The Critters Within

1980s monsters and the siege of Los Angeles

Our home movie setup is a projector with a pull-down screen, and our living room area is decently sized, so sometimes a friend asks if we can host a screening of a particular film. That’s how last weekend found a dozen people in our home watching 1986’s Critters.

I’ll cop to never having seen Critters before. It came out two years after Gremlins, which is famous (within my family) for causing me to run out of the theater because I was so grossed out when one of them blew up in the microwave. Sure, Critters looked kind of goofy on the Blockbuster shelves, but I’d been burned once before.

To get folks excited for the feature, Hope and I curated a pre-show playlist of short videos. We used to host events like this more frequently about a decade ago, and it got to the point where the playlists began to eclipse the film. This time we wanted to be sure they were complementary, so we carefully selected videos that featured one or more critters in some capacity.

As we’d hoped, our choices sparked a lively debate about what does or does not constitute a critter. Does it have to be smaller than a person? How self-aware can it be? Does it require fur, or can it be a reptile or insect? Or, the most hotly contested topic of the night: Is ALF a critter? (Voting revealed an emphatic no, but I’m more open-minded than most.)

The movie itself was a fun, competently made, surprisingly handsome piece of mid-’80s sci-fi horror comedy. It had an inevitable kid protagonist and was a lot less gross than Gremlins - I probably would have been fine with it at age 10. But more than anything within the film itself, what’s kept haunting me long after our viewing is our collective realization that critterhood is a subjective state.

The critters in Critters are absolutely critters, no doubt about it (though their species name is the much lamer “crites”). The title was chosen to be cutely dismissive, which creates a stronger contrast with its subjects’ bloodthirsty ruthlessness. The film opens with a small group of them escaping from a prison asteroid and commandeering a spacecraft that will inevitably bring them to earth. They’re considered so dangerous that a couple of Terminator-adjacent bounty hunters with laser bazookas are hired to catch and kill them before they wreak more havoc on helpless planets.

The critters (I can’t call them “crites,” sorry) crash-land on a Hollywood-perfect Kansas farm, where their presence is detected by a young boy. But there’s no Spielbergian sentiment here - the invaders quickly engage in bloody attacks that soon extend to the rest of this small, peaceful, overwhelmingly white rural town.

The Reagan era was the birthplace of all sorts of vengeful fantasies that focus on preserving a magical past that never existed - fantasies that have metastasized into today’s MAGA. It was my primal scene as well, so maybe I can be forgiven for wondering how many of the Trump supporters calling for bloody reprisals against “illegal” others grew up watching movies like Critters and are consciously or otherwise applying them to the current moment.

In the ‘80s, as throughout the last half of the century, fictional invaders from another world were more likely to be interpreted as communists. But as we all know, non-white immigrants are basically the communists of the 21s century, responsible for an absurd and paranoid Brown Scare. What makes the Critters metaphor especially insidious is the way these little monsters - like the gremlins and their kin - are humanoid but not human, dangerous but dispatchable without remorse. Stuffing them in a blender or blowing them to pieces is always good fun, especially since they struck first - we didn’t ask them to come here, you know. Compared to that kind of treatment, detention and deportation must seem downright humane.

The bounty hunters in Critters add an additional layer to the to this interpretation. Faceless in their natural form, they take on the characteristics of humans they observe during their mission. One of them watches MTV on the flight to earth and adopts the visage of a hair-metal rocker, but the other waits until they land in Kansas to find his match. Over the course of the film he successively mimics various members of the community, including a sheriff’s deputy, a preacher, and the conspiratorial weirdo who predicted the arrival of aliens through the radio signals in his fillings - a regular who’s-who of the far right.

As ICE agents swarmed Los Angeles this week, I thought a lot about these otherworldly agents: the media-friendly stud and his shapeshifting sidekick, determined to rid the world of the invasive critter menace while causing as much cinematic collateral damage as possible. They’re not quite the heroes of the story - that falls to the boy, whose aw-shucks obsession with homemade explosives comes in awfully handy. But the assassins aid and abet the citizens in their own struggle to protect their town and way of life - all without revealing their true faces. And unlike the townspeople, they get to fly away at the end and leave their mess behind them.

I feel like our masked and bandana'ed ICE agents are an echo of these guys. Sure, they see themselves as Terminators, as Norrises and Stallones - the difference is that they’re too chickenshit to show their actual faces. To anonymize themselves in craven detachment from their fellow countrymen is ultimately just as dehumanizing as their treatment of the so-called aliens they purport to defend us from. These superhuman bounty hunters came to mind while I was reading a fierce, angry piece about the L.A. ICE raids by the labor journalist Hamilton Nolan: “You’re a Bunch of Cowards.” It is highly satisfying read in its entirety, but here’s a taste:

Fucking clowns. Straight up clowns. All you guys lacked proper male role models or whatever. All you ICE agents wear shades and face masks because you huddle in deep fear of being seen. I’m quite sure you can hardly stand to look at yourselves in the mirror each morning before you set out to lick the feet of your racist paymasters. Change everything about your lives immediately or I promise that your self-loathing will consume you forever. Clowns.

It can be difficult to laugh at riot cops. But we should all try. Because they’re so fucking ridiculous. Hey, nice huge helmet and body armor and fake ass gun and shield to oppose a bunch of skater kids waving around flags. You all are the most terrified group of human beings in the United States of America. You all are the types of people who open carry handguns to go to Buffalo Wild Wings. You all need to stop getting your news from idiots on idiot websites. You all need to read some fucking books and gain a minimal sense of perspective. You all need to embrace the crushing realization that for your whole lives you have been afraid and confused and have embraced a misguided set of macho enticements that have seduced you into believing that manhood depends on looking like some sort of cartoon action figure when in fact it is this look that reveals to the world the deep inadequacy that haunts you every day.

“But wait,” says the imaginary devil’s advocate who will never read this post, “Doesn’t that mean you’re siding with the critters? Do you want savage little imps running around and raping our women and stealing our jobs?”

To quote Nolan, “Fuck off, losers.” What I’m saying is that the movies set up a false narrative dichotomy, one that dimwits and assholes treat as a key to real life. I grew up with plenty of boys who looked up to Rambo as a paragon of masculinity, and I can only imagine a significant proportion of them are damaged or stupid enough to believe it to this day. And now our government is paying them and their children to take their cosplay to the streets and goad decent people into resisting their brutality as the pretext for a civil war. All because a large percentage of the population can’t bring themselves to view people who came from somewhere else as fellow humans.

It’s interesting that the debate about critters last weekend was most polarized on the subject of ALF. His show debuted the same year that Critters was released, but the emphasis was completely different. Sure, he was “other” - Trump and Vance would have had a field day with his penchant for eating cats - but when he crash-landed on earth, he was taken in by a family, given food and shelter, treated like one of their own. The entire premise of the show is that his presence enriched their lives - and, by extension, the lives of us watching in our own homes. There used to be tons of fish-out-of-water sitcoms where the lead characters found acceptance with everyday humans - My Favorite Martian, Mork and Mindy, Third Rock From the Sun. Hell, Balki from Perfect Strangers was a literal immigrant! Why weren’t these stories the ones that stuck?

So yeah, maybe the others were right - maybe ALF isn’t a critter. He’s too fully formed as a character. The Critters critters are just shrieking, hairy balls of id who cause widespread terror and bloodshed. Kind of like the death cult that’s egging on ICE to get their sweet fix of cruel satisfaction. Let’s hope the real monsters encounter their own justly deserved defeat.