May 19, 2012

• Ramblings about Assimilation: Often Alien, Rarely Predator

  Every society will have strangers among it. The stranger is always among us, confusing, intriguing, and repulsing us with his Otherness. He may not realize his Otherness, in which case there's comedy, or he overstates it, in which case there's tragedy. But he's there, walking our streets, the Alien in manflesh, thinking different thoughts, feeling different things.

  There comes a time where each Alien starts studying its environment, and often, the Alien decides to assimilate. Drop the headgear, lose the piercings or paint, tone down the rhetoric. The Alien becomes anonymous, legion though they may be, and life goes on. Perhaps a few old chums of the Alien remember, and they accuse or congratulate the Alien about the change in status.

  But there's the other choice...humiliation, not assimilation. The moment where the Alien uses his knowledge of the society in which he lives to become Predator. To use the society's shortcomings against it, to inject his poison into the society in which he dwells, to threaten it and use it for the sake of his cold ambition. Is the Predator truly motivated by ideals? Or does his hate serve as his true ideal? Surely he must realize that there is no place to retreat to, that the ships are burned, that his mission is doomed as it starts, that he carries within himself the seeds of his own extinction. But while the Predator lives, perhaps the Alien quietly envies him, even though the Alien may publicly decry the Predator.

  I dryly remark that Jesus was a Predator. And that I've never seen any Alien or Predator movies, but one can't waste a good framework.

  • 11:14 pm
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