Cloverfield: Creatures and Catastrophes in Post-9/11 Cinema

By Steffen Hantke

Upon its release in 2008, Matt Reeves’s Cloverfield revitalized the giant creature, a cinematic trope that had languished for over a decade. The film addressed the attacks of September 11, 2001, trading the jingoistic rhetoric of retributive military aggression for serious engagement with personal and collective trauma. It applied the horror genre’s fascination with personal stories captured by found footage to the grand violence of history. Innovative and intense, Cloverfield represented blockbuster filmmaking at its best.

Cloverfield’s franchising followed the path of high-profile Hollywood properties. This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the franchise, measuring how it steers precariously between the commercial potential, creative risks, and political challenges in Hollywood. As 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) and The Cloverfield Paradox (2018) struggled to sustain and update the franchise’s original concept, both films’ strengths and weaknesses come into focus by comparison with the original, just as the historical sequence of all three films allows for a reassessment of Cloverfield itself.

Author Steffen Hantke examines how, in the broader context of postmillennial Hollywood, the Cloverfield franchise remains both a harbinger of the way Hollywood does business and a test case for the cinematic fantasies of apocalyptic disaster that continue to dominate global box office, long after the Cold War that gave rise to giant creatures has ended and 9/11 has lost its hold on the global imagination. As an inspiration for the next stage of blockbuster filmmaking, in which franchises have replaced the singular cinematic masterpiece and marketing plays to fans as critics and scholars, Cloverfield remains as relevant today as when it first unleashed its giant creature onto New York City over a decade ago.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Aug 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781496846761

Steffen Hantke

Steffen Hantke has written on contemporary literature, film, and culture. He is author of Conspiracy and Paranoia in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Don DeLillo and Joseph McElroy and Monsters in the Machine: Science Fiction Film and the Militarization of America after World War II, as well as editor of Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear and American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium (the latter three published by University Press of Mississippi).

Book preview

CLOVERFIELD

CLOVERFIELD

CREATURES AND CATASTROPHES IN POST-9/11 CINEMA

STEFFEN HANTKE

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Copyright © 2023 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2023

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hantke, Steffen, 1962– author.

Title: Cloverfield : creatures and catastrophes in post-9/11 cinema / Steffen Hantke.

Other titles: Reframing Hollywood.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2023. | Series: Reframing Hollywood | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023017544 (print) | LCCN 2023017545 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496846747 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781496846754 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781496846761 (epub) | ISBN 9781496846778 (epub) | ISBN 9781496846785 (pdf) | ISBN 9781496846792 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Cloverfield (Motion picture) | Monsters in motion pictures. | Monster films—History and criticism. | Monsters—Social aspects. | Horror films—History and criticism.

Classification: LCC PN1995.9.M6 H36 2023 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.M6 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/75—dc23/eng/20230509

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023017544

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023017545

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

This book could not have been written without the love and support of Aryong, which is why it is dedicated to her.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Some Thing Has Found Us: Welcome to Cloverfield

Chapter 1. The Metaphor That Destroyed New York: Mapping the Beast

Chapter 2. Is This Another Terrorist Attack?: Cloverfield and 9/11

Chapter 3. Handheld Terror: Found Footage and the War Film

Chapter 4. Something Else, Also Terrible: More Cloverfield

Chapter 5. Creators, Producers, and Franchisers: Revisiting the Author Function

Conclusion. Hopeful Monsters: New Uses for the Giant Creature

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

While work on this book has been helped by colleagues, institutions, and professional networks, cherished and appreciated for their support and guidance, there is also a wider network of friends who, over great distances and lengths of time, have renewed my enthusiasm for the next great book to read and the next great film to watch. Among them, I remain especially indebted to David Willingham, out on the front porch with a book and a smoke in inclement weather, and Jack O’Connell, to be found every summer in an Adirondack chair, a stack of novels next to him, looking out on a New England lake. My gratitude goes to these old friends for a reliable supply of reading suggestions, conversation and debate, and corrections of my worst instincts and ideas.

CLOVERFIELD

INTRODUCTION

Some Thing Has Found Us

Welcome to Cloverfield

The Perpetual Now—The Lasting Appeal

Seeing Cloverfield in its initial theatrical release at the end of January 2008, I was reminded of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), with its famous opening: A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now (3). Much like the film, Pynchon’s novel abruptly plunges us into the terrors of uncertainty. In Gravity’s Rainbow, the screaming that is coming across the sky is the sound of a German V-2 rocket descending upon London during World War II. It is nighttime, and the approach of anonymous, technological death and destruction sets off a frantic mass evacuation. The jostling of bodies in tight urban spaces, the near panic of the crowd, the sense of claustrophobic anxiety, all coupled with that ominous sound getting closer and closer—the visceral experience of Cloverfield felt like the cinematic equivalent of the nightmare in Gravity’s Rainbow. And visceral it was, that experience, more than anything else. The film’s images, recorded by a shaky handheld camera operated by one of the characters in the story, come pretty close to replicating the physical experience of tension—the good kind that stems from being steered expertly through your own emotions and embodied reflexes by a piece of cinema. As I recall, the film’s one-hour-and-twenty-five-minute running time creates a bodily experience in its sheer immediacy—a perpetual Now. And yet, as Pynchon would have it, there is also an undercurrent of knowing, a dawning self-awareness. As much as there had been, in the moment, nothing to compare it to, I also told myself that this has happened before. There was something familiar about the film—what it was doing and the way it was going about evoking these emotions. Because Cloverfield is able to generate both of these sensations at once—that sense of complete absorption in the moment and that of self-conscious familiarity underneath—and because it manages to keep the latter from undermining the former, the film will never lose its appeal for me. Over the years, I have gone back and rewatched the film, in search of recapturing that unique experience.

If all this sounds like high praise from a devoted fan, some modifications are in order. Devoting this entire monograph to Cloverfield—released on the weekend of January 18, 2008, directed by Matt Reeves, and produced by J. J. (Jeffrey Jacob) Abrams—might seem like an odd choice for a series of books—Reframing Hollywood—that sets its sights on the highest accomplishments and peak products of Hollywood since the turn of the millennium. It’s not that Cloverfield does not deserve a closer look.¹ Upon its release, the film was well liked, favorably reviewed, and would even go on to gain a cult following of sorts. It created a small niche for itself as a film infusing a popular genre of the fantastic with an arthouse sensibility. As Reeves puts it, the film is a very independently approached movie, with handheld cameras, produced and distributed by corporate giant Paramount (Cloverfield commentary track).² Even though it ranked thirty-fifth at the box office in the year of its release, behind such films as Kung Fu Panda and Get Smart, it made Paramount Pictures a respectable $80 million domestically. With more than $92 million internationally added to these profits, it would come in, quite respectably, above $172 million overall (Box Office Mojo). Budgeted at $25 million—a moderate cost, somewhere between Reeves’s claims for the film’s arthouse credentials and the pricey genre in which it operates, the film’s success would inspire two more films with the cleverly indeterminate keyword Cloverfield in the title: 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016), directed by Dan Trachtenberg, and The Cloverfield Paradox (2018), directed by Julius Onah.³ Each of these films, as Erin Harrington points out, clearly constructs meaning through its relationship to other transmedia texts produced by its production company, Bad Robot, which begs questions about the construction of nascent franchises as well as the ability of deeply interconnected media texts to stand on their own (131). Admittedly, critical accolades would continue to falter with each successive film. But that might say more about the subsequent films’ relative merits when compared to the original than about each film’s respective merits in its own right. And yet audience interest has remained strong enough to sustain rumors of more films to come. To the present day, Cloverfield—whatever that enigmatic word turns out to mean—is alive and well. Its story remains open-ended. Fans eagerly await the next installment in the franchise.

Rewatching Cloverfield today, more than a decade after its initial theatrical release, does not call for radical revisions of this positive assessment of the film and its nascent franchise. Viewers will still find it solid entertainment. It is well made, a thrilling ride, dramatic and sentimental, even touching at times, yet with just the right dose of humor. Proceeding from the clever diegetic premise of the found digital footage and the visual style justified by this premise may show the first signs of age. More recent films, with bigger budgets and more up-to-date computer-generated effects, might look better. But the diegetic premise has held up nicely to stave off such criticism; if visual effects do look a little rough, well, remember, it’s found footage.⁴

While Cloverfield still provides a thrilling ride years later, the film also retains some interest as a response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Without letting heavy-handed didacticism get in the way, it is very much a product of its time, a glimpse into the zeitgeist of America in the long aftermath of 9/11. For those with an eye for, and an interest in, such larger contexts, it takes its place among a group of films in which the impact of these events can also still be felt. Unlike some of these other films, however, Cloverfield is not topical to an extent that the passing of time would make it feel dated or render it obsolete. Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006) or Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (2006) will always be films about one thing and one thing only. But Cloverfield remains a vital, lively piece of cinema that continues to engage viewers regardless of their interests, political leanings, or demographics. It is not a historical document capturing a moment in a past that is rapidly vanishing from the collective consciousness. In fact, the film’s affective register—that of fear and panic in the light of overwhelming and largely incomprehensible disaster—seems to remain a constant of late- or postmodernity, for better or worse. Regardless of the exacerbating force of 9/11, or of traumatic events to follow in the years since, Hollywood’s preoccupation with disaster has continued unabashed to the present day. Periodically replenishing itself from new sources, cinematic disasters continue to thrive at the box office, with some of the prime purveyors of its most vividly imagined horrors perpetually under suspicion for enjoying the apocalypse just a little too much.⁵

As the giant creature emerges far off in the distance, and thus conspicuously off camera, the head of the Statue of Liberty crashes into Lower Manhattan (Cloverfield, Paramount, 2008).

Cloverfield has also remained relevant for putting two of its makers permanently on the map. Graduating to the big screen after directing only a handful of television episodes—just as what David Bianculli calls the platinum age of television was dawning (passim)—Reeves would submit Cloverfield as his first directorial effort. After Let Me In (2010), a brief excursion into small-scale horror with the American remake of the Swedish film Let the Right One In (2008), Reeves would go on to helm two of the three well-received remakes of the Planet of the Apes films (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes [2014]; War for the Planet of the Apes [2017]).⁶ As director and producer, he has established himself as a competent manager of projects on a large budgetary scale and with high visibility. Franchised properties appear to be his forte. More importantly, however, Cloverfield can be taken as a portent of things to come in regard to its powerhouse producer, Abrams, whose industry standing overshadows that of Reeves’s by a considerable margin. On his way to becoming one of the most recognizable industry figures associated with a blend of fantasy, science fiction, and horror—akin, perhaps, to such beloved icons as Rod Serling, Gene Roddenberry, or Steven Spielberg—Abrams can look back to Cloverfield as a crucial moment in his name becoming a brand in its own right and a step toward claiming the throne of King of Hollywood.⁷ Considering how crucial both Reeves and Abrams have been to mainstream filmmaking for more than a decade, Cloverfield is likely to remain of interest in both of their respective careers as a breakout success, a turning point, and a harbinger of things to come.⁸

And yet, if this thumbnail sketch of the film, its creators, and the nascent franchise it initiated feels oddly lackluster, it is because Cloverfield cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be called a masterpiece of postmillennial American cinema. Its formula of injecting arthouse elements into a mainstream format might register as innovative. Then again, such hybridity of taste and style bears the risk of failing on both sides of its equation. Given the odd sense of déjà vu Cloverfield deliberately evokes in its viewer—that, to quote Pynchon, even though there is nothing to compare it to now, this all has happened before, Cloverfield might not even be considered an outstanding example of its kind. One might argue that it has been left behind by, respectively, the films that inspired it and the films that, in turn, were to take their inspiration from it. Some of these films have made a greater and more lasting impact and may thus have a more compelling claim to canonical recognition. By no stretch of the imagination is Cloverfield in the top ten of disaster films or giant-creature films or horror or science-fiction films or films falling broadly into the category of post-9/11 cinema. To be clear, it does deserve to be somewhere on the list for each of those categories. Where exactly it should rank is something left for viewers to decide—near the top, comfortably around midfield, or even further below. Its fate is perhaps to be a latecomer—a giant creature standing on the shoulders of cinematic creatures even more giant than itself.

So be forewarned: What follows is not going to be an attempt to discover the film’s hitherto overlooked or unduly dismissed qualities—not that the film is devoid of qualities to be appreciated. It is not to elevate it to a canonical status that it has been erroneously denied—not that the film does not deserve to be rewatched. What follows is not an attempt to nudge the film out of the middle of the cultural mainstream in which it floats so comfortably, a mainstream that is fed by various tributaries. Instead, what follows is an invitation to see the film, comfortably floating in the middle of the cultural mainstream, as an example of Hollywood filmmaking in the first two decades of the new millennium—not as a masterpiece, but a healthy specimen of something smart and enjoyable but mercifully void of pretensions to the genius of art.

What characterizes this cultural mainstream more than anything is the push and pull of two opposing forces within the film itself. On one side, there is the film’s relative degree of originality: the clear sense that Cloverfield is breaking new ground, that it finds a new and interesting way of doing things, that it has something to say that audiences have not heard before. On the other side is its reigning in of that originality by faithful adherence to inherited formal conventions, narrative and visual strategies, and political positions. All of them are deployed in ways that make its daring originality palatable to a broad popular audience. In negotiating these tensions, Cloverfield reveals itself to be the product not of an original but of a combinatory imagination. Its achievement lies not in its radically bewildering newness, but in small partial steps toward originality within some of its specific aspects. Reeves and Abrams excel at taking a step toward originality in the overall assemblage of these individual elements into a coherent whole.

Perhaps this assessment of the film feels just a little too much like a description of Hollywood filmmaking in general, especially if that filmmaking aligns itself with the ironclad rule of popular genres always guaranteeing success at the box office. Yet this suspicion confirms why Cloverfield is a worthy object of study: because it serves as a local manifestation of industry-wide principles. A closer look at Cloverfield, in other words, sheds light onto whatever it is that restrains true originality in service of Hollywood’s production of predictable and marketable products, while leaving room for the original, playful, daring, and experimental interpretation and application of these principles. It is this contentious interplay that is injecting an element of creative joy into even that most commercially calculated of Hollywood products: the blockbuster, brimming with thrills and chills as yet another giant creature stomps across yet another modern metropolis.

The Push toward Originality—The Pull of Conventionality

Cinematic Cycles: Creating or Recycling?

That term used in the previous sentence—i.e., giant creature—is itself indicative of the complexity with which various genealogies intersect in Cloverfield. In its all-encompassing grasp of diverse iterations of the same basic concept, the term continues to appear in the discussion that follows. Implied in it are films and their respective outsized monstrosities that, at the time of their release, did not have a clear or well-established denomination. This does not apply to the early stages of the giant creature on screen. The eponymous (and friendly) monster of the silent short Gertie the Dinosaur (1914)—created and directed by Winsor McCay—is still just an animal that, though extinct, is as recognizable as it is real. So are the dinosaurs in The Lost World (1925), a film that kicked off a smattering of giant creatures, reptile and otherwise, on exotic islands, throughout the decades. Endowing them with volition and subjectivity beyond their animalistic selves generates a margin of the fantastic, but aside from their historical displacement, they are hardly monstrous in the general sense of the term. Not long after came the creative cross-fertilization across the Pacific Ocean between King Kong (1933), directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, and Gojira (1954), directed by Ishiro Honda, which initiated a lively cycle of 1950s–Cold War giant-creature films in Britain and the UK at large.⁹ While Kong still retains a link to the evolutionary theme that resonates in early films about dinosaurs, Honda’s fictional creation injects a paradigmatic change into the genealogy.¹⁰ Though conceptually still a dinosaur, Honda’s Godzilla is truly a monster, equal parts nature and technology, with no viable explanation about its truly staggering size. Rooted in a culturally specific original film, giant creatures that are conceptually indebted to Godzilla have earned a distinct designation—that of "kaiju." As kaiju would first populate Japanese cinema and then spread to Western cinema—and do so, eventually, even under their own Japanese genre designation, the offspring of Gertie the Dinosaur has never completely gone extinct. It made a comeback when computer-generated animation was beginning to replace stop-motion (and the poor man’s technology of a guy in a rubber suit surrounded by miniatures), starting with Jurassic Park (1993), directed by Spielberg.

Over the years, the popularity of giant creatures, many of them weaving in and out of these diverse genealogical traditions, has waxed and waned. But thanks to the increasing availability of computer-generated images (CGI), popular cinema would never have to go entirely without them. In fact, the science-fiction and horror-film genres of the last two decades have been overrun by giant creatures of all shapes and sizes. Some are alien invaders, others are science experiments gone wrong, and a few even claim supernatural origins. Given this rich heritage and complex genealogy, no individual iteration of a cinematic trope will ever be able to claim complete originality.¹¹

Against this rich genealogical background, Cloverfield’s immediate cinematic context must be defined much more narrowly. At the time of its release, its most recent predecessor had been Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla (1998). At that time, cultural and cinematic cycles were already accelerating, and, as a result, the audience’s collective memory was growing shorter. Ten years would have been just about long enough to make audiences forget that, not too long ago, there had been another giant creature rampaging through those exact same streets of Lower Manhattan. By the same token, the fact that Emmerich’s film does not seem to take itself too seriously would appeal to a younger audience; the film is rated PG-13.¹² But then so is Cloverfield, not by virtue of its tongue-in-cheek humor—the film is as serious as a heart attack—but by that of its visual strategies. The digital images recorded by the handheld camera in the middle of the action are fragmentary and fleeting and thus perfectly attuned to keeping excessive violence and gore offscreen.¹³ Perhaps the teenagers who had hooted and hollered at Emmerich’s Godzilla would now be the young adults seeing themselves reflected in Cloverfield’s young, affluent New Yorkers, partying in lofts and going off to lucrative jobs abroad. A more likely scenario, however, is that a general audience awareness in which the recollection of specifics from Emmerich’s film would have blended into a larger, less clearly defined awareness of the genre and its conventions. After all, video and DVD releases and television broadcasts were available to that audience all the way up to and including Emmerich’s film. Within this broad textual horizon, though, no other film—not even Emmerich’s—precedes Cloverfield so closely as to suggest a cynical cash grab or a tired retread of an idea that had already played itself out.

The interim period between Emmerich’s Godzilla and Reeves’s Cloverfield, together with the pronounced tonal difference between the two films, suggests that Cloverfield’s sense of novelty and innovation stems from its position at the start of yet another cinematic cycle. To be clear, Emmerich’s film did not close down any future film’s access to comedy. Cloverfield has moments in which it allows characters to be funny. Especially the character of Hud, played by standup comedian T. J. Miller, is clearly intended to provide comic relief. These lighter moments provide relief from an unrelentingly grim narrative. Hence, many of the jokes register as pathetic or tragic, driving an affective dynamic that swings around from tears to laughter and back again. Nowhere is the film as farcical as the tongue-in-cheek wink with which Emmerich invites its audience into a stance of ironic distance. Even the film’s commercial success failed to overwrite its reputation as a failure. When movies that nobody, not even its makers, likes make $375 million, Tom Shone notes, then something is seriously wrong with the art of popular moviemaking (273). Without coming to a conclusion about whether giant-creature films in general need to treat their preposterous basic premise seriously, Shone’s analysis points to the acceleration of cinematic cycles as the culprit in Godzilla’s curious mixture between commercial success and critical failure (264–77). Assuming that the farcical elements and ironic refraction of the monster in Godzilla signal the trope’s creative exhaustion, however, one might conclude that it was setting the stage for another film to come along and start yet another cycle in a different register. If that film was to be Cloverfield, its position at the start of a new cycle might explain why, for viewers seeing it for the first time, it felt, to quote Pynchon, as if there is nothing to compare it to now.¹⁴ Ironically enough, then, Cloverfield is burdened by knowing too much about too many films that came before it but throws off that burden by capitalizing on the gap between the cycle that came before it and the cycle for which it was to be the initiating event.

Horror or Science Fiction: Genre or Post-genre?

For many viewers, it is Cloverfield’s (melo)dramatic seriousness that registers, most of all, as the outstanding innovation that differentiates it from its predecessors. Hence, it is worth examining how the film manages to access and entrench this tonal feature. Those in Cloverfield’s original audience blessed (or cursed) with a long cultural memory would likely have been impressed with the film foregoing all and any characters who, by profession or by the call of destiny, would fight back against the giant creature. The colonial adventurers and show business promoters responsible for bringing Kong to New York, the scientists, politicians, and military elites sitting around conference tables, staring through binoculars, and planning air strikes against assorted specimen in the bestiary of Japanese kaiju films, and the accidental heroes standing in the creature’s path holding the miracle weapon in 1950s-American films