* This is now the fourth entry I have written on Cloverfield, a movie I was kind of lukewarm about when I saw for the first time last week. Today I saw No Country for Old Men, the best film of 2007, for the third time in three or four months; I have written exactly zero posts about it. Go figure.
* The most unusual response to the film I’ve come across so far is the notion that in centering it on go-nowhere characters on the cheesiest possible rescue mission imaginable, the film is actually a critique of the characters and by extension of wealthy, callow, media-numbed Young America. Here’s economist Tyler Cowen:
ut you need to know that the characters are supposed to be vacuous and annoying, and that the opening scene is supposed to be obnoxious and superficial. The heroism is supposed to be thin….Most of all this is a movie about how the young’uns have no tools for moral discourse and that all they can do is utter banalities and take endless pictures of each other and record their lives for no apparent purpose. I can’t recall any other movie that so completely devastates its intended demographic.
It’s tough for me to respond to this other than with peals of laughter, because that’s just simply not what’s going on. But one of his commenters makes the obvious point that the main character is clearly supposed to be considered a hero:
While the film’s portrayal of the cameraman was far from positive, I thought the main character was shown in a very positive light. He did what he could to be a hero, and certainly showed moral discourse when he kept urging his friends to stay behind.
But the best riposte comes from conservative political blogger Ross Douthat:
For one thing, the film does have a classic heroic arc. Cowen calls it “thin,” but the only thing that’s thin are the characters who enact it; the actual decision to cross a monster-ravaged midtown to save the woman you love is anything but. And Cloverfield plays the love story that sets the heroic arc in motion perfectly straight….Which is how the whole film plays, to my mind – as a very straightforward, even old-fashioned disaster movie in which an enormous monster attacks Manhattan and everyone learns valuable lessons about the importance of friendship and love just before they get gobbled up….There’s nothing wrong with a conventional monster-movie storyline, particularly if you’re working with a gimmicky format. But the fact that J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves didn’t manage – or didn’t bother – to flesh out their conventional narrative with even mildly engaging characters or dialogue shouldn’t be treated as proof that they’re engaged in some scabrous satire of contemporary twentysomething life. Vile Bodies this ain’t.
While I disagree that the love-story plotline isn’t thin, the larger point stands. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)
* While Kimberly of Cinebeats makes the “critique of yuppies” argument largely in passing on her way to lumping in misguided critics of the film’s use of 9/11 imagery with some strawman about people not liking Hostel: Part II because it dared to be both a horror movie and a passionate attack against the Bush Administration (snigger), she adds a noteworthy wrinkle to the argument: that the movie wouldn’t even be possible if not for characters whose privileged background made them think they could run around a war zone with a video camera and have everything turn out alright. I don’t really buy that either, though, because all the video-camera business is is a modern spin on the venerable tradition of having characters in genre fiction behave in unrealistic ways as a shortcut to the good stuff. It could just have easily been a bunch of kids from Spanish Harlem or some Great Neck couple in town for a show or a grocer from Chinatown.
* Anyway, the “yuppie critique” argument reminds me of nothing so much as my own quixotic insistence that the happy ending of Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, a film that’s an even more direct precursor to Cloverfield than the more recent The Mist or I Am Legend (and along with Cloverfield is certainly in the scarier half of that quartet), is by virtue of its flagrant slapped-on-ness some kind of critique of the notion of happy endings. I still insist that the music cues alone shore me up on this one, certainly a lot more than anything present in Cloverfield supports the idea that this is American Psycho for the Naughts.
* David Bordwell analyzes the film from a structural perspective, focusing on how the video-camera setup restricts the flow of information to the viewer and how that restricted narration is used within the conventions of Hollywood narrative. Bordwell and his blogmate Kristin Thompson wrote the first film studies textbook I ever used, so this is just like coming home.
* Finally, this week’s Horror Roundtable is all about our favorite giant monster movies. Mine’s a little off the beaten path compared to the others, if I do say so myself.