Posted on Mon Jan 21, 07:05 PM in Movies
Or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the STOMP STOMP
Note: The short version of this review = me likes. However, if you
want to find out why, you’ll have to read on, and that means exposing
yourself to plot lines and probably some spoilers. If you don’t want to know any more before you see the movie, you should stop reading here. If you don’t care, or if you’ve already seen it, feel free to read on.
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Note also: this discussion does not include “movie universe” speculations—some occurring on the internet at this very moment—concerning the real reasons the film was recovered, the final disposition of the monster, or water splashing scenes. Please stop now if you would be disappointed in not reading about any of these things.
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The big news: there probably aren’t any spoilers. At least, I discovered this upon exiting the theatre and remarking to the SO, “Depressing, but a fun ride.”
“Why ‘depressing’?” he asked. When I explained this with, “Everybody dies,” he told me, “Well, you KNEW that was going to happen, right?” But see, I didn’t know. None of the trailers revealed this, and perhaps in my limited exposure to most filmed media, and also perhaps in my unassuming nature when it comes to art, I didn’t have a preconcieved notion of how this movie would fulfil itself.
That is how I approach most art. Music, movies, books; I try to let the artist take me where they want me to go, and once I get there, decide for myself if there was anything I found redeeming about a) the ride, b) the scenery, and c) destination. And although it’s certainly true that in this po-mo society filled with ur-meta-analyisis that the artist can be expected to expose the beholder’s expectations through the very art itself, I try to approach each experience with a clean slate.
There has been a lot of commentary on how Cloverfield is a deliberate send-up of 9/11 tragedy; aside from making New York the locale, there are a few scenes that even I would say look incredibly like the personal videos we all saw in the weeks after the terrorist attacks (including views looking outside shop windows as debris and opaque smoke billows down the street). Buildings and iconic scenery get mangled, and all things familiar and taken for granted become unfamiliar and tragic. The attack is launched by something so strange and unhuman that it is difficult to comprehend that it is even there, and all attempts to dispose of the threat prove to be futile. Everyday individuals are caught up in situations as unfamiliar as the threat itself, trying to survive. In these ways, the movie is a great mimicry of 9/11. I can understand how those who were deeply affected by the New York terrorist attacks might tire of this kind of film vehicle, and how they might be worried or angry that a potential trend is starting—or being perpetuated—with films like Cloverfield, which many of its detractors claim, with the hints of 9/11 aside, has no redeeming value.
Much has also been made of the cinema veritae technique used in Cloverfield, where handheld video cameras are used in place of the usual equipment. This is used throughout the entire movie. The very first conceit of the film, that what you are watching is film found in a site now called “Cloverfield” and FORMERLY known as “Central Park,” depends on this technique. Movie reviews have mentioned, both as a pro and a con, that this is the “YouTube-ing” of film, reflecting the generation that is comfortable with it and immersed in it. Detractors claim that it makes for just under 90 minutes of motion sickness; apologists claim that it brings a (much-needed) current look to an old story form. Comparisons have been made to The Blair Witch Project.
I like to believe that well-made art, no matter the form, leaves very few decisions left to the fates. I might be biased, here, from having too many analysis classes in both music and literature (or perhaps from being too zealous in either of them); but it seems to me that well-thought out art stems from using all elements judiciously and with purpose. This is an additional way I approach art, and usually ask myself questions while experiencing it. Why is [x] this way? How does [x] fit with this new idea of [y]? Idea [z] seems random, but monumental in this piece—what am I missing?
So, as I sat in the theatre, after enduring an exhorbitant amount of trailers (WTH, people? Short movie = trailer overload??) and mind-numbingly stupid commercials for Coke (Theatre thinks: “Get people to buy stuff,” okay, I get that) and Mucinex (huh? Theatre thinks: “Get people to stop coughing”? Are there pharmacies in the lobby, now?), I found myself returning to a couple main themes:
Ultimately, I found this movie to be a nice observation on how everyday people deal with their own monsters; how our perceptions of what monsters are can change (or in some cases, should change); how the directions we move in our lives (backwards or forwards) can determine how we deal with our monsters; and what we decide to focus on in our lives can show us if we are on track in facing our monsters.
Many of the characters to which we are introduced are frought with concerns. The casual filming of the first 20 minutes, which includes footage from several weeks before, and the day of party preparations, shows everyday people caught up in the moment’s trivialities. Each one has something that bothers them, you can tell. Even at the send off party, the main character Rob has some of his own drama (romantic, emotional) which puts him in kind of a funk. A brutal heart-to-heart with his brother (Hawk) and best friend (Hud, documenting) shows his brother telling him that he is not good enough for her, that now we have to live in the present around those we care for. Immediately after those lines, the monster makes its presence known, and most focus thereafter is on the monster, or avoiding the monster, or desperately trying to see what what the monster is without being seen oneself. Everyone focuses on survival, everyone focuses on oneself.
Everyone except for Rob, the main character for whom the party is thrown. We know he’s going away to Japan, due to a job promotion which puts him at Vice President level. It’s Rob’s camera, and we know that a few weeks ago he spent a day with a woman (Beth) with whom he didn’t exactly follow up, and upon finding her on the arms of another man, sends her away at the party. He’s bumming about this when the monster strikes. As the attack begins, he tries to get her on the phone, and hears briefly that she’s bleeding and can’t move. He determines he must find her, even after realizing that her location in the city is right where bad monster mojo is going down.
His brother Hawk doesn’t really understand, he wants to survive. On the Brooklyn Bridge, his brother keeps moving away from disaster, and as Rob tries again to contact Beth, moving in a direction contradictory to 90% of the people on the bridge, the monster attacks the bridge, which was supposed to take them to safety (per the military). The bridge collapses, and Rob, Hud, Lily (Hawk’s girlfriend), and Marlene (Hud’s crush) escape… but Hawk does not. Perceived as moving backwards, they remain alive.
Rob needs to find Beth. He doesn’t expect the others to follow him, but they end up doing so. I find this interesting. In Lily and Hud’s case, this might be true friendship coming through… in Hud’s case, at least, it might also stem from something humorously alluded to at the party, of Rob being Hud’s “main dude” and possibly not being able to “get along without him.” Marlene did not want to be at the party to begin with, but goes along regardless. Fear? Her own tendencies to “go along” coming through? I’m not sure. What’s interesting about this dynamic is that people seem drawn to Rob. He has many friends who show up to the party to tell him how much they appreciate him. Many close friends care about his well-being. He draws people in. At no point was there a consensus that he was to become anything of a leader… yet, de facto he became one. This parallels his ascendency to VP of his company. Are leaders the ones we are told to follow, or the ones we are compelled to follow? And what makes leaders people who others want to follow?
Because of the filming style, we as observers are stuck focussed on whatever the characters are focussed on. This is no more pointedly stated than when Hud is at the party, documenting testimonials, and at one point drifts the camera left and focusses on Marlene in the background while Lily, ever focussed on getting things right, prattles on (and now off-camera). We’re at his mercy, essentially. And during all this “documenting” we observe a number of plain, somewhat self-absorbed young people. They sound like people we know. They may even sound like us. We continue to be focussed on these people throughout the movie, but after the attack begins, something changes. We begin to get “glimpse” footage of the terror, of something outside “ourselves.” For a very long time, we can’t even see the thing entirely, but undeniably the thing we can’t see is determining how we are reacting to the new world around us.
Except for Rob. The monster, seen or unseen, is a distant second to his goal of rescuing Beth. Why is that? What makes him different? Many times he’s told “it’s nuts” to attempt to go into that area of the city. Even the military, who is trained and expected to run into dangers all the time, tells him he might be nuts. Yet onward he goes, and people follow him.
We clearly see at the party what Rob’s own fear is; losing someone he felt a deep connection to. It fouls his mood for the entire party. In an attempt to reclaim some of what “was not meant to be” he asks Hud (while documenting) if he took the tape out first. The tape, of course, is the one Rob made of his day with Beth; Hud tells him “I just used the tape that was in here” and we understand that Rob is never going to get that time back, even on film. Rob can’t go backwards, only forwards. When the attack starts, he is right there with everyone else trying to figure out what’s happening, but when it’s clear that terror is on the way, it isn’t long before his own monster, a fear of losing Beth again, and for good, rears its own ugly head. To Rob, this is a bigger monster.
And instead of avoiding it, he tries to defeat it. The only other characters in the movie with similar motivation is the military. Both psychologically and physically, they are the only two entities in the movie headed in the same direction, towards overcoming a monster. This is blatantly pointed out in a scene where the four characters are caught in a crossfire of sorts, with soldiers and tanks at one end of the block and the monster at the other. Hud captures everything passing by on the street, with Rob and the women directly across from him on the other curb. As the military passes, pushing the monster back for the moment, Rob points without hesitation after the soldiers and tanks and screams “That way! That way!” It seems absurd, and no one would want to follow, but Rob has no doubts. He knows his own monster, and is focussed on overcoming it. The military knows its monster, and is focussed on overcoming it.
We can’t say as much for the rest of the characters; most of us can’t say as much for ourselves. Identifying our fears and personal monsters takes a kind of fortitude that isn’t readily available to most of us. It requires us first of all to give credence to the IDEA of identifying what scares us; to take the time to do so; to face up to any personal deficiencies or otherwise unflattering traits; and to take action and overcome the fear itself. People will drift through their own “real worlds” filled with sometimes unneeded detritus so to become distracted from their monsters, in order to avoid dealing with them. Self-absorption and worry about inconsequential details can be a few ways we put off the inevitable, and in my opinion, quite a lot of that happens in society today. In the end, we delay the action requiered to overcome our monsters, but not the monsters themselves. They will always be there, growing and getting uglier the longer they remain unexamined. Then, when—beyond our control, perhaps—they make themselves known, we are surprised at how big they are, how disgusting they are, and run from them, and from ourselves. Maybe your monster is having an event flop if it’s not exactly the way you envision it; maybe it’s talking to the cute girl and having her reject you; maybe it’s not knowing what decisions to make because your friends move away; maybe it’s finding a purpose in life; maybe it’s knowing that people are making folly of your personal tragedies; maybe it’s not all that. What are we left to do in a situation where our monsters no longer remain hidden, when they are out for everyone to see, and out of control?
Rob’s fear is losing Beth, but the original focus of the evening—his bon voyage to Japan—could only have occured by overcoming another fear, which we don’t really find out about until the last quarter of the movie. Throughout the filming we are reminded, jarringly and randomly, that Hud is recording over Rob and Beth’s private day several weeks ago; when the current film stops or the camera momentarily fails, it cuts to the film underneath, and we catch literal flashbacks. During one which lasts only about 10 seconds, we cut into a discussion Rob is having with Beth about the possibility of going to Japan. It’s clear he hasn’t decided and is putting forth reasons for not going. Beth asks him to name one: “The language,” Rob replies—he doesn’t know Japanese. Beth laughs this off and thinks he would easily learn it if he had to. She thinks he should go. Without much speculation, I think it can be said that Beth had a lot to do with convincing Rob to overcome his fear of change, of moving to unfamiliar countries. I think this is part of what fuels his desire to rescue her, and the momentary glimpse to other fears is deliberate. Even a leader, accorded VP status, can have fears, and with help from those around him, he can overcome them. In any empathetic human, the feeling would be reciprocal.
Rob is focussed. The counterpoint to Rob’s focus is Hud’s “documenting.” He is focussed on getting everything down on film (almost as though he found his purpose). And while the film remains almost perfectly focussed throughout, his vision is not. As they move through the city, at various distances from the monster, his desire to identify the monster grows. Longer and longer glimpses of what we STILL can’t see come and go throughout the movie. At one point during Beth’s rescue, we get a rare view above the monster and see the most of it that we’ve seen up to that point. Hud has to be reminded of the current focus (the rescue). Yet it’s an unsettling dichotomy; he wants to see more, but he wants to run away. How many of us can identify? Facing monsters head-on can be helpful, but who wants to look into the deep to really see what’s there?
One thing we are focussed on are the people. For a monster movie, there is relatively little monster. The benefits to filming this way include not having any third person narrative viewpoint, giving the observer that “oh my god, if they only knew!” sympathy to the hapless victims. It was refreshing to have uninterrupted action and energy without deliberate schlock or smarm. You did not know what was coming around the corner; you only knew it when the characters knew it. You did not move in any direction but forward, as there were no stops for narrative exposition. The only exception to this were the aforementioned “flashbacks” on the camera, but I feel these were introduced as a reminder of what the characters could NOT do. It was an unflinching look at everyday people dealing with extraordinary circumstances. It was quite realistic; I had an easy time indentifying with the characters.
So how do we react to our monsters? We see a lot of reactions in the movie. Rob seems to have identified the more important monster for himself and dealt with it directly. Hud, whose monsters are both getting closer to Marlene and finding a purpose, tries valiantly to face both throughout the film. Most of the city takes the safe route and tries to escape, while the military is dedicated to stopping the threat altogether. Near the very end, during the helicopter rescue, we get what is possibly the “best” view of the monster, a view that for the first time, lets us see its magnitude. But it’s a safe view, and it really doesn’t give us a complete picture of its nature. It’s not until several minutes before the film ends when we finally, literally, look the monster in the face. It is a dreadfully long five-second shot, more terrorizing than any view before this, and the only one in the entire film like it. Not coincidentally, after this shot is over, the camera is tossed aside, and for the first time has trouble auto-focussing its lens. It takes the place of a human double-take, or the cartoon character head-shake to clear the eyes of what one has just seen. After so much focus on the ourselves, five long seconds of the full-on fear leaves us being unable to focus on anything else. We become, like the camera, disoriented.
With Rob’s personal monster defeated, he still is left to deal with the monster itself. He knows, as does Beth, that they can’t escape a larger threat from the military, and he turns the camera on himself to document his own identity and that of the situation. He turns it to Beth, who is not holding herself together in any way, and tells her “Just tell them who you are.” She states her name, and instead of telling us more about who she is or going into an update of the terror as Rob just has, she breaks down: “I don’t know why any of this is happening.” She asks what many of us in the theatre were probably asking as we watched the movie. She asks the question that Marlene was unable to ask earlier and the answer to which prevented her from talking. She asks what many of us want to ask when faced with situations we didn’t plan or terrors we weren’t prepared for: why? Neither we nor Beth get an answer to this question. We don’t get answers to “why” in life. Why does “a terrible, terrible thing” (as Hud earlier refers to the monster) happen, ever? We don’t get to know, and it’s not the important question, after all. No matter our planning, no matter how we identify our own monsters, ones we can’t have imagined are going to pop up. Shit is going to happen… sometimes really bad shit. The important thing is to keep moving forward and remember what the real monsters are in the face of so many fake ones.
The very last line in the film (or is it? believe what you wish…) is “It was a good day.” I was immediately reminded of the beginning and ending of Neil Gaiman’s “Brief Lives” sequence in the Sandman graphic novels. In that context, a similar phrase is was used to bookend several sequences where the reader sees extraordinary lives changing and ending. One unremarkable human declares, both before and after much tumult and change, “It’s going to be a beautiful day,” and by doing so reminds us that all days are beautiful because they are in our lives and we are living in the moment. That’s no less true for the characters of Cloverfield, whom we lived WITH in the moment and who did what they could when they could. All days are good: a reminder at the end of a film which portrayed the worst day any of the characters could not have imagined.
I haven’t seen this yet, it is on THE list, but how excited am I to a have a family member who likes trashy movies too?!