(Assignment 1: Part 1)
“And so they killed as they kill today, not for food, but because they love to boast like children and say, ‘I have killed so many of such a kind.’” – Excerpt from North by West: Two stories from the frontier, R.D. Symons. (1973, p. 55).
The Predator arrives as the literal and metaphorical alien: ushering in new technology, new ideology, and orders and might of a foreign empire. Its aim is for conquest, for superiority, for absolute authority above the lesser. In many ways, this Predator exhibits the allegory of the colonial conquerors, the conquistadors who shed blood not for war but for power and control. At its introduction, we see not the predator, but the food chain it is observing: an ant, panning to a mouse that scoops it up, the camera shifting to rack focus to a rattlesnake readying to strike, until that snake is killed by the predator (00:13:38, Trachtenberg). This shot pulls the audience through the very hierarchy of power in a mere twenty seconds.
The Predator hunts for glory, for the power of the kill, for the mantle of the victor. Not unlike the trappers, razing the land of the New World with a fervour of conquest. Everything that wore fur was hunted down, whether it had four legs or two. When Naru and Taabe are captured, they’re held in cages, seen as ‘wild’ and subhuman compared to the trappers. In the following scenes, the camera is placed on either side of the cage wall, further separating Naru from the trappers and placing a physical and symbolic barrier between her world and theirs (00:58:00, Trachtenberg). The Predator and the trappers operate by the same logic: hunt what they deem inferior, collect proof of their dominance, and move on to the next field of bodies to brutalize.
Prey is an exercise in both achievement for Indigenous representation, but also the inheritance and perpetuation of colonial violence against Indigenous bodies. Carnage stains the entire film, warriors are cut down for the cinematic spectacle, Naru’s family is butchered in front of her, and she is hunted for sport. Though Naru herself is victorious at the end of the film, she is still an embodiment of a sub-set of the Hollywood Indian: which is to have the Indian endure great suffering. The film’s visual pleasure in the hunt implicates the viewer in the same cycle of glorified brutality against brown bodies. Prey gestures towards an attempt at visual-sovereignty, but it falls flat once again in the shadows of colonial conquest.
“Manitou’s children were called game and some vermin and some predators and some weeds […] But it was all the same, because it did not save their lives; and what use are names to the dead?” (Symons, 1973, p. 55).
Symons, R.D. (1973). North by West: Two stories of the frontier. The Garden of Manitou IX: The Dream of Morningchild. pp. 55-60. Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Trachtenberg, D. (Director). (2022). Prey. Disney+.
Provide Feedback