if, instead, Prey had centred around a Predator who showed up in the middle of a current-day reservation that’s blasted to bits not by bombs and fires but the slow and inexorably damaging and toxic neglect of a government that, in 2022, is perfectly fine with the fact that Native Americans have seen the largest number of Covid-related deaths among racial groups? In such a story, how would a Native American teen — whose school is barely one, whose family has died from a lack of healthcare, whose people endure a lack of housing and the most basic resources — overcome a fearsome alien? In Prey, there are clear lines between the goodies and the baddies. In the 1987 Predator, everyone’s a killer, everyone’s after profits of some kind — including the Native American.
With headdresses and anachronistic language about forked tongues, today’s Indigenous activists have to tread a fine line between providing white people with what they imagine are symbols of authenticity and presenting an actual political agenda that seeks to reverse or at least mitigate the massive damage done by capitalism — which might well piss off a lot of said white people. While we needn’t dwell on uncomplicated historical narratives about their victimhood or their status as perfect people, the stark truth is that Indigenous people everywhere have endured centuries of rape, pillage, land theft, and the shattering of the most essential bonds between and within families. While activists are compelled to speak of the harm to “Mother Earth,” the much more devastating loss was that endured when children were physically and emotionally torn from their parents and siblings and placed in abusive institutions. We are only just beginning to literally scratch the surface of this injustice as new burial sites, filled with the carelessly disposed remains of children, continue to be discovered.
Prey is part of a project of reclamation, of crafting a new story about resilience and that might well be a comforting one for many. But the danger lies in its success making it difficult for alternative and more contestatory and complicated stories to emerge. Instead of returning to a pristine past that offers the hope of a different history, a more complicated and worthwhile Predator movie centred around Native American representation might simply end with the alien bemusedly messaging his comrades in outer space, “This place is going to hell all on its own: they’ve devised a death-making system we could never have dreamed of, this thing called Capitalism.” Sometimes, reality is scary enough.
The 1987 Predator gave us a central force and antagonist who remains, till his end and that of the movie, contemptuous of everything that Dutch and his paymasters stand for. As he quietly watches the group, the Predator records snatches of conversations among the men and says them out loud to himself: Duolingo for alien assassins. At the end, he takes off his mask for a duel with Dutch (whose expression makes it plain he would rather be anywhere else) because the puny human clearly doesn’t have the same kind of protective gear and the Predator also has a principle he lives by: he will only engage in battles with equals. Of course, even this fearsome alien loses to our hero and as he lies wounded and defenceless, squashed by a tree trunk, Dutch stares down at him and asks, in disgust, “What the hell are you?” The creature looks back at him and repeats the words with something resembling a mocking laugh — in what we can only describe as a strong Predator accent — and proceeds to calmly open up the suicide bomb device on his forearm to blow both of them and the surrounding landscape to bits.
“What the hell are you?” is what the Predator seems to be asking of humans. The alien has been gliding from tree to tree and watching them moving below in packs determined by vaguely held allegiances, destroying the jungle, mercilessly killing each other, and setting fire even to what they build. From his vantage point, very little about them makes sense. What the hell is all this really about? Why not just destroy the lot and their puny planet?
With many thanks to Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sanchez at Current Affairs, for conversations and insights that helped shape this piece.
*September 21, 2022: Many thanks also to Olive Shakur for pointing out that I needed to name the nation: corrected from the original “filming was mostly in First Nation land in Calgary, Canada” (the region is in fact outside the city).
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