Voracious Verite

The whole side has collapsed? -- Peter Jennings, a mortal inquiry

Two of the last films I would see at the Boyd Theater at 1908 Chestnut Street, this being the grime settled retail zoned business district emanating outward from City Hall, with the rotund and pilloried sienna brick lay CVS two blocks below, also of historical interest as a grim, bleak, industrial age factory conveyor belt gray seediness before my time, reflective of how urban planners built for lives of toil, was the 1998 Matthew Broderick Godzilla, detailed slightly in my archives in another context, no particular lucidity attached, and the 1999 Blair Witch Project, the latter leaving me singularly unimpressed in the emotional turbulence of dismay, though I will concede to the always omnipresent gap within our generations, that Sanchez and Mynick anticipate an eradication, a dimensional abstract of openness and claustrophobic undercurrent, which now assails us in pixels, but also offers a shield to species outcasts. These two lackluster fin de siècle dramas offer the near perfect set up to be wary of a “free” movie like Cloverfield being offered to viewers with cultural resentments against Abrams, in the troubled Halloween of 2020, a cheesy, material rendition of transmutation, under threat as a collective, over the top victory and bemusement. Within the past sixty years, which is basically the span of one human life, an average span, even as the median agony of a crone’s visage increasingly makes a centennial and emaciated body more common, sans Joe Biden, sans Pelosi, (does she reign as the most powerful woman for yet another 24 months?), Halloween, at least in both Americas, is about having fun with inhibitions released to the mischievous.

The question isn’t whether Cloverfield is a great homage to Ishiro Honda and his forever inflicted terror lizard. I mean, even if we take one step back in our biologically engineered ability to endure long walks, most of us alive today rarely see the 1954 original with which Honda shocked the collective consciousness. I did make it a point to refresh myself on that matter and will only yield on certain points of innovation: there are elements of greatness in the original film which veer south due to the very nature of post war authoritarian stricture, and by the time we get to Jet Jaguar of Megalon, even coming of age audiences for which it was made might blasphemy into heterodoxy. The industry essentially demolished Godzilla with overkill, and Abrams, as well, is guilty of over reach and series which crumple over on themselves in the post Lost aftershock. The Fringe failed as a transhumanist playboard. Revolution failed in its attempt to take Lost in another direction, as most of these dystopian loss of power movies do. Power plants may be vulnerable to military destruction, but when it comes to credibility, the universal loss of the electronic age for sustained periods due to diabolical menace is highly improbable. Even the Clover creature doesn’t quite achieve this end. The film does open and swivel into horror very well. Abrams likes brackets, and much like Joseph Conrad, uses them as close-ended narrative frameworks, proving the paranoia seeded in the digital age was placed there as high concept before the Trump phenomenon. I was not too perturbed at the thinness of the characters, particularly as these characters are literally dealing with annihilation without the benefit of blame being assigned to nuclear detonation. The question, which I certainly can’t answer, even with two viewings of the film fresh and better sequenced the second time, is whether Abrams is using September 11^th at our expense, or if Clover is successful as a coping mechanism. The movie divides critics on this point, with the enemy who wins. The win, however, is inexplicable, and nihilistic, if not also parasitic, as what happened to yours truly, the content generator, who only has hate as the price of survival, malice against an ethnicity into which she flung herself. In the medias res, Marlena manages to fend off the alien host just long enough for the viewers to grasp the aim taken at Romero with lightning speed, who like Honda, created the animated cadaver, forever and a day. When presented with a life of combat deformity who simply breaks down and cries, a momentary immovable object on tires, in her sagging sex, ambulatory pedestrians might ward her off, or those same pedestrians might have called for paramedics, but in those moments of night, of impoverished frustration, the outburst of tears went unheeded. She drove back to the ten story building with its difficult location on the dead end of Penn’s uncomplicated grid of interconnected squares.