PREY

or, what was once cultural appropriation

I’m e rathke, the author of a number of books. Learn more about what you signed up for here. Go here to manage your email notifications.

Quick aside: you were meant to have an essay in my Wong Kar Wai series today but I watched the wrong movie, somehow. Accidentally skipped Fallen Angels and went right to Happy Together.

Whoops! Expect that later this week instead. Fortunately, I had a completed essay all ready.

Predator

The original Predator came out a few months before I was born, which means I have never lived in a Predatorless world. When I used to teach children, all of them were younger than Pokemon. My youngest son is a few months older than Prey.

None of this means anything and yet I cannot help but measure my life in this way. The pillars of culture and media giving a certain kind of shape to my life, or at least landmarks in the tattered map of my life.

I’ll just lay it out right here: I love Predator.

I love Predator.

And not just because it stars my former governor, Jesse The Body Ventura. And not just because the sequel stars Danny Glover muttering Murtaughly as he fights a pussy faced alien across New York. No, I love Predator because it simply doesn’t care.

This movie is full of big muscled men glistening in the South American jungle heat while they wield bigass guns to fight guerillas and save someone or something or whatever.

The plot doesn’t matter.

I’ve seen this movie many times in my life and I don’t know that I’ve ever known what the premise is or why they’re out there doing whatever it is they’re doing. Though watching it as an adult did make the general political background lock into place. These big muscled men are something like a private militia of Vietnam vets subcontracted by CIA spooks to kill a bunch of native people in the name of democracy.

Is this satire?

I don’t know, babies. I don’t know if we’re meant to think this is awesome or atrocious, but the narrative does sort of lead me to believe that the movie is not endorsing illegal military operations in South American countries.

The narrative thrust being that all these dudes die violently at the hands of the Predator.

These unwanted invaders infiltrating a foreign jungle are then strung up and ripped apart by an actual alien doing it all for fun.

Of course, we may not want to go that route of proclaiming perceived morality for a movie that’s definitely just trying to have a good time with a bunch of big sweating roided up bros with a penchant for machinegunning small brown people in an unidentified country.

The big men hunting insurgents become hunted themselves, and though Jesse The Body Ventura ain’t got time to bleed, he sure does bleed a lot.

Early on in the movie, they capture a guerilla named Anna who tells them there are more guerillas. Since this team of badbutt bros is small and compact, they decide to retreat to the extraction point.

Only the future governor of California makes it. Interestingly, so does Anna, the guerilla.

the galloping gazelle

Cultural appropriation is a fraught term that’s often treated quite controversially by anyone who hears it mentioned within earshot. Before I ever heard this term, I essentially knew what it meant.

We all do.

To put it simple: it’s when a dominant culture uses the symbols and stories of an oppressed culture.

Curiously, the first time I actually heard someone use the term cultural appropriation, they meant it in the exact opposite way.

I was in Budapest on a walking tour where we observed the bullet holes that have been in walls for decades, the shattered buildings never rebuilt, and the tour guide explained to us that Budapest is often where World War movies are shot because it still looks like a place in the middle of a war.

She went on to show us Soviet iconography and then pointed out the subtle subversions within it that allowed Budapest anti-Soviets to critique the government while being paid by the government to create public art.

These people fighting against totalitarian oppression were appropriating Soviet symbols to say something uniquely Hungarian. Since their culture was being suppressed (Hungarians have a lot to say about cultural suppression; for more read about the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires) and their freedom of expression choked, they found ways to use the language and iconography of their oppressor to speak to their fellow Hungarians and anti-Soviets.

In Padma Lakshmi’s excellent Taste the Nation, she spoke to Vietnamese refugees and immigrants who made their living shrimping on the Gulf Coast. These immigrants thrown into a new place with new ingredients and no ability to connect directly to their heritage through food adapted the local cuisine to their traditional cuisine. The way they incorporated Gulf Coast ingredients and flavors went on to influence not only the cuisine of the local Vietnamese immigrant population but, strangely, even the Vietnamese cuisine in Vietnam.

We see this, too, with the banh mi sandwich. Before the French colonizers came, I imagine bread was not a staple of the diet. But when bread came and the French forced their own culture on the people, the people began to tinker. Over the following decades and especially after a century, the banh mi became what it is: a baguette with distinctly Vietnamese ingredients and flavors.

Curiously, the Vietnamese immigrants to France brought the banh mi with them, injecting it back into French culture.

And so who owns the banh mi?

Is it French or is it Vietnamese?

Or, maybe, asking such a question is the wrong way to look at culture and especially cultural exchange.

Whether we like it or not, cultures do exchange pieces of themselves. They do it constantly and directionlessly, randomly.

Despite efforts of the French and their Immortals, one thing culture will always do is change. It will change and twist and become, potentially, even other to itself, no matter how tightly you cling to it or how tightly you systematize its definitions and boundaries.

The French Immortals may not want the French people to call fin de semaine the weekend, but the war ended and was lost long before they tried to keep those dirty English words out of their clean French mouths.

While some think that food is a poor way to discuss cultural exchange or art more broadly, I think food is probably the best way to discuss these things, in part, because cuisine changes and develops from the bottom up. And because food is art, no matter what the dilettantes will say.

The reason the French eat snails isn’t because some Marquis in the 1400s decided to pop one in his mouth. It’s because starving French peasants were trying not to starve. They smothered it with butter and garlic to mask the fact that they were sucking mollusks off the ground and into their mouths.

When your friend in high school took bulgogi and put it in a tortilla, he wasn’t trying to make a statement about anything. He just thought it might be good.

It was.

It is.

Try it sometime.

Now, that’s not to say that all cultural exchange is kind or even well-intentioned. My high school was named after a brutal butcher of the Lakota people and our mascot was the head of a Lakota warrior.

That people freaked out when the mascot was changed to a knight (hilarious choice, honestly) had nothing to do with respect or care (the school is now named Two Rivers, as of a few years ago). It was about power, just as the Kansas City Chiefs is about power.

So while we cannot help but watch cultures change and twist, with symbols from one culture becoming common or even important in another, we can at least not be an asshole about it.

I’ve been doing a lot of Arthurian research for reasons that may someday become clear and one of the fascinating aspects is how much it drifted across the continent and became swallowed and swallowed in turn entire generations of cultures. There’s a French tradition, a German tradition, and Italian tradition, and, now, even a Japanese tradition. And it all started in Wales.

Or Cornwall.

But definitely not England. But the English claim him too. And he is England’s, is he not? Well, not to the Welsh! And not to the Cornish! But they also can’t agree on which of them properly owns these myths that have even become an American cultural juggernaut.

But it’s interesting how Arthur went from Cornwall or Wales to England, then to France and Germany, where it developed dramatically, only to have the English try to take ownership of it by producing Gawain and the Green Knight (the cultural competition can be seen in the newly elevated status of Gawain as the greatest of knights, the position held by Lancelot for centuries) and, of course, Alfred Lord Tennyson revitalized him, and Mark Twain and John Steinbeck took him to America for a time before the American fantasists got their molluscan little hands on him.

But Arthur belongs to all of us, but also none of us, but, yeah, completely he is all of ours though he had to wander the entire globe for fifteen centuries first.

Though, before we go on, I want to discuss something that I do think is less than good, and it does have to do with the oppressed community adopting and coopting the symbols of the domineering culture.

To return to that Soviet Hungarian example - should we celebrate this coopting of the dominant culture?

I mean, it is the story of human ingenuity, which is pretty all right if you ask me. Finding ways to be creative and sneak your own stories into the dominant culture violently suppressing your own (look at what the Irish have done with English!).

But I think of something like Moana, for example. And I like Moana, mind, but it’s possible that it is the most devastating kind of cultural appropriation. Rather than tell a traditional Māori or Pacific Islander story using culturally specific structures and styles, Disney swallowed up a culture and spat out a delightful goop which is far more recognizably Disney than it is Māori.

Disney seems to have successfully sidestepped the wrong kind of controversy by filling their cast with the politically correct ethnic makeup, but in some ways this passing is more insidious in that it coops the iconography and symbolism and stories of a minority group and then pastes it over a traditional Disney movie using very US specific story structures (though also influenced, no doubt, by Hayao Miyazaki, a man from a different culture that colonized Pacific Islanders in brutally horrific ways in the decades preceding Miyazaki’s birth).

Or Encanto, which I’ve discussed positively before, or Coco. By using the politically correct kind of casting methods, the largest media corporation has avoided anyone crying foul by the way they have taken traditional stories from around the world for decades and turned them into slurry for American audiences. And part of the method is shaving back the things that actually make storytelling and art diverse from across the world.

Make it sleek and cute and slap a few songs in there and now you’ve turned an Arabic legend into a tightly choreographer Broadway musical without anyone saying a thing.

And so while I think we can all agree that it’s not cool to put on blackface and do a minstrel show, most people seem to be perfectly fine with a deeper kind of minstrel show, where the blackface, for lack of a better term, is narratively deep rather than just a layer of makeup.

We grind down a story from a different culture and repackaging it for American sensibilities for lots and lots of dollars. And we get rewarded for being so culturally sensitive and progressive because we cast The Rock instead of, like, Chris Pratt.

Prey

The reason I rewatched Predator is because I watched Prey and was reminded of everything great about Predator. What I discovered in rewatching Predator is that they are they reflect and invert one another.

In Predator, a single indigenous woman survives, though she’s narratively sidelined and functionally a trophy in a cupboard for most of the movie. In Prey, that single woman girlbosses that badbutt alien and all the badbutt dude hunters, European and indigenous alike.

The Europeans enter the movie relatively late in Prey and Naru is quickly captured, much like Anna was. Like Anna, she watches most of these invaders get ripped apart by the alien. Unlike Anna, she becomes the hero and kills the predator.

Rather than the hulking roided up freaks of Predator, Naru is a young warrior trying to prove herself. Her status as a warrior is far from given and her early attempts to be taken seriously don’t go well.

But like the one surviving roided up governor from Predator, Naru makes a study of the predator and finds a way to fight this impossible monster.

And, in good Hollywood fashion, she wins and saves her people from the meaningless slaughter of this alien, of the Europeans (though we also, tragically, know the fate of the Comanche; here’s a book and here’s another).

The movie’s good. I like it a lot. Though one funny thing about this movie—which reminded me of The Bourne Identity—is that movies need to do more physical work with their actors. I was all on board with Naru being a badass warrior…until I saw her run.

There’s a scene in The Bourne Identity where Matt Damon has to run, like, 100 feet, and it is hilarious. Instantly, you can tell that Damon has never run in his life. And not to pick on Amber Midthunder, but the stunt choreographers or director or somebody should’ve been like, “Hey, we’re gonna have you practice sprints for the next month because you look like you’ve never run before.”

Other than that and what was, to me, a confusing way that she finally beat the predator—am I just too dumb to understand what happened? (I’m not complaining, just…what happened?)—the movie is great.

Really. Go watch it now if you haven’t seen it yet. Also, in a land of movies stretching towards three hours, Prey comes in at a lean 100 minutes (a few minutes shorter than Predator, which was already lean and mean and a fighting machine).

Definitely recommend.

Watch it tonight and then thirty more times before you die.

bleached bones on the savannah

I saw almost universal acclaim for the movie which is pretty cool and also kind of dumb¹ but what sort of surprised me—though it shouldn’t have—was seeing people insist that the movie should be seen in Comanche.

I mean, it’s cool they did that…but why is that the preferred way to watch a very Hollywood movie with a cast of native English speakers that was originally shot in English? And this movie is not only the product of Hollywood, but it’s also clearly in dialogue with its own franchise, which is now a 35 year old Hollywood franchise.

I don’t think it did anything especially innovative, unless returning to the glory of the original counts as inspired innovation (at this point, I guess it kind of does). But the way it so clearly is in dialogue with that 35 year old movie, even reflecting its inverse narrative almost exactly, shows me that this is not a Comanche movie.

Yes, it was cast in the way that liberal Americans like to see, but I guess, to me, if we’re going to celebrate the Comanche-ness of a movie, maybe we should—I don’t know—make a Comanche movie and not a Hollywood (in this case, produced and distributed by Disney, the cultural demiurge) movie dressed in Comanche.

Now I ain’t no expert about nothin, but this kind of cultural appropriation is the kind I saw in Hungary a decade ago. And it is cool and I love it and would love to see more of it.

It shows the dynamic nature of culture. How symbols drift and slur across boundaries, how stories shift and soak into a different culture and different context. Predator has become a cross-cultural story and symbol, and Prey attempts to pull in the predator in order to tell a story about Comanche people.

All well and good and cool.

But what if, instead of following Hollywood structure and story beats, we got a story using the traditional Comanche rhythms and motifs? What if we told a Comanche story that had the predator in it rather than a predator story that had Comanches in it?

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And if you’re one of those kind souls looking to get into my fiction, here are the novels I’ve released recently:

• Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster

• Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure

• Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera

• The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse. Coming tomorrow!

• Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl. Coming 7/25/2023

Some free books for your trouble:

• SF&F for June

• Dark Reads

• Taming the Beast

• Defeat the Dragon

• Spaceships!

• Indie Space Adventures

1. I love dumb action movies but I also wish we still had cultural gadlfies trying to push art and culture beyond its familiar boundaries