Imagine my surprise, then, when the other night on a whim I watched the movie Predator (the 1987 version), and saw these things come together somewhat in its story (It was actually kind of a fun movie to watch - I hadn't seen it since I was a teenager, I don't think).
The connection didn't hit me until I was well into the movie actually. Anna, the girl Arnold's team takes with them after they storm the guerillas' hideout, starts talking about the Predator as a Chameleon, after Arnold realizes that it has been using the jungle and the trees to hunt them. Here is that clip (apologies for the language):
After the team decides they need to take a stand and is waiting for the Predator, Anna goes into another monologue where she lets them that what is now happening to Arnold's team had been happening to her people for quite some time. They would find Men killed and missing their skins (earlier in the movie, we also see soldiers with their skins removed), and she goes on to say that they call the Predator a Demon: The Demon Who Makes Trophies of Man.
Anyway, it was during this series of interactions that I started to think about this. We have a jungle Demon-Chameleon (who is an alien) hunting and terrorizing Men on Earth, and who likes to remove their skins.
Later, Arnold's team is completely obliterated and it is just him and the Predator. That is when it gets to this iconic scene of Arnold yelling to the girl to "Get to the choppa!" and then running away from the Predator. Because all of this was already on my mind a bit as I was watching, the running scene did remind me of that strange picture that WJT has posted on his blog a few times (with Arnold running away from the reality temple), and which I've associated with the Run Boy Run video and other symbols there. Here is that scene:
Arnold even gets a 'baptism' after his run away from the Chameleon.
After I called out Saruman in November, and wrote that "Saruman, you rat..." post, I had an image come to my mind that night (while standing in my room awake) of a Being I assumed was him. His face was obscured behind a thick jungle brush, just like those fronds in the scene above. The brush then parted and I saw his face more clearly. The image then changed to that of a yellow sunflower. As I 'looked' closer at the sunflower (this was all happening in my mind), the center of the flower transformed into a gray mouth full of sharp teeth. It was one of the most grotesque things I have ever seen. The mouth tried to reach out and bit me in a very fast motion which startled me, and this broke the image, and I felt like I was going to throw up. That disturbing imagery was one motivating factor in me spending the next few days in November writing a bit more about Saruman.
Anyway, that is another reason why this Chameleon in the jungle was interesting to me - because of that image of Saruman hiding in a jungle in that imagery.
Not sure why, but this was on my mind this morning, so there you go.
[Note: as I was just finishing up some edits above, I looked at Predator and saw it as Pre-Dator, as in something that pre-dates. A Being that is very old and from "Before" - Ancient - for whatever that is worth]
This is a little strange but
ReplyDeleteA few years ago, I had a couple of mental images within quite a short amount of time (a week maybe?), that I supposed might be demons. It recently occurred to me that they could have represented Saruman and Ungoliant.
The first one (male) looked like some kind of Grey alien with a massive cranium with the shape of the brain externally visible (central ridge and stuff). Extremely malicious and inhuman expression with blood-shot eyes, and gleeful smile with sharp teeth.
The image of the female resembled the image associated with Hobbes' 'Leviathan', with the figure looming or presiding over something. She had a similarly extremely malicious look.
It occurs to me that it could be that Saruman should be understood as distantly related from most humans and should be understood to be actually something like a space-alien (originating far away from most humans, and having come in from some distant place), with superhuman deviousness and persistence/depth of evil-motivation incomprehensible to most people.
ben:
ReplyDeleteStrange is pretty much the name of the game these days, and in light of everything else, this doesn't sound even all that strange, honestly.
I've also had 'alien' faces a few times meant to resemble Evil beings, though not exactly like your images, but not completely different either. It could be what we see is symbolic, at least to some degree anyway, in how various Beings are portrayed.