I thought that in light of tonight’s big Times Square soirée, this article by the New York Times’ Sewell Chan on filmmakers’ penchant for destroying New York City with aliens, monsters, natural disasters, nuclear war, terrorist attacks, rampant crime, marshmallow men, viral vampires, the passage of time and so on is all too appropriate. What’s more, it references The Blair Witch Project when discussing Cloverfield, thus providing fodder for my Blair Witch trend post’s lively comment thread.
One quote from the article perplexed me, however:
In contrast to “I Am Legend”–which like “The Omega Man” (1971) is based on a Richard Matheson novel–the “Cloverfield” images verge on being tasteless, [Celluloid Skyline author James] Sanders said. “They are playing on feelings not just about New York as civic symbol but on the shock of Sept. 11,” he said. “To some degree, that’s not fair ball.”
Okay, first of all, I Am Legend did the exact same thing, believe me. I don’t even think you needed to be in an opening-night screening in Union Square, listening to the uncomfortable laughter of your fellow New Yorkers as neighborhood after neighborhood and landmark after landmark is shown abandoned and destroyed, to figure that out. (Though it helped.) And Legend isn’t even the first such post-9/11 horror film to go there–Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, anybody? But the thing that really sticks out is Sanders’s assertion that playing upon 9/11 anxiety is unfair for a genre filmmaker to do. That’s really like saying it was unfair of, I dunno, Godzilla to play upon the Japanese people’s experience with nuclear war. Maybe he means that Cloverfield is crassly exploiting 9/11, but that’s not what he (or Chan, to be fair) actually said. It’s simply an unsupportable position as articulated.
(Via Matt Zoller Seitz.)
Playing on disaster is “unfair”? WTF? The tastefulness of such a move might be debated (still haven’t seen LEGEND or WAR OF THE WORLDS, actually), but invoking the fear of 9/11 has proven to be a viable political strategy, so why the hell shouldn’t mere genre entertainment allowed to work that vein? Isn’t that the whole point of art?
I know. I’m talking to myself again.
And whilst I’m here, Happy New Year, Sean. Looking forward to another year of intriguing postings (and comments.)
Yeah, I’m really not even sure what he even means. I think he’s approaching it from a place of extreme NYC-ophilia, which I understand, but the thing is, New Yorkers LOVE these kinds of things in my experience, while if something really does treat 9/11 (the event itself as opposed to the government or media response to it) offensively or demeaningly they’ll let you know about it.
Thanks for the kind words, too! Happy New Year!
Funny thing is, most folks I know who love Los Angeles and live there revel in the various forms of cinematic destruction that the city has undergone in its storied history (fictional and otherwise — see also STATE OF FEAR by Mike Davis.) I guess New Yorkers are different after all. Or I just know a bunch of freaks…
No, New Yorkers love New York getting destroyed in movies too, which is why this quote makes so little sense to me.
Last Night (on Earth)’s Party
It’s difficult to separate an evaluation of Cloverfield the movie from Cloverfield the viral marketing phenomenon, Cloverfield the latest capitalization on Lost’s ur-absentee father J.J. Abrams’s largely unearned reputation as a genre hitmaker (from wh…