They’re 7 feet tall and hunters built for menace.
One with sickening mandibles.
The other has a stabbing second mouth revealed between a set of crushing jaws.
One is technological, arming itself with weapons that range from spears and nets to cloaking shields, laser cannons and heat-vision monitors.
The other is biological, with flesh-tearing teeth, bladed tail, acid spit and blood, and armor-like exoskeleton.
One hunts for sport, and the other just kills.
One knows honor, even mercy. The other has none.
One has been used as a challenge to humanity’s dominance, and the other is a metaphor for people’s cruelty and mental frailty as much as for eviscerating them.
They are both extraterrestrial terrors, and they both were named after their films: Predator and Alien.
These two creatures also have one more thing in common beyond being in movie franchises associated with the 1980s. (Though, thanks to stunning Prometheus, the Alien franchise continues to be far superior. Predators, while fun, isn’t exactly good.)
Both creatures originally were played by black men.
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| Kevin Peter Hall (left); and Bolaji Badejo |
I knew about the Predator being black back in the ’80s.
Kevin Peter Hall had shown up on NBC sitcom 227, playing a recurring character that eventually married the character played by longtime Sesame Street actress Alaina Reed, just as Hall had married her in real life. When Hall was on 227, towering above Marla Gibbs and Jackée Harry, you had your issue of Jet magazine telling you he fought the Terminator in the jungle.
But I only recently found out about Bolaji Badejo, a 6-foot-10 Nigerian who lucked playing the xenomorph for the 1979 film. Badejo bumped into agent Peter Archer while having a drink in a London pub. Archer saw this very tall, very thin man and told him to try out for the part. Ridley Scott hired him at first sight, and thus began Badejo’s four months of work on the film.
Does it mean anything that two of the scariest star beasts of all time were secretly black men underneath?
There’s an irony to the premise of black men being identified as monster-like perpetrators of crime, and having black men wearing monster suits as interplanetary terrors. I wonder if Hall and Badejo ever thought about that.
At the very least, they were people trying to do a good job.
There was nothing racial about the xenomorph, really. It implants eggs in people, explodes out of them, runs around and kills a lot. Pretty simple. And its H.R. Giger design was the unsettling, with its omnisexual malevolence. The thing looked sexy, ugly and scary all at once.
But I always thought the Predator had some racialized elements, with his dreadlocks for hair, his appearance in the jungle like a hunting tribesmen. In Predator 2, the creatures take on a noble savage aspect when they hand Danny Glover a colonial-era flintlock as respect for besting one of them. But I don’t think those aspects amount to much in the end; the Predator looked cool.
It’s a bit of racial coincidence, however, that the makers of Predator ditched Jean-Claude Van Damme for Hall when they wanted the Predator to look scarier standing up to the muscle-laden Arnold Schwarzenegger. There was some pride in knowing Hall was in the suit.
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| Rare photo of Van Damme in the original, less scary Predator costume |
From a wider view, the significance of these men as space monsters points to what I call the behind-the-scenes aspect of the black experience. Author Ralph Ellison referred to it as visibility and invisibility; the experience of a minority group being invisible in most of the majority culture, but highly visible in certain parts of it.
Black people and other ethnic/religious minorities all know this experience; the general culture will imagine a white person in most jobs or places. But our minds generally go to people of color when discussing pro basketball players, or migrant workers, or certain doctors and lawyers and computer engineers.
You see it in film and television, the power of the image reflecting reality and influencing it at the same time. With Badejo and Hall, they were both highly visible and invisible at the same time. Both of them getting a lot of the fear, but not so much credit. Schwarzenegger’s name was on the poster, as was Sigourney Weaver’s.
The prominence or visibility of actors and actresses of color is shaky.
In nerd world, too. I’ve already lamented the slim number of black sci-fi/fantasy movie heroes in this column. Even in my beloved Marvel Studios movies and Christopher Nolan-directed Batman films, you can count the black characters with multiple speaking lines on one hand. Wesley Snipes’ prominence in the Blade films shrank with each sequel, and he was the main character. Other people of color might take up a finger or two, thanks to the “good with calculation” Chinese criminal in The Dark Knight alone.
At least the Alien and Predator films gave me Yaphet Kotto and Idris Elba, Sanaa Lathan and Danny Glover, Carl Weathers and Laurence Fishburne. And Bill Duke, who’s spent considerable time being visible on camera, and invisible behind the scenes directing everything from feature films with black actors in starring roles (Not Easily Broken, A Rage in Harlem) to episodes of Miami Vice, Knots Landing, Dallas and Falcon Crest.
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| The great Bill Duke |
And I salute Badejo and Hall for their work as two of my favorite cinematic nightmares.
For getting to escape the daily perception of us black men as monsters, by using a mask to become actual ones. As one last tribute to Badejo, look at how scary he was just in test footage without the full costume on.
No wonder the other actors looked afraid in the film. They really were.
