Shooting at Nothing: An Interview with Ander Monson
Ander Monson | Predator: A Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession | Graywolf Press | 2022 | 264 Pages
For his new memoir, Predator, Ander Monson watched the eponymous 1987 action flick 146 times. Use of the word “watch” perhaps sells his effort short, considering the sheer thoroughness of the project; Monson’s journey takes him through online communities and commentaries and archives and, before it’s over, the final depths and origin of a fandom that revolves to this day around one irrefutably unforgettable American blockbuster.
In following every rabbit hole of his obsession with the film through to its end, Monson creates a book that is truly one-of-a-kind—not just a dose of nostalgia for movie buffs, but a revelatory investigation for anyone who’s ever really loved a singular piece of culture, enough that it got tangled inextricably in their identity and could never quite be excised. In Monson’s own words: “I believe that if you look long and hard enough at what you loved best at fourteen and how you lived then and what you saw in the world, it will reveal both the world and you.” As the pages turn, a question inevitably arises: What have you loved in the way that Monson loves Predator? And, for better or worse, how has it made you who you are?
I spoke with Monson over Zoom about fandom, genre fluidity, and what he learned from watching (and rewatching) Predator.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Abigail Oswald: What was it like to watch Predator 146 times? How’d you land on that number?
Ander Monson: I wasn’t trying to hit 146; it probably would have been better to hit 150, which I now have. But it was 146 as of the last finished draft of the book, when I kind of settled on the present tense of it. I’ve watched it so many times over so many years that every one is different. The experience of watching it as a 12-year-old, in the theater or on VHS, is really hard to imagine—I can’t totally access it now. I still remember being thrilled by it and kind of freaked out and blown away. It’s one of those things that I was too young for, technically. Those moments where you have access to something you’re not supposed to from the adult world that your parents just aren’t paying attention to, or in some cases maybe sharing with you without knowing what it is—it’s one of those kinds of moments that has just seared itself on me. I mean, obviously. Although I didn’t know that it had for a really long time.
I watched it probably 20, 25 times as a teenager and in my early twenties. It was only after Gabrielle Giffords, my congresswoman, was shot in 2011 by Jared Loughner—which I talk about in the book—and then I found myself playing Fallout 3, and just kind of headshotting people. I had this weird moment of, like, this is like my self-care, apparently, just like killing dudes in a video game. And “Where did that come from?” is the thought I had in that moment. How was that the thing that me personally, but also men my age, go to as a sort of a safe space, or whatever you want to call it—our retreat from the world?
And then I started to rewatch [Predator]. And I started to watch it again and again and again, you know, 146 times, eventually frame by frame. The experience of watching the movie that way is just totally different from watching it in real time. After I finished the book, I rented out a theater during Covid to watch Predator with a few friends for my birthday. I hadn’t seen it in real time for a year or two, maybe longer. But I was surprised by how quick it was, and how fun it was to watch, ‘cause I’d been watching it frame by frame. Almost all those viewings were very different. And every time I go back to it again I see something new in it, or I notice something else about myself watching it.
AO: Predator transcends genre in a really interesting way; you note that it’s “a movie about both the future and the past. It’s a sci-fi movie wrapped in a horror movie wrapped in a war movie wrapped in a space movie. It’s satire wrapped in gun pornography. It’s tenderness wrapped up in beefy macho posturing and explosive ballets.” Do you think Predator’s genre fluidity contributes to why it’s endured all these years?
AM: Yeah, for sure. I think it’s a highbrow movie that’s masquerading as a lowbrow movie. I don’t know if you talked to [John] McTiernan, the director, if he would cop to that. Probably not, ‘cause he plays it pretty straight, but I think that’s what accounts for most of its depth as a film. You think it’s gonna be one of those Rambo kind of movies, and it starts out that way, but then takes a turn pretty fast, and it becomes a movie that keeps transforming, and so your expectations keep changing with it, which gives it a much more layered experience that I didn’t notice when I was 12. I was just in it for the guns and the dudes in the jungle and the monster—all of which is super cool, I don’t mean to diminish the coolness of those things, and the legitimacy of the beauty, really, of that response which still remains. But when you watch it again you’re like, oh, yeah, it’s not doing what you expect it to do, and it keeps transforming. And that is the thing that convinces me that it’s such an important cultural text.
It does almost all of these things pretty well—sometimes really well—and without pointing them out, which I think is key. Most people don’t go to a movie to think about the movie—you go to enjoy the movie and be entertained by it. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be art for the people that are paying attention to the art, and for those who aren’t, I mean, it still kind of registers on you. And that’s why we still talk about Predator.
AO: You spend some time on what’s possibly Predator’s most famous scene: a shootout that occurs in the wake of another character’s death, which you describe as “seventy-seven seconds of straight-up only shooting, a total blistering spectacle.”
You go on to quote director John McTiernan’s commentary, where he says, “I had the feeling that people had a sort of perverse fascination with pictures of guns firing, literally an almost pornographic desire. And I said to myself, okay if you want pictures of guns firing, I’ll give you pictures of guns firing, so I created this sequence where they take all of their guns and they blaze away continually. And what I was really doing was sort of, in the Australian phrase, taking the piss out of [war too], to quietly ridicule the desire to see pictures of guns firing. All of this is the moral separate piece where I said in no circumstance were there to be human beings in front of the guns firing. In fact, the point of all the firing was, as the man says as soon as they stop shooting, we hit nothing. The whole point is the impotence of all the guns, which is exactly the opposite of what I believed I was being hired to sell.”
When I watched it myself, I was struck by the image of all of these strong, tough guys essentially processing their fear and anger by firing into the void. Was it this scene in particular that made you realize Predator was satirizing action movies and speaking to the impotence of guns?
AM: I think it’s the scene that has the most distance from the way that I experienced it as a 12-year-old, which was basically just, fuck yeah, this is fucking awesome, we’re fucking shooting a bunch of fucking guns into the fucking jungle. It was a spectacle of technology and masculine anger and coolness and I think that was the primary way I processed it then. But it’s the scene that is most obviously meant to be a satire in retrospect. I like to think that 12-year-old me watching this movie knew there was something else there, but couldn’t articulate it, or didn’t know how to. It was probably only when I rewatched in my twenties that I was like, Oh.
That’s kind of the whole point of the franchise. And it’s actually a really interesting perspective, because it’s like, however cool you think your guns are—especially guns, almost all guns—they don’t mean shit. They are not going to help you survive against an alien predator. The only thing they do is make you a target. I mean, they make you feel better. They make you feel more like a man, but you’re not gonna hit them. And it’s a kind of anti-colonialist sentiment. The colonists come in with their superior firepower and all the cool technology and it doesn’t matter. That’s not the thing that makes you better, or makes you survive, or makes you more human or more powerful or more resilient, and that’s really fascinating to me.
A bunch of other movies ape this scene afterward, which I talk about a little bit in the book. But as McTiernan points out, they put people in front of the guns and it kills them, and that’s a very different message that’s not obvious to a lot of people when they watch it. The point is you’re shooting nothing, and you spent so much money and so much ammunition and all this energy—to what end? Nothing.
AO: I was drawn to this idea you have about movies “parenting” us. In the book you touch on the loss of your mother at a young age, the ups and downs of your adolescence in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Riyadh, and your relationships with your father and stepmother. Can you speak more to this idea of Predator parenting you? Do you think most of us have a movie like that?
AM: Probably. I think maybe it’s a little different with kids growing up now, who probably have a little more supervision. I grew up mostly in the ‘80s, which was not an era of a great deal of supervision—at least not for me and my friends. And as a result we found our way to rewatching movies like Predator and like, how can you not get parented by these stories and these characters that the culture has for us? And you kind of choose them yourself to some degree.
I don’t think it’s necessarily even a bad thing. I actually think it’s important for kids to have these kind of unsupervised spaces and hopefully find their ways to cultural stories or artifacts or whatever that have value and depth to them, and Predator did. Like, Rambo III doesn’t, I don’t think, but Predator did, and so I think it’s valuable. Otherwise you’re kind of in the cocoon of your family, where you learn certain things about masculinity and femininity and what it is to be American and to be a citizen and to be a person in the world, and you get some of that from your friend group, or maybe from a wider family. But it is useful to have these moments where you just get to completely connect with something else.
I don’t think I ever actually watched this movie with my dad. But he’s the same age, basically, as all the guys in the movie. So I think that also kind of contributed to the way I felt parented by it. I mean, my dad was less of a gung-ho and beefy macho posturing dude. But how else are you gonna learn that stuff except by interacting with the culture? And hopefully you’re able to get through that in a way that doesn’t permanently harm you. But part of the thesis of the book is that I think it did permanently harm me in some ways, and a lot of other men my age. Like, I do think that if you watch enough of this stuff, it’s a non-zero effect on your attitudes toward violence, men, masculinity, culture, women—all this stuff. If it parents us, then that does have an effect.
AO: While working on this book you visited the archives of Paul Monette, the National Book Award–winning author who wrote the novelization of Predator while his partner, Rog, was dying of AIDS. What did you learn about him while working on this project?
AM: When I thought about Predator, I thought I remembered that Paul Monette had written the novelization, which was just a bullet item in a grad school workshop presentation that someone had given on his collection Love Alone, this really beautiful and fierce book of poems. And years later, I was like, wait, what? A novelization is kind of an inherently shitty form, right. It has very little cultural value; we don’t venerate it. If you look at the contract for it, you can see Monette and his agent had to specify that his name would be on the cover, that he would get the edit, that it would appear in his bio, ‘cause normally novelizations don’t, they’re just something you do for money. But this one really feels like a Paul Monette experience.
So I realized he had written this novelization, and I knew his partner had died of AIDS, and I put the timing together. And then I started to think more about some of the obvious overlaps between the AIDS crisis—this invisible government-denied killer that’s stalking men primarily. And so I’m like, well, I’ll read some more of Paul’s work, and I read a couple of his books of poems, and I read a couple of his memoirs, one of which won the National Book Award. What did it mean that this serious literary person was writing a kind of crappy version of a kind of unliterary product? Like, a novelization, of all things? Of Predator, of all things?
And when I read the book, it was actually a beautiful book. I mean, it’s kind of problematic in some ways; it gets kind of lazy in the way you do if you’re writing a book on short notice and it doesn’t really matter how good it is, in a certain sense. And he characterizes all the characters with their ethnicity in real broad strokes, and that’s kind of hard to take. But the way he sees men is actually kind of revelatory and beautiful. And when I learned more about his life, and more about where he was when he was working on this book—he was literally at the bedside, working on the edits of Predator in the hospital room, as his partner was dying—it added this very tragic feeling. It really added another layer.
AO: You write about Predator as “a shared reference point”—not just among you and your friends, but also its wide-reaching fan community. I connected with that, how a film can function as a shorthand not just between friends, but complete strangers. What facets of Predator shaped it into such a cultural touchstone?
AM: This is one of the things I think is really interesting about Predator and people’s love for it. There’s a large cosplay community that makes their own suits and has their own kind of fan fiction, and built a very large world from an early point. Really, it was the point when Dark Horse did the first Alien vs. Predator comic, even before Predator 2. their willingness to kind of splice the Alien into the Predator universe—which then shows up on the ship at the end of Predator 2, which is a really cool moment—that gave people a sense of permission that they could participate. It’s a very fan-service kind of move to have made—Predator 2 came out in 1990—so that’s a really early move that invites people in, and invites this conversation that had already been happening online, in early online BBS culture and so forth. That opened a door, and then people were able to enter it.
But the cool thing about the cosplay community is no one cosplays as Dutch or any of the human characters. They all cosplay as Predators. Everyone that does this identifies with the alien that kills everyone except for our hero, which is a really weird move. But I think it’s because the Predator is a kind of sympathetic character. Like, Dutch’s team is put into action based on a lie—he’s being lied to and betrayed by the U.S. government—but they’re trying to meddle in other governments. We are the bad guys to begin with here, going in to fuck with some Central American government to try to overthrow—it’s not quite a coup, but it’s in that direction—and that’s something America was super involved in doing. So the Predator is kind of punishing them. Some people, when they watch the movie, feel a sense of pleasure seeing these American guys get punished, and I do, too; that’s certainly a facet of my experience.
Because you get to see through the Predator’s POV, I think that’s the thing that allows people to inhabit the Predator. That willingness to invite the audience in and see as the other. Especially for a bunch of non-other cis straight white males who grew up at a certain time, that’s a really powerful opportunity to give someone.
AO: Do you think the rest of us could benefit from returning to some formative film from our past over and over again, like you did? Now that you’re on the other side, is it a process you’d recommend?
AM: There’s something fascinating that happens when you return to a thing that has been crucial for you, for whatever reason, and you just look at it closely. It allows the self to reveal things about itself that it wouldn’t otherwise get to. Like, if you try to write about the self, or male friendship, or gun violence, right—I can’t do that, I don’t know how to access that. But I know how to write about Predator, and Predator can get me there, to these other things. I’m from the Midwest; I’m incapable, really, of writing directly about these things. But I can write at an angle. So if you give the front brain—the kind of conscious, critical brain—something fun to play with, that’s what I think form also does, on the page. If you’re working with formal constraints like a lipogram or a sonnet or whatever, it gives that front brain something to do, and then allows the back brain—the rest of the brain—to come out and play in a less self-conscious way.
And there’s nothing that’s below our notice or investigation. You could write about anything, which a lot of my work has done; it’s become one of my tactics. I love to write about stuff that no one cares about—like Dokken, this ‘80s metal band that isn’t good, but that doesn’t matter. You can still illuminate so many beautiful things by looking at it, if you look at it closely enough, and I think that’s really key. So I highly recommend the experience. I mean, I think I maybe went too deep and got lost in the labyrinth for this book in a way that I haven’t before. It’s a better book for it, but it took a long time, and I don’t recommend getting lost in the labyrinth. Maybe bring some thread or something to help you find your way back out.
AO: What’s your favorite frame of Predator, and why?
AM: It’s two frames, really. The two that come back to me the most are right at the end of the first third or so, after they raid the rebel camp. The moment after Mac kills the scorpion with his knife, and then he kind of squashes it with his boot—it’s the first time we’ve seen the Predator, and the Predator comes in and picks up the scorpion in its claw. You kind of see it, and you watch as the shot resolves. It looks like a heart originally, but then in a second or two you can tell it’s a scorpion as it loses its body heat.
That to me is the most iconic moment—when the Predator’s looking at a thing and can’t figure out what it is, and we can’t tell what it is—that’s the feeling that I love maybe the most about the movie. It’s the moment I want to stay in the most when I rewatch it; I want to stay in that moment of not knowing what we’re seeing, and I love that. And then a couple seconds later you figure it out, and you’re like, oh, it’s the scorpion that [Mac] just killed. And then if you kind of explode that a little bit, it’s also like the Predator is trying to figure out how these guys are interacting, because [Mac] seemed to stab [Dillon], they’re saying things that they don’t seem to mean. The meaning of the interaction—it seems friendly, but it’s not friendly. The Predator’s trying to understand the different ways these men are relating to each other.
And that’s the thing I come back to with the movie—I am the Predator, I wanna understand how these men—who are, to some degree, my men—are. With each other, to each other, and to the world that surrounds them. I feel like Predator offered me the door to do that, and offers all of us the door to do that, and that’s why we should watch it.
Ander Monson is the author of nine books, including Predator from Graywolf. He edits the magazine DIAGRAM, the New Michigan Press, Essay Daily, and he directs the MFA program at the University of Arizona.