The carrier bag theory in Prey
I watched Prey by Dan Trachtenberg the other night. I am not particularly keen on Predator sequels, but this one seemed promising: raw untouched nature, a Native American setting, and strong reviews.
Right before watching it, I had Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction on my mind. In short, she suggests that tools for carrying, holding, and preserving may have been more fundamental to human life than tools for cutting, piercing, and hunting, which usually sit at the center of our stories.
Prey turned out to be a good example of that tension. It is still a hero’s journey, but its female lead unites both worlds. She wants to be a hunter, yet she also carries medicine, prepares herbs, and knows how to heal. In the end, that knowledge becomes part of what allows her to defeat the Predator.
This three-minute clip captures what I am trying to point to:
Although I was fascinated by the thrilling action scenes throughout the film, I kept thinking about the glimpses of foraging and daily life. I found myself wondering what a movie of this same caliber would look like if it centered more on that instead.
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My recent interest in Native Americans’ daily lives comes from a chapter in The Dawn of Everything, where Graeber and Wengrow compare Western lifestyle with Native Americans’.
I just revisited that chapter and found them describing something close to what I was trying to get at here:
One gets the sense that indigenous life was, to put it very crudely, just a lot more interesting than life in a ‘Western’ town or city, especially insofar as the latter involved long hours of monotonous, repetitive, conceptually empty activity. The fact that we find it hard to imagine how such an alternative life could be endlessly engaging and interesting is perhaps more a reflection on the limits of our imagination than on the life itself.
