Cloverfield as an Omen of Things to Come

By John David Ebert 

The new film by director Matt Reeves, Cloverfield, shows us an attack upon Manhattan by giant monsters out of a 1950s B movie. It is filmed in the fake documentary style pioneered by the Blair Witch Project and so the whole story is told from the point of view of the guy on the ground with the camera who has no idea what is going on, as would be the case, more or less, in real life. Also, as in real life, we never find out who or what these monsters are or where they came from or what they’re doing in the city, as the director rightly senses that in electronic society such things as plot and storyline are antiquated relics of our literate past. In the age of “secondary orality,” as Walter Ong has termed it, narrative structures can afford to be loose and haphazard since it is no longer the story “line” that counts but rather the all inclusive and immersive immediacy of the events themselves. The film’s cameraman point of view suggests that the events are taking place in “real time,” that mediatized nowness that has come to engulf us all in a shower of photons and which has eliminated the deferred time and space necessary for the processing of experience by the human mind. There is no time for such processing when everything happens at the speed of light, all at once.

On the surface, then, this is a film without historical depth or temporal relevance. The timeline of the story is an eternal ”now” in which the past does not exist and in which the world comes to us “live” and uninterpreted through the filter of larger overarching metapatterns. Cloverfield suggests that things just happen, like they do on CNN. Historical context and the long slow space of thought which enfolds events within contexts of cultural meaning and significance have become irrelevant.

But this is not to suggest that Reeves’s movie is meaningless, or even without historical precedent. Far from it. The film is basically a modernized retelling of the 1950s giant monster B movie that began in 1953 with Ray Harryhausen’s The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and which was instantly copied by the Japanese with their first Godzilla movie in 1954, entitled Gojira. The master figure animator Ray Harryhausen had been a pupil of the earlier animator Willis O’Brien, and it was O’Brien’s dinosaurs in the 1925 silent film The Lost World which had been the first celluloid behemoths shown attacking a modern megalopolis: in this case, it was a brontosaurus, depicted crashing into buildings and knocking down civic structures in London. The plot of this film, however, was copied by Merian C. Cooper for his 1933 King Kong, and here it was O’Brien once again who was in charge of the dinosaurs and the climactic great ape shown running amok in Manhattan. Seeing this film as an adolescent was what made Harryhausen want to become an animator in the first place, and so he was apprenticed to Willis O’Brien on the set of Mighty Joe Young, Cooper’s own self rip off of King Kong. The dinosaur-like monster that is shown attacking buildings in New York in The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms was Harryhausen’s first solo effort.

All through the 1950s giant monsters were projected upon the screens of drive-in theaters, where audiences watched from inside the safety of their automobiles while the monsters attacked and destroyed bridges, skyscrapers and other such engineering projects, many of which had been erected as part of Roosevelt’s WPA program during the Great Depression.

It is an interesting phenomenon of cultural development, however, that when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the very first issue of their Marvel renaissance, Fantastic Four #1 in 1961, the four superheroes in that issue were shown battling a series of giant monsters which resemble those depicted in Cloverfield very closely. Lee and Kirby were unconsciously suggesting that the whole raison d’etre of the superhero’s existence is to defend the modern megalopolis from attack by monsters and demons from the mythic realm. The superhero, then, seems to have been conceived as a sort of immune system invented by the superorganism of Manhattan in order to defend itself from such monstrosities.

It could be said that the Japanese film Godzilla was actually a post-traumatic processing on the part of the Japanese of the shock of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, what Godzilla does to Tokyo in that film resembles the assaults of an atomic bomb very closely. Following the lines of this same logic, then, Cloverfield would seem to be a post-traumatic processing of the assault on New York City by Islamists in September of 2001. If you imagine in your mind’s eye the scale of that assault, it does have something of the feel about it of an attack on the city by a gigantic force, something powerful enough to bring the world’s mightiest skyscrapers crashing down into a diffuse, powdered dust. In this case, it was technology, but in Cloverfield that gigantic something is pictured as a monster.

This is how metaphors work: they take sensory stimuli from the realm of waking consciousness and translate them into the ancient pictorial language of the dreaming psyche. Haven’t you ever heard a sound while you were sleeping that was incorporated into your dream as something strange and otherworldly, something totally out of alignment with the banality of the sound’s real cause? The psyche, then, likes to think in large and grand pictures of startling hyperbole, for it understands these things innately, unlike the rational mind which has to wake up and figure them out.

The point of Cloverfield, then? Only this: New York City is in trouble, for the film suggests that the attacks during 9/11 were the result of a breakdown of the city’s immune system. Viruses only gain the upper hand when something compromises the immune system, for we are bombarded by viruses and bacteria all the time, and usually our immune system functions well enough to keep them at bay. Something, then, is compromising the immune system of New York, even at the height of the popularity of its pantheon of superheroes. On 9/11 and in Cloverfield, the superheroes have failed to do their job.

Does this mean that the phenomenon of the superhero as a whole is beginning to break down? If the superhero is failing in New York, where it was mostly invented, then the arc of the hero’s trajectory is beginning to trace its descent across the heavens like some faltering satellite that is headed for earth. It is a well known phenomenon in cultural studies that when something attains its sunset effect, this means that it is about to disappear.

Cloverfield seems to suggest, contrary to the popularity of superhero movies, that the superhero is entering the twilight of his old age and is beginning to weaken, like that grizzled, shambling old Dark Knight who appears with his shoddy machines and his threadbare suits in Frank Miller’s prescient epic.

And, furthermore, it does not bode well for things to come. The imagery of the arts often appears just ahead of real historical events, like the sinking of the Titanic that was foreshadowed in Morgan Robertson’s 1898 novel Futility. The events of 9/11 also were forecast in a number of films which had been showing airplanes crashing into skyscrapers beginning with John Carpenter’s Escape From New York in the early 1980s and continuing right down to James Cameron’s True Lies a decade or so later.

So if we pay attention to the imagery of Cloverfield, it may be the cultural equivalent of a nightmare forecasting something large and ominous heading our way. Who knows what? I sure don’t.

But I can tell you this: the sinking of New Orleans may only have been the beginning of a larger process of the assault upon America’s great cities by the combined forces of planetary ecosystems thrown out of whack by global warming and Islamic jihadists out to teach the West that there are more things in heaven than are dreamt of in its religion of the dollar bill.