At this point I think it’s safe to say that almost everyone who has seen Cloverfield agrees that it’s a rollicking good time; one of those popcorn movies where every jolt and twist is made all the more enjoyable by watching it in a packed theatre. That in itself is a major marker in our country’s progression beyond September 11th, as Cloverfield is the first movie that asks us to engage the event as drama, unpacked of all of its helplessness and heartbreak. In a way, it resembles the original Godzilla movie, a film that also used a monster as a stand in for a devastating attack. Ultimately, Cloverfield allows us to move forward by accepting 9/11 for what it was: a horrific attack by forces that we could not adequately understand and were powerless to stop.
The initial scuttlebutt about Cloverfield was that J.J. Abrams had decided, upon traveling to Japan, that America needed its own Godzilla movie. But the similarities between Godzilla and Cloverfield are more than monster-deep. When Gojira was released in 1954, Japan was still reeling from the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that led to the end of fighting in the Pacific Theater nine years earlier. Creating a powerful, fire-breathing monster that comes from outside Japan’s borders to wreak havoc on its shores was a way of dealing with the pure terror that they must have felt after the atom bombs’ detonations. Through the course of the movie, the audience is invited to meet, fear, and finally conquer the monster, thus conquering their own post-WWII fears as well. Film as therapy. The horror contained and the collective psyche now repaired, Godzilla can even become an ally in future films, its power now harnessed by the people it used to terrify.
Cloverfield follows the same structure, and comes at roughly the same point in our national history, almost seven years after the terrorist attacks on New York and DC. Its decapitated Statue of Liberty is as clear a stand-in for the fallen Twin Towers as can be; the monster of unexplicable origin an apt representation of the new era of warfare that 9/11 ushered in.
This is a sea-change from how Hollywood has dealt with 9/11 since the attacks. The first few movies to be released post-9/11, Zoolander and Serendipity, had the World Trade Center digitally removed from the New York skyline–it was “too soon” to mention them. Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese (in 25th Hour and Gangs of New York, respectively) chose to pay respectful homage. It wasn’t until 2006 that Hollywood directly confronted Sept 11, with World Trade Center and United 93. Both were somber affairs that were more interested in erecting two-hour long monuments to our losses; neither attempting to move beyond solemn respect to engage with what was happening beneath the surface of our national psyche.
Cloverfield is a sign that America is ready to move forward, past our mourning and on toward the future, and just like Japan over 50 years ago, we will do it with film. Yes, the monster in the movie lives on–which is fitting because we are still figuring out how to fight on this new front. But I am an optimist, and I have to like our chances in the sequel.
1 Comment
June 10, 2008 at 10:36 pm
wow…i like how this was worded. I myself very much enjoyed the movie, especially in the theatres and saw a similar notion that the monster had to live on.