Just as every hero’s motivation is to protect his people, every monster’s is to uncover and exploit his central weakness. This conflict is the foundation upon which every hero-vs.-villain plot is constructed, but thematic content is wholly determined by the villain. In order for a villain to function, the villain must pinpoint the hero’s flaw. This flaw must not only exist in the hero, but exist as a reflection of the problems in the hero’s culture. One such flaw is that of the male ego’s ability to grow past the physical limits of its carrier. This flaw is most-often referred to as “toxic masculinity,” and it is the target of the three monsters interpreted in this essay. Beowulf’s Grendel, The Green Knight’s Green Knight, and the Predator—specifically the one featured in the 2022 film Prey—are all monsters whose purpose is to purge humanity of its toxic masculinity.
In Grendel’s case, he battles not only to humble Beowulf, but the incessantly macho company of warriors residing in Heorot. The gender-specificity with which Grendel attacks is noted in his introduction, as “those who lived, left— or locked themselves in ladies’ lodgings, far from fault lines. Those who stayed? Slain” (Headley 9). This detail emphasizes the fact that Grendel was selective about killing, letting the humbler men as well as the women evacuate the mead hall while he dealt those who felt “man enough” to stay and fight him.
This process of filtering out the humble and passive to dispel the arrogant is similarly applied—through rhetoric, rather than violence—by the Green Knight in his selection of Gawain. In his introductory speech, he presents King Arthur’s knights with the following terms of his “friendly Christmas game”:
Let whichever of your knights is boldest of blood and wildest of hearts step forth, take up arms, and try with honor to land a blow against me. Whomsoever nicks me shall lay claim to this, my arm. Its glory and riches shall be thine. But… thy champ must bind himself to this: should he land a blow, then one year and Yuletide hence, he must seek me out yonder, to the Green Chapel six nights to the North. He shall find me there and bend the knee and let me strike him in return. Be it a scratch on the cheek or a cut on the throat, I will return what was given to me, and then in trust and friendship we shall part. Who, then, who is willing to engage with me? (The Green Knight 17:18-18:15)
Simply put, the Green Knight challenges Arthur’s knights to do unto him no more than what they wish to endure. Gawain, wholly occupied by his wanting to prove his worthiness of knighthood, believes he can win a game founded on reciprocity, in which there is no winner. Thus, out of confidence-borne ignorance, he takes a swing that determines his own death. His rash reaction can be better understood when acknowledging Medieval standards for masculinity, outlined as follows:
Violence was the main way of exerting dominance over other men. Since manhood was all about competition, a man must always be ready to respond to challenges from other men. This was the natural state of things in a society where government institutions were weak, and the courts of justice were often distant and hard to access. It was fundamentally important to react instantly to any form of injustice, because lack of action might well be considered a sign of acceptance. (Hallenberg 136)
Given Hallenberg’s insight, Gawain’s attempt to behead the Green Knight can only be seen as an effort to assert the knightly image he craves. One can blame Gawain for his volatility, or blame knight culture for encouraging it; either way, the toxic byproducts of such a mentality are what the Green Knight seeks to correct with his game.
Predator’s ascension through the North-American food chain in Prey cannot be described as reciprocal—rather, it is an outright display of power—but the specificity with which he hunts can still be likened to Grendel’s and the Green Knight’s. Predator begins his journey through the Great Plains by killing a snake as it hunts a mouse; he then kills a coyote as it chases a rabbit; then a bear before it can kill the main character, Naru. Eventually, he comes across a field laden with buffalo skeletons, leading him to track down the deadliest of the Plains’ inhabitants in 1719; French hunters and trappers. He finds their camp just as they kidnap Naru and her brother, deciding to use them as live bait to trap Predator. When Predator finally engages with the camp, Naru informs her brother that “It doesn’t want bait, it doesn’t hunt that way. Before the trappers captured me, it saw me. It came right up to me, and then left. It didn’t think I was a threat” (Prey 1:02:05-1:02:23). Predator proceeds to kill every Frenchman in the encampment, brushing off every attempt of theirs to stop him. While it is his goal to find and kill Earth’s deadliest killers, there is a deeper layer in his mission. Just as Grendel hunted only the bravest male warriors, and just as the Green Knight challenged only the most pompous male knight, Predator hunts only the humans whose killing goes unchecked. The all-male party of hunters—in killing innumerable buffalo, trapping innumerable small game, nearly killing Naru’s brother, and having the audacity to set a trap for Predator—thus become his target. In the end, Naru kills Predator. As the only female hunter in the film, she is the only one that Predator does not recognize as his prey.
Grendel, the Green Knight and Predator all fall into the same function-based category as monsters. In his essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” Jeffrey Jerome Cohen states the following in his first thesis “The Monster’s Body is a Cultural Body”:
The monster is born only at this metamorphic crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place. The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy (ataractic or incendiary), giving them life and an uncanny independence. The monstrous body is pure culture. A construct and a projection, the monster exists only to be read: the monstrum is etymologically “that which reveals,” “that which warns,” a glyph that seeks a hierophant. (Cohen 44)
All three of our monsters are certainly representative of the cultural fears and anxieties during the time of their existence. For Grendel, it is the clan warrior’s insistence on building his legacy around his strength, regardless of risk and consequence; for the Green Knight, it is the knight’s fixation on holding his elite, bountiful status; and for Predator, it is the European settler’s ignorance in his ecosystem-destroying pursuit of fortune. Despite existing in varying contexts, these three monsters attack their assailants with the same goal: to purge them of the toxic masculinity that pushed their goals from noble to exploitative.
Sprockets and Springes 