The most lasting and recognizable of the 1987 movie Predator’s many great effects is this one: the thermal imaging we see ourselves through in the film. These shots are many and nearly all beautiful and surprising. Bewildering, really, because for much of the movie we don't know whose eyes it is we're seeing through, how it's seeing, even what we're seeing oftentimes. Sometimes we get it, we see our human shapes and hear clips of human voices and know something other is watching us. But other times the image takes a while to resolve and we're caught in it, that looking but not knowing, not yet seeing what we're seeing.
This effect also allows us to see our bodies in a way we hadn’t previously imagined. I don’t remember if I’d ever seen humans through infrared before, though I probably had, since I understood immediately that it was our heat that we were seeing, and not our faces. Or not only our faces. Here's how our faces looked if we only looked at heat.
Immediately I wanted it, the alien's toy, its infrared vision. How does one get that, I wondered?
So many of my favorite shots from this film are those that come in infrared. They nearly all take work to comprehend: an art effect. I’m not used to seeing palms and brush outlined in washes of winter blue, and the flatness of our bodies rainbow-bright in stripes and patches of pink and red and orange. It's wild to see the eye in purple, blue, and white, and to see so much of the contours of our skulls. By our skulls of course I mean Schwarzenegger's skull and skin, which is the one in the image above, one of my very favorite frames from the movie.
Each shot has to teach us how to read it, how to navigate its disorientation, and each moment we're in the disorientation is a moment we are outside ourselves—we are seeing as the creature! I wrote a lot about this in Predator: a Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession, my book about the movie that came out this month.
This is probably the time to mention that the more I watched Predator and thought about it seriously over the past decade, the more reasonable it began to seem to me to buy an infrared camera myself and achieve my childhood dream so that I could replicate the movie’s landmark visual spectacle and apply it to my life.
So I did. Once you start looking at the things in your life as the creature does they start to change. You see them in different ways. I mean I start to change. I become the you. You become the I. We see the way each other appear as heat signatures. For instance, the image below is of my beloved cat Rooster. She left us a few years ago. She was a predator, the one best suited to hunting and killing interlopers in the house. We'd often wake up to find parts—just a few parts—of a bug she'd killed in the tub at night.
Poncho says: Skin them? Why'd they skin them? There are so many easier ways to hurt.
The hurt, of course, was the point for her, the play of it.
Here she is memorialized, as the Predator would see her. It's one of my favorite pictures of her, her meowing at me wondering what the hell I'm doing. Shout out to Rooster!
Mostly these are shots from the film, but some are from my life beyond the film, at the yearly All Souls Procession, Tucson's idiosyncratic celebration/adaptation of traditional Day of the Dead celebrations.
I mean when the eye changes, the I changes, and I start to see—and to be—a little bit differently. I can't recommend it enough. Watching Predator would be a great start. Watching Predator on the big screen with me is an even better one. First up is Tucson, The Loft, 10/5 (tix and details here). Find all the info on and links to more screenings and readings in 2022-2023 on my website.
