Image copyright 20th Century Fox
Houston is as steamy as the Central American jungle on my TV, where Bill Duke has just plucked a scorpion from Carl Weathers’ meaty bicep with a machete. The air conditioner in my unremarkable duplex drowns out the hum of locusts, crickets and traffic, a monotonous backdrop at odds with the epiphany that is about to occur.
While my recently-engaged roommate is out for the evening with her fiancé, I am passing the time alone on our living-room futon watching my VCR tape of Predator, an old favorite. It begins as straightforwardly as my surroundings, conforming to the conventional action movie tropes of testosterone-fueled male bonding in camo gear on helicopters. Arnold Schwarzenegger leads a band of special-forces types into the jungle, invited by CIA operative Carl Weathers for the type of covert operation that involves makeshift camps and boxes full of highly flammable objects. The characters all share hard-edged names: Schwarzenegger, Weathers, and Duke play men named Dutch, Dillon and Mac.
When Dillon offers his thanks for the scorpion-plucking, Mac responds with one word, “Anytime,” shaping it into a menacing whisper-growl, as cool as mist rising from ice. It’s the first indication that things may not be what they seem. Mac doesn’t trust Dillon – correctly, it turns out, as Dillon has, with typical CIA wiliness, brought this team to Central America on false pretenses. Later, when Dutch learns of the betrayal, he asks Dillon, “What happened to you?”
“I woke up,” Dillon says. “Why don’t you?” The reply speaks to a world of Machiavellian dangers, where truth hides below the surface. But, of course, Dillon will get his comeuppance, when the alien hunter appears, blowing everyone’s conception of how things are apart. It’s what I love about this film – the narrative’s hairpin turn, nothing like my life, which has followed a prescribed middle-class, good girl trajectory. National Merit Scholar, college, solid job, long-term boyfriend. Savings in the bank for a down payment on a condo. One minor concern – when the film outings and lunches I share with a similarly movie-obsessed co-worker lead to him becoming obsessed with me, sending me increasingly personal postcards and, eventually, a bumper sticker with the letters cut out and rearranged in a message of devotion. His girlfriend confronts me one afternoon in the Fiesta grocery parking lot near my duplex and begins interrogating me about my intentions, which are innocent. No machetes are drawn. And almost immediately after the arrival of the worrisome bumper sticker, my would-be paramour is fired for an unrelated offense and removed from my attention. Nothing now obstructs my path to a satisfyingly productive future.
Until this night, when I watch Arnold pummel the alien with ingeniously rigged low-tech booby traps in Predator’s final scenes. This time, I’m walloped by a thought as the final credits roll.
I need an adventure.
The next morning, I carefully begin to dismantle my life.
***
In Predator, the most macho of men meet their match. Mac, so unflappable when blowing up Central American rebels, is reduced to a quivering wreck when the mysterious alien starts killing his commando brothers. Mac’s saucer eyes deepen to black moons of horror during his last few hours as he anticipates his death.
Billy, the group’s vaguely Native American mystic-type, is more stoic. “We’re all gonna die,” he proclaims in the midst of the chaos, gazing out over the unseen threat from the jungle. I pulled that line out once, a few months before my film-induced revelation, at the head of an ice-coated road in the Ozarks my father was about to tackle with the car, trying to extricate our family from our last Christmas vacation before my parents’ divorce. It was the final family in-joke, my pulling a line from a film that was part of our canon, the movie my Dad and sister and I used to bond over, trading lines in bad Austrian accents while my mother rolled her eyes and told us to turn it down. It was, perhaps, the last thing my parents could agree on, to laugh off my concern and choose the risk of sliding off an icy mountain road over another night trapped together in our rented lakefront cabin.
When my father called a few months later to tell me that he and my mother had separated, I said, “I’m upset, but I’m not surprised.” After I announced my intent to leave Houston, my boyfriend of four years responded by cheating on me, taking home a female acquaintance of ours after a party one night. I opened my eyes in the pre-dawn gloom, pricked awake by wrongness. Letting myself into his apartment after hours of unanswered calls, my first sight was her metal-studded black purse resting on a blue velvet chair that had once belonged to my grandmother. I was upset, but should I have been surprised? It was a cowardly way for him to end our relationship, but perhaps he saw what was coming.
***
The first and last acts of Predator are the most conventional, full of explosions and the good guys winning, and unable to hold my interest. It’s the middle acts that fascinate me: the sheer absurdity of an alien sport hunter showing up in the middle of a commando raid is what mimics real life: the way one’s decisions and fate inscrutably intertwine like vines. Dutch’s team comes to Central America for a rescue mission that doesn’t exist, only to encounter an alien who isn’t supposed to. We think we’re on one path, but, really, we’re on another. “Adventure” for me was chucking my job, my boyfriend, and my apartment only to end up just a few hours away, enrolled in the MBA program at the University of Texas at Austin. Adventure was spending my first Labor Day as a child of divorced parents sitting on a living room floor surrounded by my mother’s family, laboriously filling out T accounts for my class in Financial Accounting. Adventure was starting a relationship with a new boyfriend who I thought I might marry, lining up a well-paying, post-graduation job, and going house hunting on weekends.
On the evening after I wrapped up my final session of an entrepreneurship course named “Identifying Opportunity,” I accompanied my peers to a graduation reception, and then to a kitschy Tex-Mex joint, where a group of us crammed into a circular, vinyl booth to order tacos and margaritas. There, one of my classmates, upon discovering I spoke decent Spanish, invited me to accompany him on a post-graduation volunteering stint with a microlender in Nicaragua.
While I considered the proposal, the final days of business school exploded into an alcohol-fueled, end-of-term “dis-orientation,” which included a night of partying at a sticky dive bar on Sixth Street. There, two of my classmates began making out in front of me at our table, a third revealed his year-long crush on me, and then a fourth pulled me onto the dance floor in a scheme to make his girlfriend jealous. After escaping outside, I watched a fifth desperately jabbing at her cell phone as a sixth explained, “She’s drunk dialing France.”
“What is happening tonight,” I muttered.
Looking at me, sixth said, “Oh, it’s always like this at the Chuggin’ Monkey.”
A few weeks later, I stepped off a plane into the Central American jungle, just like Arnold and his band of men.
***
In Predator, the alien spies on its prey, recording snippets of their conversation. One of the chosen words is “Anytime.” The alien plays it back, repeats it, trying to understand, maybe, the intention behind the word as it ripples into the air.
School was a time of possibility, of opportunities blossoming, and my intention in going to Nicaragua was to squeeze in a few more weeks before the petals folded up and normal life resumed, a few more weeks of saying yes to anything that dropped into my lap, just because I could. When Hill, the inviter, leaned in to kiss me on a cheap painted wooden bench on the patio of the main lodge of a backpacker beach resort, looking across palm trees to the Caribbean, with gusting wind, and fat wet drops of rain splatching around us, I said yes to that too. I said yes to chucking my carefully put together post-MBA plans, yes to moving aboard a sailboat for eight months, yes to marriage, to five years working in the film industry, to parenthood, to becoming a writer, to the realization, as I began writing about my sailing experience, that the Predator viewing and the hot, unairconditioned microlender’s office where my future husband untucked his shirt, unleashing a flood of pheromones, might be connected in a way I can never fully understand.
***
It’s a very cinematic notion: the one decision that changes the course of your life. The credits roll and we and think, of course, that was always how it had to end. Yet, the eventual defeat of the Predator by Dutch is driven as much by chance (an accidental fall into a mudslide that masks him from the alien’s infrared vision) as it is by choice (building a series of low-tech booby traps to corner the creature). In the final showdown, the alien, wounded and beaten, immolates itself, and Dutch emerges from the ashes, bloodied but victorious. But with resolution comes change, a new, different state, an equilibrium that may prove fleeting or tenuous.
My husband shares my love for this ridiculous 80s action movie. Sometimes, he will catch my eye and, pitching his voice like Mac, whisper, “Anytime,” making me laugh. And, always, I am reminded of my epiphany on that boring evening in Houston, “I need an adventure,” blazing as bright and sure as the mushroom cloud marking where the Predator destroys himself at the end of the film. Was I led here? Or did I lead myself? Lurking in the word is a hint of the all the things we don’t know and the only certainty: a promise of change.
Beth Anderson is a writer, pop culture junkie and night person. Her work has appeared in 730 DC, Akashic, Beneath Strange Stars, Trembling with Fear and Furious Gravity. She currently resides in Austin with her husband and two daughters. Find her on Twitter @bandersonmedia.