Sunday, January 20, 2008
Cloverfield
Saw it on a whim Saturday night, and... wow. On reflection, what's most interesting about it is that it strikes me as a movie that couldn't have been made before 9/11. War of the Worlds met with some hand-wringing by the "too soon" crowd, but in the end the usual ultra-glossy finish Spielberg puts on all of his movies allowed the audience to keep an emotionally-safe distance. But some of the early scenes in Cloverfield knock you down, kick you in the teeth, and drag you in with a ferocity that will leave you more shaken than you expect.
We don't know what it's like to have the Mongol Horde at the city gates, knowing that a brutal and humiliating death is imminent. Most of us don't know what it must have been like to see the gate on the landing craft drop in front of Omaha Beach. None of us has any idea how we would process a giant monster stomping its way through our city, though pants would be shat. We do, however, know with awful clarity what it looks like when a skyscraper collapses. When you see crowds of people running in terror from King Kong or Godzilla, you laugh because they have a certain absurd quality to them. Surely some day people will laugh at the crowds running for their lives in Cloverfield too, but not until those of us who saw clouds of debris billowing down the concrete canyons have all been fitted with adult diapers and locked away in the home. For now it feels like being five years old and staring out into the woods at night alone. You don't care what Mom or Dad says, every fiber of your being tells you there's something large and hungry out there.
What's almost as interesting, and the reason why I think this movie hasn't prompted as much hand-wringing, is the conspicuous lack of allegory; so complete in fact, that the lack tempts allegory in itself. Hollywood has told us that nothing happens without a reason. A cigar is always a repressed desire to suck cock. If there is a monster, we probably caused it to appear. Nearly every awful thing that's happened in a movie in the past twenty years was caused by Republicans, evil corporations, warmongering generals, global warming, or excessively rigid toilet training by a father who voted for Goldwater. If the US military appears in the film, there is almost always a conspiracy of some kind, and if there's a sympathetic character, it's the junior officer who bravely defies orders to prematurely nuke the city.
In Cloverfield, though, the monster simply appears out of nowhere, and just like the characters, we get no backstory, no reason to explain its appearance, no hint of deeper intentions. Sometimes evil just crawls up from the depths or falls out of the sky and harshes the fuck out of your mellow. Welcome to life, there are no guarantees and you don't get your money back. Meanwhile, when the junior officer warns our characters of the hour when the nukes will fall, you may find yourself saying "WTF are you waiting for? Didn't you see that thing just eat a tank?" Given infinite opportunities to take a cheap shot, this movie takes none. Perhaps it's just maintaining the minimalism that serves the film so well, but it's refreshing nonetheless. And it's this, I think, that helps explain why the unsubtle use of 9/11 images hasn't brought out the predictable scolds*. Using awful events as the basis for entertainment is not only not beyond the pale, it's par for the course. Godzilla was made in a country full of people who could tell you just what an atomic bombing smelled like. It's fine to exploit our collective memories for dramatic effect. Just don't patronize us in the process.
*As a matter of fact, I do resemble that remark. ¶ 8:24 AM
Saw it on a whim Saturday night, and... wow. On reflection, what's most interesting about it is that it strikes me as a movie that couldn't have been made before 9/11. War of the Worlds met with some hand-wringing by the "too soon" crowd, but in the end the usual ultra-glossy finish Spielberg puts on all of his movies allowed the audience to keep an emotionally-safe distance. But some of the early scenes in Cloverfield knock you down, kick you in the teeth, and drag you in with a ferocity that will leave you more shaken than you expect.
We don't know what it's like to have the Mongol Horde at the city gates, knowing that a brutal and humiliating death is imminent. Most of us don't know what it must have been like to see the gate on the landing craft drop in front of Omaha Beach. None of us has any idea how we would process a giant monster stomping its way through our city, though pants would be shat. We do, however, know with awful clarity what it looks like when a skyscraper collapses. When you see crowds of people running in terror from King Kong or Godzilla, you laugh because they have a certain absurd quality to them. Surely some day people will laugh at the crowds running for their lives in Cloverfield too, but not until those of us who saw clouds of debris billowing down the concrete canyons have all been fitted with adult diapers and locked away in the home. For now it feels like being five years old and staring out into the woods at night alone. You don't care what Mom or Dad says, every fiber of your being tells you there's something large and hungry out there.
What's almost as interesting, and the reason why I think this movie hasn't prompted as much hand-wringing, is the conspicuous lack of allegory; so complete in fact, that the lack tempts allegory in itself. Hollywood has told us that nothing happens without a reason. A cigar is always a repressed desire to suck cock. If there is a monster, we probably caused it to appear. Nearly every awful thing that's happened in a movie in the past twenty years was caused by Republicans, evil corporations, warmongering generals, global warming, or excessively rigid toilet training by a father who voted for Goldwater. If the US military appears in the film, there is almost always a conspiracy of some kind, and if there's a sympathetic character, it's the junior officer who bravely defies orders to prematurely nuke the city.
In Cloverfield, though, the monster simply appears out of nowhere, and just like the characters, we get no backstory, no reason to explain its appearance, no hint of deeper intentions. Sometimes evil just crawls up from the depths or falls out of the sky and harshes the fuck out of your mellow. Welcome to life, there are no guarantees and you don't get your money back. Meanwhile, when the junior officer warns our characters of the hour when the nukes will fall, you may find yourself saying "WTF are you waiting for? Didn't you see that thing just eat a tank?" Given infinite opportunities to take a cheap shot, this movie takes none. Perhaps it's just maintaining the minimalism that serves the film so well, but it's refreshing nonetheless. And it's this, I think, that helps explain why the unsubtle use of 9/11 images hasn't brought out the predictable scolds*. Using awful events as the basis for entertainment is not only not beyond the pale, it's par for the course. Godzilla was made in a country full of people who could tell you just what an atomic bombing smelled like. It's fine to exploit our collective memories for dramatic effect. Just don't patronize us in the process.
*As a matter of fact, I do resemble that remark. ¶ 8:24 AM
