Double vision

Several years after its cultural moment, I’m finally watching “Cloverfield”. It’s enormous fun, because of its paradoxical premise. Normally when you watch a movie you are so completely immersed in the artificiality of it that you forget the artificiality entirely. The characters – who are obviously movie stars merely playing actual people – are so transparently synthetic that you tend to ignore the unreality of it all. You end up rooting for Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant to win in love precisely because you had already made a deal when you sat down to watch the movie that you would politely ignore the fact that they are really movie stars playing a role. And it’s that contract which makes the whole enterprise function so seamlessly.

“Cloverfield” is quite a different beast. On some level it’s an answer piece to “The Blair Witch Project”, but it comes with none of that earlier film’s ambiguity of provenance. If you saw BWP when it first came out in theatres, you could perhaps convince yourself that it might be real – found footage from a series of actual events.

But “Cloverfield”, while maintaining the same gritty feeling of cinema verite´, tells you at every moment, which each shot, that it is a highly artificial construct, a window into a world that not only never happened, but could not have happened.

For me the effect while watching it was that my consciousness of what was happening was neatly cleaved into two. On one level I was watching a gritty, gripping tale of terrible things happening to people who were oddly affecting in their detailed imperfection (like real people). On the other hand, I was acutely aware at all times, every single moment of the film, that I was watching something as artificlal and laboriously constructed as a Japanese Noh play.

This might very well be a new genre – one attuned to the PoMo sensibilities of users of Facebook and Twitter. When everything is in quotes, the entire audience ends up being invited to become a kind of critic of postmodern cinema.

I wouldn’t want all films to follow in this path, but once in a while there is something very cool and fun about having such an experience of double vision.