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Saturday, February 16, 2008
Cloverfield
There’s a moment, early in the film, before the characters realise what it is that’s causing the distant explosions, roarings and thumpings, and as they all rush upstairs to have a look from the roof of their building, when somebody says, ‘is it terrorists?’ I went into the cinema primed enough by reviews and the like to think ‘it’s clearly, on one level, going to be a 9-11 metaphor, New York ravaged by the monstrous Other’, so this stuck out as a minor, ‘aha! that’s knowing‘ moment. But by the film’s end I was struck by an absence: nobody in this movie, on the news footage, or personally encountering this huge ocean-born monster rampaging through the streets of Manhattan, smashing Brooklyn Bridge with its tail, ripping the head off the Statue of Liberty Except For Muslims, nobody at any point says ‘wow, this is just like Godzilla!’ Wouldn’t they, though? (There’s a stilted little half-conversation at one point about Superman, as if to say ‘look these kids aren’t entirely innocent of popular culture’; but that, to me, only made the absence more noticeable). Given that the film is an explicit Godzillan midrash (J J Abrams on the genesis of the project: “We saw all these Godzilla toys, and I thought, we need our own American monster") I suppose the makers thought too obvious a metareference would be, in some sense, distracting: we’re to believe, just as the population of Ambridge don’t listen to The Archers, that none of these wealthy young Americans have seen a Japanese monster film (Or, hey: this is science fiction; maybe the film takes place in an alternate timeline precisely identical to ours except that the Godzilla films were never made). Perhaps this is the Last Action Hero lesson, a contemporary Hollywood mantra: a text referring to itself leads instantly to postmodern shortcircuit and a stench of burning that stops us caring about the characters. Of course, there are other reasons to stop caring about characters: smugness, improbably ubiquitous good looks, too much money, general idiocy and so on. I felt the tug of identity more with the monster himself, in part because he’s got a big baby-like face (well, OK, obviously big; but really quite babylike too), and in part because he’s got these ungainly, sticky-out elbows. I’ve got quite sticky out elbows myself. They make life difficult on the Tube, say.
Comments
Or maybe it’s just kind of obvious and not worth bothering about? Or maybe 12 references were left on the cutting room floor? Or maybe Godzilla called and said he wants points.
I think the 9/11 is too easy.
You can take anything with conflict in it or explosions and say “ooooh… it’s about the war!” but unless you’re willing to make some kind of sustained comment about it then, if you ask me, it’s just a facile critical reaction.
The truth is that Cloverfield isn’t about 9/11 or the War in Iraq. It simply steals some of 9/11’s imagery such as the billowing smoke and people hiding in shops to get out of it.
I don’t know… would it be postmodern for Cloverfield to refer to Godzilla? I’m not sure. If they refer to godzilla qua cultural artefact then I don’t see why it would be any more disruptive than the Superman reference or the decapitation of the statue of liberty. All three would serve only to position Cloverfield in our world.
Great minds, eh?
Derek: three valid maybes.
Jonathan M: well, indeed. On the other hand, your comment, despite ostensibly being about how Cloverfield isn’t about 9-11, is itself evidently a metaphor for 9-11. It’s the plane flown into the tower of my post. Well, I say tower ...
Adam,
Your question about a lack-of-Godzilla reference is interesting. Following Jonathan, it isn’t clear to me that a reference to Godzilla would necessarily be postmodern in any meaningful sense of the word. In fact, one could argue that it is more about “realism” than a self-conscious, meta-knowingness, or whatever. Movies/pop culture are omnipresent in our lives and we tend to compare real life occurences to pop culture ("This is like that Seinfeld episode when..."). So in terms of a “reality effect” we would expect references to terrorism, Godzilla and the like in Cloverfield--- IF we assume that the diegetic world maps fairly onto our own (I think here we do as the film’s aesthetic puts forth a quasi-documentary “this is real” notion).
However, too many cultural references (especially very obvious ones) can be boring, distracting, and can date the film (depending on the reference). And, generally speaking, how much of a correlation between a film’s diegetic world and our world are we supposed to make? If horror film characters are too knowing, then all horror films will devolve into Scream territory. Do we really want persistent bits of dialogue that refer to other horror movies? Should we always assume that the film’s diegesis maps onto our world? Does Godzilla even exist in the world of Cloverfield?
As for the 9/11 metaphor, I agree with Jonathan. Sure the film resonates (or exploits) our collective experience of 9/11, but that doesn’t make it a metaphor or allegory in any sustained, precise way. I’m very, very skeptical of this tendency in film criticism to “read” horror films primarily as allegories for various social, politcal, ideological issues. I’m not saying there is no connection, but rarely can this sort of reading be sustained in any meaningful way when the whole of the film is considered.
Thanks for the interesting post!
Ah! Intertextuality: the great beast of post-modernism. Can a film explicitly refer to another film or must it merely allude? Does it lose its veneer of realism if it mentions a fictional beast? (Of course, when you’re talking about a ridiculous deep-sea leviathan kind of thingy, you’ve long since abandoned any claim on verisimilitude.).
Harold Bloom spoke of ‘the anxiety of influence.’ We must extinguish the father in order to stand on our own two feet. Maybe that’s why.
The other question that arises: What happens when we (among other things, I am a writer of fiction) work historical personages into our fictional contrivances?
One thinks, too, of fan fiction: isn’t there a book out about Huck Finn’s father?
Then, what if there were copyright/trademark/intellectual property right problems with the use of the name ‘Godzilla’? (I’m also a lawyer.). Could Godzilla sue for libel or misappropriation of likeness (or at least his owners)?
All good meat for thought. Nothing systematic here.
Nor did they say ‘wow, this is just like the Blair Witch Project’, which also struck me as weird. Or maybe it was just that, as far as I can recall, they didn’t explicitly liken their adventures to the plot of a movie - really strange given that they were so assiduously filming everything that went on.
I did interpret the quickly-dropped pretext that the main kid was shortly to leave for Japan as a convoluted reference to Godzilla, which isn’t exactly what you’re talking about.
I wonder if an argument couldn’t be made for a changed threshold of intertextuality?
For example, when Quentin Tarantino started mentioning old TV shows in his films, there was a rule in films that you didn’t really refer to media. It was a bit like the way in which American politicians would never refer to their opponents by name.
However, in the last 15 years, our culture has become increasingly inward looking and increasingly attached to popular culture (as our culture fragments, our remaining shared reference is increasingly old films and TV shows) and the tendency for media not to mention other forms of media has well and truly been shattered.
As a result, Cloverfield not mentioning Godzilla short-circuits our sense of disbelief in the way that Reservoir Dogs referencing Charlie Chan and Madonna’s Like a Virgin once did.
When culture is naturally postmodern, the greater act of deconstruction is eliminating all traces of postmodernity.
Remember Independence Day and how no one in it had heard of War of the Worlds? Is this kinda like that? Not having gone out to the movies in years, I wouldn’t know.
Jonathan,
I’m not sure about your cultural diagnosis, but I think you are right that intertextuality has shifted in recent years. I think the shift has been from one of “allusion” to “citation/quotation"--from an indirect means to a direct one. Whereas a 70s filmmaker such as Scorsese would allude to film noir, Italian auteur cinema, etc. through aspects of style or iconography, someone like Tarantino does it through quotes and citation (not exclusively, but...).
It’s the difference between Godard’s Breathless and Melville’s Le Samourai. Both are intertexts with American gangster/noir films, but the former quotes and cites, while the latter alludes to--however, both are self-conscious in their own way.
These days we mostly cite and quote… the art of allusion has taken a backseat.
It’s all so problematic—and interesting.
Filmmakers have to make a decision early on. Does the action take place in a world in which there are monster movies, i.e., fictional stories about monsters? Does the action take place in a world in which there are known to be monsters?
My favorite movies are the ones set in a world in which there may be monsters—some people believe they exist, some people believe they only exist in fictional narratives, and some aren’t exactly certain. Frequently, such films give a good bit of time to showing us characters move from one category to another.
But that’s just me. Cloverfield aggravated me for entirely unrelated reasons.