Van and Lyle are joined by writer and educator Eric Stinton, whose combat sports columns for Sherdog and essays for Honolulu Civil Beat have long explored how violence reveals deeper truths about culture, class, and masculinity. Together they take on John McTiernan’s Predator, a film that begins as a Reagan-era commando fantasy and ends as something far stranger: An inversion of the frontier myth in which the “savage” turns out to be the most technologically advanced being in the jungle.
The setup is pure covert-ops schlock. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Dutch and his squad are dropped into an unnamed Central American country on a mission dressed up as rescue but quickly revealed as assassination. “We’re a rescue team, not assassins,” Dutch insists, a line that could double as the tagline for U.S. foreign policy in the region throughout the 1980s. The banter is drenched in a period-specific bravado, from Jesse Ventura’s homophobic chest-thumping in the chopper to the iconic arm-wrestling clasp between Dutch and Carl Weathers’ Dillon, a gesture that fuses multiracial solidarity with pure masculine display. Weathers, fresh off playing Apollo Creed, was one of the few Black actors granted entry to this kind of role at the time, and his presence here rhymes with that earlier franchise. “Do you remember Afghanistan?” one of them asks early on. “Trying to forget it,” Dutch replies. In 1987, the joke writes itself. Four decades later, the punchline haunts.
Predator’s real force emerges when the squad starts dying and Dutch is forced to adapt. The guerrillas have been skinned, and the soldiers assume it’s the work of insurgents, the dehumanized enemy of every counterinsurgency manual. Except here the actual predator isn’t human at all, and is far more sophisticated than any of them. It kills not for territory or ideology but for sport, a mirror held up to the commandos’ own relationship to violence. Then there’s Sonny Landham’s Billy, the squad’s indigenous tracker who, in the film’s most loaded scene, strips himself of all weapons save a blade and cuts open his own chest, challenging the creature to single combat. It’s a sequence thick with frontier mythology, the “noble savage” facing a worthier opponent on ancestral terms. That Landham himself claimed Cherokee heritage, and later called for the genocide of Arabs on live radio before being expelled from the Libertarian Party, is the kind of life-imitates-art-imitates-empire loop this podcast was made for.
Further Reading
Eric’s columns at Honolulu Civil Beat
“Boomerangs of Empire” by Romina Green Rioja and Sergio Beltrán-García
The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins
America, América by Greg Grandin
Teaser from the Episode
Predator Trailer
