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The cultural significance of Cloverfield
Jonah Goldberg, National Review. . . (warning: spoilers ahead). As many have noted, its sort of The Blair Witch Project meets Godzilla. A bunch of vacuous twenty-something hipster doofuses are at a party in Lower Manhattan when a critter that looks like a cross between Godzilla and a praying mantis attacks the city. The whole movie is shot from the vantage point of the most doofussy of the doofuses, who carries around a very bouncy camera and films everything thats going on. My movie theater actually posted a sign warning that the visual effects may induce nausea or vertigo. The film mostly succeeds in making you feel like youre watching all of the crunching and munching unfold in front of you (the video is supposed to have been found by the military at some point in the future). The technique is less plausible than in The Blair Witch Project but believable enough for you to want to shout, Turn off the dang camera and run! The response from many critics, particularly Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, has been dismissive. Its Godzilla for the MySpace generation and nothing more. Rightly noting the superficial insubstantiality of the hipsters, Dargis quips, Rarely have I rooted for a monster with such enthusiasm. The problem with the its-just-a-Godzilla-movie line is that Godzilla wasnt just a Godzilla movie either. The original 1954 Gojira renamed Godzilla for American audiences was a deeply significant film. It came out less than a decade after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a mere two years after the formal end to American occupation, and amidst an enormous controversy over a Japanese fishing boat damaged during American nuclear testing in the Bikini Atoll. The film conjured the imagery of WWII air raids, and it evoked the feeling of powerlessness that came with the defeat and occupation at American hands. Audiences were traumatized by the film. Theres a reason why Godzilla is the most enduring Japanese pop-culture symbol in the world, particularly in Japan. Obviously, later Godzilla movies were silly affairs, and if theres a Cloverfield 7: Bug-Lizard Meets Frankenstein, that will be silly too. But this movie is not. Self-consciously evocative of 9/11 its set near ground zero Cloverfield portrays self-absorbed young people who are suddenly yanked out of their comfortable lives. In the first scene where the monster is revealed, the decapitated head of the Statue of Liberty comes screaming out of the sky. Thats hardly subtle symbolism for the end of America, or at least the end of America as we know it. The military is portrayed as caring, competent, and brave as it battles a monster who is, in the words of one harried soldier, winning. The handheld-camera gimmick allows for a before-and-after effect in that the horror is being recorded over an old tape of the protagonist and his girlfriend on a carefree day capped by a trip to Coney Island. After the depressing denouement is captured on the tape, it reverts back for one last scene from the Age of Innocence. The young lovers are figuratively on top of the world in a Ferris wheel, talking about what a great day theyve had. The message of the film is that such youthful feelings of permanent bliss can be rendered an illusion in an instant. In the wake of 9/11 and with the very real possibility that the first city to be nuked after Nagasaki and Hiroshima may well be New York, that strikes me a message worth pondering, even from a Godzilla movie. Posted by: Mike 2008-01-25 |
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