Predator A memoir, a movie, an obsession

The cult 1987 sci-fi horror movie exposes the male heart of darkness, according to this rueful homage. Novelist and critic Monson (Vanishing Point), who's watched Predator--in which Arnold Schwarzenegger and other armed mercenaries battle an extraterrestrial big-game hunter--some 146 times over three decades, gives a scene by scene, sometimes frame by frame analysis. He admires the flick's visual effects and nuanced characterizations, along with the sheer panache of its over-the-top violence ("It's brilliant. Dillon screams. The camera lingers on his disconnected arm. The arm still pulses with simulated blood, the finger twitching on the trigger, bullets flying"). He further dissects its rendition of a manly archetype of combative, emotionally repressed men spewing quips amid the carnage, one that he connects to serial killings, the January 6 riot, and other masculinist pathologies. Monson riffs on such tangents as rocker Little Richard, shoot-'em-up video games, and the gay actor who portrayed the alien Predator, and explores the movie's resonance with his youthful miscreancy in rural Michigan dabbling in amateur explosives and computer crime. Written in loose-jointed yet elegant prose that guiltily savors Predator's pleasures, Monson's subtle, twisty appreciations and critiques--"It's satire wrapped in gun pornography.... tenderness wrapped in beefy macho posturing and explosive ballets"--transform the movie into a penetrating commentary on the contradictions of manhood. Movie buffs will want to snap this up. (Sept.)

A metamorphic memoir cloaked in a celebration of the 1987 film Predator, which Monson has seen 146 times. In a country where incomprehensible, violent tragedies are becoming commonplace, Monson finds clarity processing the new American way against the backdrop of his favorite movie. "The world we're living in watched it and consumed [the film], and now I see it everywhere I go," he writes, effortlessly connecting incidents like the Jan. 6 insurrection to the golden age of 1980s action blockbusters, a time of glorified violence and explosive machismo. While the text initially feels like an arbitrary lens to discuss toxic trends in masculinity, Monson finds a cracking pace that imbues the film with an improbable resonance, at once lowbrow and mesmerizingly cogent. A frame-by-frame discussion unspools with repeated pauses and digressions, all of which scatter fragments of memoir and existential inquiry within celluloid scenes of over-the-top alien action. Monson positions the film as a watershed moment in American masculinity as well as in his own development, and he's a sympathetic but critical participant. As he notes, he was a teenage hacker and made bombs with his friends based on recipes from The Anarchist Cookbook, and while he recognizes and shuns the part of him that could have evolved into the worst of today's men, he still revels in the film's muscle and aggression. The '80s were also an era of film novelizations, and the author spends many compassionate chapters telling the story of Paul Monette, the acclaimed poet and author of Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, who, oddly, wrote the Predator novelization as a side gig while his partner was dying. All these pieces form an illuminating whole despite their buckshot focus. In a discussion of Predator's alien and its infrared vision, Monson profoundly elucidates: "These shots are really about adaptation, our ability to see ourselves as others do, and to--hopefully--evolve, at least a little." An unlikely treatise on manhood with the charm of a late-night movie marathon. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.