Predators and Queens

Why I loved Prey, a movie you've probably heard of, and The Emerald Crown, a novel you probably haven't

*The original version of this post was published on Patreon on August 11, 2022.

Being a woman is annoying for lots of reasons, including the fact that it’s difficult to make art about the experience of being a woman, or rather it may not be hard to make that art but it’s hard to make it “right” by dominant social standards. Either an extra layer of doubt is applied to works by or about women (could the heroine REALLY be this brave, strong, victorious?) or works by or about women are quickly buried, especially if they don’t meet male standards of relevance (the heroine was insufficiently brave, strong, victorious).

Today’s recommendation post is an unexpected double rec of two different works which seemingly have nothing to do with each other, except that they’re both about women. The first is the movie Prey, the latest entrant in the Predator franchise which premiered recently to critical acclaim (and a lot of negative outcry from the usual crop of Gamergate types); and a forgotten novel called The Emerald Crown by the equally forgotten Theodora McCormick, published in 1955. Prey is a sort of historical science fiction, set in Comanche lands in the early 18th century, where a young woman is trying to become a hunter against the social expectations of her people and ends up facing off against a hunter-alien from beyond the stars. The Emerald Crown is a historical romance set in Ireland in the 9th-10th century and is based on supposedly real events, specifically the life of a princess who was forced to marry one king after another (thanks to the social expectations of her people), and then finally got to marry the man she really loved. The stories could not be more different, or the heroines more unlike—Naru of Prey is a clever and sometimes clumsy hunter, Sionna of The Emerald Crown is a queen who does embroidery and is prone to blasphemous doubts about the existence of God. But (and this is another annoying thing about being a woman) their unlikeness is their similarity: they are both “wrong” types of women.

Let’s start with Naru in Prey. (Spoilers for Prey after this: it’s hard to talk about what makes it so good without giving away the story. It’s a violent movie, so NSFR [Not Safe For Rennix], but if you don’t mind violence then you should watch it IMMEDIATELY. Seriously, run, don’t walk, to your computer or TV. Make sure you select the Comanche dub on the main Hulu screen, it’s not a subtitle option.) Everyone seems to like Prey, except the old Gamergate crowd, and while their objections are no doubt motivated by racism as much as misogyny, most of their criticisms have been couched in misogynistic terms. How could one untrained girl defeat the Predator, whereas in the original film it took a whole team of beefcakes led by Arnold Schwarzenegger to do it? It’s entirely likely that these conscientious objectors haven’t actually watched Prey, and missed the part where Naru actually sucks at hunting for the first half of the movie. She’s committed to the hunter lifestyle but inexperienced at it—she clearly hasn’t had the same training that her brother and his dismissive friends have had. And then, as her brother and his friends are picked off one by one by the Predator, charging at him while she hangs back out of a combination of both fear and good sense, the Predator declines to pursue her because—she realizes, to her humiliation—he doesn’t consider her a threat. When she defeats the Predator in the end, it isn’t because she somehow morphed into a huge beefcake badass warrior who stomps him to death (not quite how Arnold does it either), but because she uses what she’s learned about the Predator’s technology, the terrain, and her knowledge of medicine to construct a fabulous Home Alone-esque trap. Every step of how this trap will be built is set up in the narrative, and the final payoff is hugely satisfying. Naru wins, and she deserves to win.

Unless, of course, a girl can’t win—unless, of course, the nature of being a girl is itself a trap, and a girl setting a trap to get herself out of a trap is too good an image for some. Well, then surely, the Gamergate squad must want stories about women who are bound by gender roles, and don’t fight against them: stories about manly men who are warriors, and women who endure their fate. That’s obviously why The Emerald Crown is such a beloved classic. It’s definitely not a dusty book that I pulled off my friend’s dad’s bookshelf because I thought the cover was pretty, and I was curious about the writer.

Forgotten or unfairly ignored women writers are a particular area of interest for me—there are just so many, and they tend to be so good. Theodora McCormick was an intensely prolific novelist: her Wikipedia profile lists 38 “selected works” rather than a full bibliography. She wrote historical romances, science fiction, fantasy, and mystery (the last usually under her married name, Theodora Du Bois.) Then her 1954 mystery novel, Seeing Red, made the House Un-American Activities Committee look bad, which led Doubleday to stop publishing her books…and the rest is (not) history. When I opened The Emerald Crown I read a single page, fell in love with the prose, and ran (didn’t walk) to Alibris to find a cheap copy of my own. The novel is, of course, out of print.

Rennix has cast some doubt on the historical accuracy of some of the details in The Emerald Crown (did wandering Irish satirists really wear cloaks of feathers?) but whether the depiction of 9th-10th century Irish life is academically valid, it feels “real.” The book has that magical quality which many great historical fiction, fantasy, and science fiction novels have: the reader is dropped into a world with a different set of lifeways from our own, different modes of thinking about and perceiving reality, which are nonetheless comprehensible on their own terms. Prey has this magical quality too (and is supposed to be extremely historically accurate, thanks largely to the work of producer Jhane Myers). Even though it’s mainly a sci-fi action romp, we get a  glimpse of what Comanche life might have looked and felt like at the time, including how their gender roles worked, and how a young woman might have struggled against them.

The Ireland depicted in The Emerald Crown is also big on gender roles, if very different ones, and the heroine Sionna isn’t thrilled with them but also doesn’t battle them in the same way. She’s not a warrior: she’s not physically strong or badass. She struggles with her faith, but takes Christian ideals of mercy and compassion very seriously; she’s proud and stubborn, and sometimes brave, and sometimes scared to death. When she gets pregnant, she’s beset by anxiety (thanks to an eerie visit from a wandering satirist, who has the power to curse) and we hear about her terror, and the pain of her labor, for pages—it isn’t glossed over, and it’s riveting. With the exception of some chapters that are from the point of view of Sionna’s lover, Niall (a pleasantly flawed but badass hero-type), the story is about her, and she’s presented as a fully-faceted, “real” person within it.

The problem is, of course, her reality. The Emerald Crown lies forgotten for a number of reasons including aggressive anti-communism, but the same crew that thinks Naru is unrealistic will also never read it, or track down other forgotten women writers. There isn’t a version of women’s stories that they want: there isn’t a women-centered narrative which might be interesting to them. “Oh yeah?” they might say. “What about Game of Thrones? Lots of ladies there.” Lots of ladies—and lots of rape, and helplessness. One of the showrunners of the Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon has claimed that the new show cuts down on sexual violence, but also that “you can’t ignore the violence that was perpetrated on women by men in that time.” The “time” he’s referring to is, of course, the past of a fictional country based on 19th century medievalist dreams rather than any real history. The Game of Thrones universe may be popular, but it isn’t one of those stories which presents truly different lifeways or modes of experience: in fact, its set of expectations and possibilities are pretty much the same as our own, or rather the same dull ones we’ve been holding onto since about the 19th century. The continent of Westeros is England/the West, blown up on the map to tremendous size and holding extraordinary influence, while the other countries are withered stubs. If there are dark-skinned natives anywhere, they’re easily liberated or controlled by a white queen (“but the white queen isn’t supposed to be good,” these guys might say, “she’s a violent person who goes on a rampage until her boyfriend safely murders her, which means, uh…”) Anyway I don’t think I’ll be watching House of the Dragon, unless the CGI dragons are really good. The CGI animals in Prey are not good at all, but I don’t especially care because Naru is real, and her world feels real, and she has agency and screws things up and figures it out, just like an actual person, even a woman-person.

That’s really the problem—the trap which, in the eyes of a lot of men, can’t be escaped. A woman can be acceptable as a character if she’s woman-as-secondary-to-man: backgrounded, less powerful, less important. Isn’t Arya in Game of Thrones a total badass, in fact much more unrealistically badass than Naru given that she’s like, 12 when she starts going on killing sprees? Yes—but Arya is a supporting character, and not a particularly fleshed-out one, and also she gets threatened with rape a lot. It’s not really a matter of whether women embody gender roles or reject them—it’s about whether they’re vulnerable in the story to male importance, male power, male predation. Naru starts out as vulnerable and then defeats the ultimate male predator; Sionna, passed around from king to king, isn’t defeated by any of them. When it comes to her vicious second husband, Carrol (who threatens to let the Vikings burn down a nunnery if she won’t marry him), she toggles between pity and hatred, and when he dies she doesn’t mourn him.

To paraphrase Margaret Atwood for a moment, men are afraid that women will ignore them, and women are afraid that men will kill them, and what men are specifically afraid of is that women will ignore the fact that men can kill them, and take away all their power in a stroke. I have complicated feelings about “the ability of art to change the world” so I don’t know if consuming narratives about realistic women who rise above male power will make much difference to anyone—plenty of men understand that women are human beings without needing to be reminded of it by fiction (it was my friend’s dad, after all, who had The Emerald Crown on his shelf). The men who do need those lessons probably won’t seek them out. I think it’s probably best to let the Gamergaters weep in the corner (“but I liked Ripley in Alien!” sure, you saw it when you were 12 and not yet hardened into your misogynistic casing, you wouldn’t like her now) and just enjoy the great feminist art out there: the unexpectedly good new entrants in old scifi franchises, and the forgotten novels by prolific and fearless ladies who dared to satirize (or is it curse?) the House Un-American Activities Committee. The predators may annoy us but they do not, in fact, always win.