i am most definitely not one to go flying out the door to a film’s opening night, but i did just that for cloverfield. wasn’t disappointed either—the film’s genius pop.

the criticism thus far lobbed at the film (“it’s just godzilla!” “the characters are vapid!” “the setup is obvious!”) has been pretty much on par, but i can’t help feel that there’s a whole bunch of point-missing happening.

when i left the film, i had two overriding reactions:

1: i hate it when a film can’t stay away from the ending that ties things up in a nice little bow. stories should be messy.

2: this wasn’t a film about any particular event or person—it was an illustration that we have become that which we never understood, even laughed at. we are now a culture with a monster hanging over our shoulder, just like everyone else.

gojira, the fabled japanese monster, is a perfect embodiment of post-wwii japanese gestalt. the monster’s attacks are the embodiment of a horror ripping through life, destroying everything it touches, unstoppable.

the host, from south korea, is pretty much the same phenomenon with a different focus: the monster is created by environmental factors the culture could have controlled.

cloverfield, for the first time, presents that concept in american culture, and i’m sad to see it make sense. our monster is closer to japan’s, further from korea’s. but it’s the same: a monster destroying us for reasons we can’t see.

american culture was, for the longest time, completely untouched from the outside horror other cultures have seen. we were never savagely attached the way the japanese and koreans were (i am not talking about the issue of justification, but the way it feels to an average citizen to be suddenly and violently attacked). when 9/11 rolled around, suddenly we knew what it was like to be in the world, to be attacked for who you are.

the characters in cloverfield represent americans before 9/11. they’re callow, young, innocent, brash, and overprivileged. their real characteristics don’t actually begin to show until the crisis unfolds.

rob has visions of himself as a man in charge. he’s almost a hero; his heart seems to be in what tradtionally would be called “the right place.” he wants to make things right in love and to family. unfortunately, he’s an idiot and that gets everyone killed instead.

the one character who shows true hero potential, marlena, is killed because of her colleagues ineptitude and her second-guessing of her own initial instinct to ignore the rest of her party. as she said early on in the film, “i wasn’t even supposed to be here.” none of us were supposed to be there, girlie, but there we were dropped nonetheless. even in chicago, we ran from downtown because who knew what could be coming.

the movie succeeds in something i never thought i’d see: it makes monster movie about its characters. the monster is only a giant horror driving their lives forward; nobody really cares who or what it is. this isn’t the monster from the kinds of movies whose morality we all know—there’s no idiot saying “i’ll be right back,” to later fall dismembered from the refrigerator. the deflowered virgin doesn’t get a post-coital knife in the face. this is a new sort of movie-monster ruthlessness, and its similarity to real disaster is disturbing.

the characters’ vapidness hammers home the film’s core truth: bad things happen to everyone no matter who they are. the people we saw falling through the sky on 9/11 became heroes only upon their deaths. in life, they were probably boring nobodies—just like cloverfield’s characters. the complete traumatization of diamond-hard, self-centered manhattanites makes the disaster visceral.

the film uncovers 9/11’s mundane horror: nobody chose to go through hell that day, but hell came to town anyhow. there was no lesson. it just happened. the sense of it never came.