Modern Monsters and Modern Humanity
January 21st, 2008
Part One: A Quick Primer on Giant Monsters
Cloverfield (IMDB link) is, simply put, the best giant monster movie ever made. In order to understand why this is, let’s take a look at some other sterling examples of the genre in order to, first, understand what made a few sterling examples of the genre so good, and second, to understand how and why Cloverfield goes beyond them to break new ground and inject new life into an otherwise moribund horror concept.
We must, of course, start with the two most recognizable names in the genre: Merian Cooper’s King Kong (1933) and Ishiro Honda’s Gojira (1954), better known in the US as Godzilla. Cooper’s Kong was a landmark in that it was the first film to ever portray a gigantic, superhuman creature attacking a city, thereby establishing the basic identity of the monster-movie genre: an oversized creature, representative of Nature at Her Most Powerful, attacks that most recognizable symbol of contemporary, technological human civilization—the glittering, glowering metropolis. In King Kong, the monster, a giant, primal ape removed from his Edenic jungle paradise is brought into the cold, angular realm of New York City—the very archetype of the Modern City—and wreaks all manner of havoc before finally being defeated by human might as represented by biplanes, the height of 1930s technology. Twentyone years later, the same basic plot was transplanted to Japan but essentially repeated in Honda’s Gojira: the monstrous, saurian Gojira emerges from the primal Pacific Ocean and proceeds to pound Japanese civilization (typified by the capitol, Tokyo) into the dirt until finally defeated by the technological superiority of Dr. Daisuke Serizawa-hakase’s “oxygen destroyer.”
In both cases, the giant monster clearly depicts the unbridled, inhuman power of Mother Nature rising up to humble Mankind. As Blue Oyster Cult notes in their musical tribute to Godzilla/Gojira, “History shows again and again / How Nature points out the folly of Man.” Eventually, humanity prevails not through physical prowess—we are individually little more than dolls in the big simian mitts of Kong and little plastic figurines beneath the clawed feet of Godzilla—but through our intellectual/technological capacities. Where the two films greatly differ are in their explanations of their monsters’ origins.
In the 1930s, there were still unexplored black spaces on the global map where dragons (or, at least, dinosaurs) and huge apes could still exist untroubled by mankind. King Kong, like the other dinosaurs on Skull Island, is a living, breathing chunk of the prehistoric world which, supposedly, has vanished forever beneath the pavement and electric lighting of civilization. To have a piece of that prehistoric world of archetypal nightmares dragged back to the urbane surrounds of New York City was a source of wonder that soon turned to terror as Nature’s champion, Kong, breaks loose and brings the horror of unrestrainable Nature into the very heart of civilization.
However, after the technological horrors of the Second World War, human civilization itself is shown to be responsible for the birth of Gojira, a gargantuan mutation summoned from the depths and given flaming radioactive breath by the fallout of atomic weapons testing. To Japan, the only nation in the world to have ever experienced the unbelievable destructiveness and virulent aftereffects of that very pinnacle of human weaponry, the Atom Bomb, nothing could be more horrible than a perversion of nature produced by the most awful weapon ever developed.
From the beginning, therefore, the giant monster movie has always followed the basic trope of Giant Primitive Thing attacking Civilized Human World (in the form of a large modern city). Pick any of the myriad monster movies of the 1950s and 1960s—Them!, The Monster that Challenged the World, or Gorgo—and you’ll find either the King Kong formula or the Godzilla formula repeated virtually unaltered. Aside from featuring different prehistoric or radiation-enlarged monsters, and from differing locations (some take place in rural areas, swapping the Big City with the bucolic imagery of America’s heartland as symbolic of civilization) these films are all virtually indistinguishable. Entertaining, yes, and sometimes revolutionary in terms of the special effects artistry used to depict the monsters on screen, but all more or less the same.
Same, too, are the depictions of human characters in these films. No matter how grand the destruction depicted in the movies, the scripts’ focus is always on a small number of people—almost always featuring:
- the person responsible for bringing the monster (or monsters) to the mainland,
- a scientist of some sort who’s usually there to explain the monster’s origin and/or provide a means to stop it,
- a military character who is often to person who spearheads attacks on the monster,
- and usually a few “everyman” characters who just happen to get caught up in the fray.
This way, the large-scale aspects of the giant monster’s rampage are humanized and made real for the audience by focusing on the destruction’s effects on this core group of characters. Monster movies are not just about the monsters, of course, but also concern the impact of the monsters on humanity; and in order to give the films a measure of pathos so they remain interesting to viewers, a tight focus on a number of people with whom the audience can empathize is necessary, or you’d just end up with a documentary about the monster’s attack.
Over the decades since the ’60s, though, giant monster movies have been in sharp decline, mainly because the sameness of their plots eventually wore thin. Godzilla films devolved into campy kaiju versions of Wrestlemania. Giant monsters were traded for man-sized monsters that didn’t need massive FX budgets to portray (just put an actor in a latex mask and, well, there you go). Every now and again during the 1980s and 1990s, a new giant monster movie would appear in the States—for example, The Relic (1997), the abysmal 1998 American “remake” of Godzilla, and 2006’s surprisingly good (and funny!) Korean entry, The Host (Gwoemul). But for the most part, even younger movie-goers and monster aficionados born after the heyday of the giant monster movie have come to identify the genre as primarily a 1950s/1960s phenomenon.
But now Cloverfield has come to reinvigorate the giant monster movie with a cleansing shot of cosmic horror mixed with ultra-realistic, street-level depictions of humanity.
Part Two: Cloverfield and the Giant Monster Reborn!
Cloverfield broke box office records for January, raking in $41 million dollars in its opening weekend alone. Not only did it make money, it also debuted to extremely positive reviews by various film critics—an almost unheard-of occurrence in the giant-monster-movie world! But…what’s so special about Cloverfield?
Fundamentally, the movie adheres to all the basic tropes of the genre: a giant monster appears and proceeds to terrorize and devastate New York City while a small “focus group” of human characters scrabbles for safety in its considerable shadow. The military naturally shows up to combat the monster (ineffectively), there are plenty of tense moments and furious action sequences, and viewers get to witness the heroism of “everyday people” dealing with an extraordinary situation. But, aside from those basic similarities, director Matt Reeves, screenwriter Drew Goddard, and produced J. J. Abrams—well-known for his clever, postmodern television dramas Alias and Lost—have created a film that brings a completely new perspective to the giant monster film. It does so in two ways: stylistically, in the hyper-realistic “handcam” medium in which the film is shot, and conceptually in the inexplicable, utterly alien depiction of the monster as a force of destruction whose origins, motives, and very nature are left entirely(?) unknown.
The first thing any viewer will notice about the film is that it is presented as video “evidence” taken from a video camera recovered in the ruins of what was once New York City’s Central Park. The videotaped evidence initially depicts characters Rob and Beth’s burgeoning relationship, establishing a measure of pathos and sympathy for these characters and establishes a “before-the-disaster” view of workaday New York City life, but then properly begins with Rob’s going-away party, which viewpoint character Hud is taping over the previous material. The entire film, concerning characters Rob, Beth, Marlena, Lily, and (behind the camera) Hud, is shot entirely from the subjective viewpoint of this one small group of people as they attempt to survive the monster’s rampage. There are no “omnipotent” scenes depicting the monster’s origins and overall chaos, no chunks of exposition or infobites—all we see is filtered through Hud’s limited lens.
This leads to some very clever means of exposition that serve to highlight the down-in-the-streets realism of the film rather than detract from it. When the monster initially strikes, the crowd at Rob’s going-away party pause to turn on the television and watch a news broadcast breaking the news of a mysterious “earthquake” in Manhattan and an oil tanker capsized in the bay. Later, as the characters are scrambling around the city looking for safety, Rob and Hud enter an electronics store in the process of being looted and witness, on a number of TV screens, more news broadcasts of the monster tearing up buildings and shedding vicious arachnid “parasites” that magnify its destructiveness by unleashing another danger on the streets around it. All of this exposition is delivered in a naturalistic fashion.
Throughout the film, the camera is as much in motion as the characters themselves—leading to inevitable comparisons with The Blair Witch Project (in fact, the movie has occasionally been called “The Blair Witch meets Godzilla”). This presents some action scenes in a dizzying blur of panicked scenes, in which the monster is often glimpsed but not directly seen. In fact, the monster’s appearance is kept vague and fragmentary throughout most of the film, as the characters run from it. This is not a film that glorifies in revealing the monster and focusing on its destruction; rather, it is a film that by dint of its stylistic “shakycam” narrative device focuses on the human characters just trying to live through the experience. In that fashion, Cloverfield redefines the giant monster genre by altering the viewpoint of the entire flick.
Also, the ensemble of viewpoint characters is strictly limited as well: there are no Merlin-like scientist characters or tough-as-nails military men in the party—the main characters are just a handful of ordinary (if relatively well-off) New Yorkers. Hud and the others occasionally speculate about the origins or identity of the monster, but there are no wise scientist characters even encountered in passing who identify the monster or attempt to offer up a rational, scientific means of defeating it. Military characters are only encountered briefly, and are shown to be barely keeping themselves together as the monster and its parasites attack. They are not stalwart, all-American heroes whose technological prowess and cool-headed, can-do resilience is guaranteed to ultimately overcome the monster, but frustrated, scared, and confused bystanders of the monster’s seemingly unstoppable rampage. The National Guard is not here to Save the Day in Cloverfield; like Rob and Hud and the others, they, too, are just trying to live to see the sunrise while the monstrous horror stampedes through their ranks.
In the absence of “authoritative” characters who offer up even a possible explanation of the monster, we have only the monster itself: a hideous, aberrant cipher whose origins, motives, and meaning are left entirely unanswered. The monster is a Complete Unknown: not a giant ape captured in the wild, nor a lizard or ant colony grown to great size by atomic radiation, nor even an alien come to earth in a meteor—it simply shows up and begins ransacking the city. This is the point at which Cloverfield departs most strongly—and most effectively—from the established giant-monster ideal and therefore adds a refreshing novelty to the otherwise played-out genre.
Throughout the months leading up to the film, during which the monster’s appearance and most of the film’s plot were a closely-guarded secret, speculation abounded as to who or what was the thing attacking New York. A common suggestion was that the monster was H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, a popular gigantic “monster” invented by Lovecraft to embody the great Fear of the Unknown which he so brilliantly wrote about. Though the Cloverfield monster is not Cthulhu itself, it is still a highly Lovecraftian monster in that it, too, represents the Lovecraftian idea of an entity without identity, or convenient explanation.
In his essay on “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927, revised 1933-1935), Lovecraft notes that:
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naïvely insipid idealism which deprecates the æsthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to “uplift” the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism.
What can be more unknown, more alien to all contemporary human experience, than a gigantic, incomprehensible thing whose actions and motives are left entirely unexplained? In past giant monster movies, the terror of the creature was often blunted and, eventually, defeated by explanation: once it was understood that Gojira was a radioactive mutant, a certain amount of mystery concerning the monster was dispelled and effective means of eliminating it were then suggested based on the knowledge of its identity. Oftimes in giant monster movies, understanding what the monster is will usually lead to the human characters’ development of a way to defeat it. In many ways, these films frequently have a “didactic” nature, too, which serves to “uplift” the viewer (as HPL notes) at the end by offering an optimistic resolution brought about by human ingenuity and technical superiority. The “lesson” inherent in King Kong and Gojira is simple: treat Mother Nature with respect or she will lash out at you—but, because you are human and therefore smart and powerful, you will always prevail in the end.
So what are we to believe about the Cloverfield monster? No one has any idea where it comes from; its origins are totally unknown (with one potential caveat: see appendix below for explanation). The characters speculate on this, but there are no definitive answers. What is it? Don’t know. Why is it attacking New York? Don’t know. What are the spider-things it brings with it—parasites, children, symbiotic organisms? Don’t know, don’t know, don’t know. Can the monster even be stopped? We. Don’t. Know.
The Cloverfield monster is an ultimate enigma. It is a ten-story-tall chunk of the fearful Unknown.
The monster is a thousand times more terrifying because nothing is known about it. Humanity has no clue as to where it came from, how to stop it, or what to do with it. Bullets don’t phase it. Tank shells don’t phase it. Even five-hundred-pound bombs, symbolic of undefeated American aerial might, do nothing to it.
Hence the reason the movie is, quite literally, a rebirth of the genre. The monster is a truly monstrous unknown, and the narrow, immediate lens of the narrative device lets the film maximize that unknowability by focusing on a small handful of average folks caught up in the destruction. Even at the very end of the film, the fate of the monster (and the human protagonists) is left undecided—and, perhaps, undecideable. Unlike King Kong, Gojira, or a hundred other giant monster films, this one manifestly does not have a comfortable ending. Humanity does not prevail. The monster may or may not be defeated. Either way, the usual resolution of humanity standing triumphant over the monster’s carcass thanks to our innate technological superiority is thwarted. The horror does not end with the “smirking optimism” of those who have lived to see a Bright New Day.
The film ends, but the horror does not end.
A quick survey of criticism shows that many of the people who did not like the film objected to either the fact that there is no tidy resolution or to the limited viewpoint. These folks either misunderstand what the film was aiming to do, or, perhaps, are just too in love with the basics of the genre to see them turned on their heads. Either way, critics have noticed that the film is an excellent example of genre-bending. In the case of the giant monster genre, a little bending is a good thing. Even Godzilla needed to reinvent himself periodically.
With Cloverfield, Abrams et. al. have managed to make a film genre once thought completely milked dry entirely relevant again by tweaking the sacred fundamentals of the genre. Forget the post-9/11 imagery, the commentary on the “YouTube generation”’s so-called individual absorption. At the bottom of all that, Cloverfield’s incredible success has everything to do with its producers’ desire to revivify the giant monster drama by stripping away all certainty and focusing the camera narrowly. What makes Cloverfield so great is not what is seen, but what is unseen. The mystery of the gigantic Unknown drives the film and brings the giant monster movie up to date.
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APPENDIX: The Cloverfield monster’s “origin” may not be a complete mystery. In the final frames of Rob’s tape, when it jumps back to Rob and Beth’s adventure to Coney Island, if you pay close attention to the ocean in the background, you can catch a glimpse of something falling from the sky to splash down in the ocean. Some viewers have suggested that this is the monster (or an egg/vehicle of some sort) coming to Earth. Setting aside the elaborate viral marketing scheme that built up interest in the movie over the last year and concentrating only on the contents of the film Cloverfield, as such, this subtle little hint does seem to suggest an extraterrestrial origin for the monster—however, this still does nothing to explain the monster’s actions or nature.
Technorati Tags: cloverfield,review,monsters,giant monsters,kaiju,gojira,godzilla,king kong
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Cheers!
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Well written.
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I was excited about the film before and now I am very excited.
Thanks for this post.
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