One of the first things which is immediately noticeable about Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield is the way it serves as a form of the return of the repressed of 9/11. Most critics who saw it, could not help but remark upon the similarity between the images we saw on September 11 and the ones that are presented in Cloverfield. People running away from crumbling buildings with dust swirling, panicked screams and most of all, the uncertainty of the situation certainly recalls the feeling most people had. Far from arguing against this point, I want to take the argument even further, and say that what we are actually dealing with, is more than simply the return of the repressed. It is a willed attempt at articulating cultural anxieties and frustrations. and in this process the film inevitably ends up in an ideological position, which I want to investigate in the following.

I do not wish to argue that the film is a simplistic reflection of the cultural environment in USA today, nor do I even want to say that the film represents how the majority feels or reacts. Instead, I claim that this is simply one response among many to the events that unfolded on 9/11 and in the years since then. If anything, these events have clearly revealed that the US cannot be said to be a homogeneous cultural entity, but rather a heterogeneous multitude of responses. Cloverfield itself is representative of this split, for in its attempt to articulate a sense of the evil of terrorism, the film ends up at an ideological dead-end, unable to properly reflect and engage with the events it re-frames.

My paper will first detail the encounter with the monster and how it is represented as a metaphor of evil and terrorism – the two are equated by the film. Having done this, I will turn to the fact that although the film would like to portray the monster as abject and monstrous, it also draws upon a discourse that we know very well – monster films and their cultural history – which in turn results in us not feeling as estranged and frightened by the monster as the film would like. The monster is more a part of ourselves than the film would care to admit. It is this final point that will round off my paper, analyzing how the ideological system which the film proposes is interpellated by its use of a too-familiar metaphor, thus resulting in what I refer to as an ideological fission.

I want to proceed from the banal yet insightful point set forth by Judith Halberstam in Skin Shows. As she states: “monsters are meaning machines” (Halberstam, 21), pointing out that monsters are not so much discovered as they are made. We make monsters – in our fictions, but also in our daily lives – in order to express and articulate certain concerns, where monsters play specific roles. In much horror fiction, boundaries are challenged and brought into play – sometimes violated and sometimes reinforced. As David Russell points out:

[...] horror films can function to reenact and reaffirm social repression and contain disorder and violence by eliminating the monster, which symbolically stands in for social disorder and rampant desire (as exemplified in so-called reactionary horror films). Yet Otherness itself expressed through the horror film and its monsters may also serve to point to the breakdown and failure of repression as symptomatically expressed through a realization of unconscious desire for which the monster acts as medium.” (Russell, 237)

It is from these two observations that Cloverfield can be seen as a problematic and interesting cultural text. Despite its clear intention to present a monocular vision of evil, its position within the history of monster films opens up the film’s meaning to different spectator positions, which may in the end deconstruct the film’s ideological message.

The Monster as Terrorist

I have already mentioned the extent to which much of the visual language of Cloverfield has been drawn almost directly from the television images shown on September 11. It seems to be no coincidence that all of Cloverfield is shot as if by a hand-held camera, placed within the diegesis. Although narratively motivated to be present in the film – it is being used to document the surprise party held for Rob – it also reproduces the fact that many of the newsreels from 9/11 were actually amateur photography. Cloverfield attempts to create a sense of immediacy and urgency by placing the camera squarely within the frame of action, indicating a cinema verité-effect that is hauntingly familiar.

The film begins with a couple going on a romantic date to Coney Island. These images are fragments, left over from that day. Right now, in the present time of narration, the film is meant to be a documentation of the surprise party for Rob, who is going to Japan. Already here, the alien and other is introduced as a problem, for it is the very fact that Rob is going to Japan that has caused his girlfriend to leave him, despite the two potentially still being in love. Had he remained in America, this problem would never have occurred, thus priming us for a skeptical view of things outside the US.

When the monster strikes, it comes as a shock for the party-goers and to some extent for the spectators as well. We have not been introduced slowly to the fact that the monster is descending upon New York City, but of course know this going into the cinema. The point is, however, that any knowledge of the monster has been suppressed. At first, no one even knows that it is a monster; they simply suspect (coincidentally?) that it may be a plane which has crashed. The first thing to be visibly destroyed is the Statue of Liberty; a symbolic target more than one that causes any spectacular explosions, but is fully congruent with the film’s ideological slant – this is an attack upon American values as much as on American soil.

This is the first clue to reading the monster as terrorist – it attacks the symbolic landscape of USA, and it does so from a position of secrecy. As we are slowly introduced to the monster, it remains constantly at the edge of our vision, always disappearing just as we think we can see it. It attacks without apparent rhyme or reason, and moves more or less randomly about New York City. The few images that we do see of the monster, reveals that it is both one and many – it is a huge, lumbering beast, but smaller, vicious raptors are discharged from it, spreading across the city. If one is injured by the monster or the smaller raptors, one becomes infected and must be quarantined and shot. In other words, anything that comes into contact the monster or its brood, must be put contained since they have become part of it as well. The virus breeding within the borders of normality is seemingly as dangerous – if less spectacular – as the monster itself.

Violent, contagious and senselessly, the monster rages through the streets, as it is attacked by US soldiers without any apparent effect. We see images of soldiers shooting at a target they do not understand, do not try to understand and cannot defeat. The only solution the army can respond with, is the so-called “hammer down” tactic of carpet-bombing all of New York City. What is so particular about the film, is that it never questions this situation or these responses. It remains fully on the side of the incomprehensible nature of the monster, and the necessity of responding forcefully. When Rob foolhardily ventures out to save the girl he loves, it is characterized as bravery rather than folly. This is a film which celebrates the courage to take action against the horrible events that unfold.

At the same time, the monster is irrational, without meaning, murderous and incomprehensible. It is the perfect personification of how we in Western culture regard the terrorist – it is a myth of evil, which is absolute, which neither can nor should be understood. The monster of Cloverfield stands as the figure of evil as popular imagination sees it; it is a materialization of an ideological fission which attempts to excise certain ideological constructions, yet paradoxically casting them in a form that is recognizable and familiar. It is this paradox which I will turn to now.

The Monster as Monster

Here, I do not intend to discuss in detail the generic traits or belongings of Cloverfield to the horror genre, but simply wish to proceed from the banal fact that Cloverfield clearly draws on the tradition of monster films, such as Godzilla, The Blob, The Thing and many more. At least part of our response to Cloverfield comes from our familiarity with and enjoyment of these earlier monster films. The narrative structure of Cloverfield is relatively identical to these earlier films, and the frightened struggle against the monster is also similar. The monstrosity of the Cloverfield monster is turned into evil because of its lack of morality and respect for “fighting fair” – it attacks civilians as much as soldiers. In this case, the film casts the monster as the dangerous and threatening cultural outsider which must be isolated.

Cloverfield’s monstrosity is thus quite conventionally coded – the dangerous and threatning is cast in what Nöel Carroll refers to as a horrific metonomy (Carroll, 52). The impurity of the monster comes not just from its murderous inclination, but also from the fact that it is not one but many. The brood of the monster is as significant and dangerous as the monster itself. The monster itself thus conforms to Carroll’s category of fission as the structure of its horrific metonomy – it is spatially divided into these different beings. It is hardly, therefore, a coincidence that the monster’s brood are contagious – this is a deadly virus that will spread, of not kept in check.

In this way, the monster fulfills all the requirements of being a monster; it is, in fact, a very proper monster, conforming to the conventions of the genre. What is different, however, is the monster’s motivation. It is unlike the Godzilla films of Japan, or even Roland Emmerich’s travesty. In these earlier films, the monster was not decidedly evil but rather misunderstood – a victim of circumstances, if you will. Gojira always simply tried to live a life in peace, but was disturbed by foolish humans. Not so with the Cloverfield monster; it itself instigates the conflict, it strikes first and we get a sense of it willfully destroying New York City, even if we never get any hint of its motivation. Here, the citizens of New York are the hapless victims of a force they do not and cannot understand. There is no sense of them transgressing any values, they are completely innocent when confronted with a source of indecipherable evil.

If we accept David Russell’s argument that “[Horror] mediates between culture and ideology through an indirect mode of representation” (Russell, 237), we can argue that the monster is meant to indicate the Other of American culture – in this case, the very specific Other of the terrorist. However, precisely because of the film’s structural dependence on the history of monster films, what is supposedly unfamiliar and Other instead becomes hauntingly familiar. We are familiar with these cinematic monsters, even if we are not fully comfortable with them. I will argue that more than reminding us of transgressive and dangerous Otherness, these movie monsters have disseminated into our culture as particularly and distinctively American responses to social fears. We recognize these monsters, but not as Other to US culture but rather as an integral part of it. These monsters work more as the return of the repressed of the culture’s own internal fears.

It is for this very reason, that I argue that we cannot regard the monster as abject – this is to miss the point. The monster is of course abject, as all monsters are. It certainly conforms to Julia Kristeva’s point that the abject disturbs order and does not respect borders (Kristeva, 4). However, the monster is made up, as I have already pointed out as a very conventional spectacle of evil – one that we are so familiar with that it cannot be said to be truly Other or even abject. What the film proposes, is that the monster represents the culturally abject of the terrorist attack, and in that sense the film functions as a form of “working through” of the trauma experienced in 9/11. However, I argue that this is problematic, in the way that the monster is more familiar than other. It is this that I refer to as ideological fission and is what I will round my paper off with.

Ideological Fission

My basic point here is that traces of earlier films clings to Cloverfield. There is a metaphoric dependency which makes the film’s ideological message split in two, so to speak. It is evident that the Cloverfield monster is a paradoxical construction which attempts to articulate fear and loathing about terrorism, but ends up trapped in an ideological dead-end maze, unable to do anything other than magnifying popular fears into a familiar spectacle. While the film attempts to create a monster which violates a proposed distinction between human and terrorist, this never succeeds because the film never seriously engages with the monstrous vision of evil it shows us. Precisely because this vision of evil is so limited, it prevents us as spectators to truly engage with it, as a moral construction.

The fact that the monster is so recognizable, means that we do not see the monster as other, but instead as same. The attempt at articulating a sense of the cultural trauma fails, and instead the monster becomes a representation of the inability to do anything. The monster is reduced, I would argue to pure spectacle – an image of pure and total war in Paul Virilio’s terms – rather than traumatic therapy. My reading of the monster argues that rather than reveling in an ideological split between American and terrorist, the monster instead becomes an interpellation, a rupture in the ideological force of the narrative. Instead, we cannot help but see the monster as the very face of evil, but the face of an American evil. By magnifying the evils of terrorism into this monster, the film’s representation becomes a concave mirror which only reveals how American terror discourse is constructed; indeed, the film itself serves as a premier example.

It is this movement that I call an ideological fission: in attempting to reconcile social trauma into a neat categorical distinction, the film is itself subjected to this ideological fission and we come to see the rupture inherent in the film. I have shown how the familiarity with the monster and monster films, has resulted in this split, and so the very form that the film employs, results in this internal schism. For this reason, it is also no surprise that the film ends with no closure – we do not learn if the main characters survive and we certainly don’t know what happens to the monster. This lack of closure is an attempt, I would say, to reduce the monster to a monolithic vision of evil, as ideologically uncontained and as a disruptive element. In doing so, the film itself rehearses an evil argument, by imposing a totalizing truth on the spectator: by arguing that the monster must always be evil, the film itself takes on the structure of evil, and so becomes not just a vision of evil, but an act evil.

Although the monster is meant to function as an unspeakable deviation, it is rather the film’s projection of the monster onto the Other as terrorist, which is the unspeakable act. The real monster in Cloverfield, I would argue, isn’t the beast that we only see glimpses of, but the film itself. The film is a monster, because it renounces engagement with the Other in order to construct a world when one is one, and not a world where one is two (Badiou). This reductionism is the film’s monstrous act.

I’m interested in films such as the Hostel series, the Saw series, The Devil’s Rejects, The Passion of the Christ, Wolf Creek and similar instances where the torture becomes so prolonged that it turns into a spectacle rather than merely a narrative device to set the scene for the films. What I’m primarily interested in, is the need for such a spectacle, and how this spectacle ties into cultural concerns about torture.

The primary difference between earlier horror films – even gruesome ones such as Last House on the Left – and the new cycle of torture films is the fact that the camera emphasizes the violence and so it becomes torture. It never pans away, leaving us to imagine what happens, nor does it contextualize the violence or the need for it by providing deep, complex characterization. It simply happens almost without reason, yet confronts us to some extent with the desire to see the scenes.

While earlier types of horror films were clearly focalized through the victims and only switched focalization in order to increase suspense, the case is different in the torture films where the focalization is blurred and we as spectators are placed somewhere between the victim and the torturer. When the point for the seeing the film is to see these torture scenes (certainly they are not seen for their inventive narratives or psychologically complex characters), we as spectators become complicit to some extent to the violence occurring on screen. The spectator identification is blurred by this dual focalization and we are sutured into the violence and not just subjected to it.

This brings me on to the transgressive nature of these films, as they work with transgression in a different way than earlier horror films. First of all, the torture films seem transgressive in the way they tantalize us with showing something which is labelled as illegal (although they are of course completely legal, being in fact rather mainstream films). The transgression of torture films is first underlined by the emphasis on reality – in the case of Wolf Creek by being based on a true story – and realistic torture scenes.

However, due to the lack of characterization the films end up being very cinematic in their portrayal of their stories. As spectators we end up feeling that we are seeing a film rather than engrossing us completely in the narrative. The transgression is thus incorporated into cinema culture and so loses some of its transgressive nature – it becomes commodified, but it also becomes safe and harmless, dissolved into a pure spectacle for entertainment which always remains clearly within the boundaries of cinematic form.

This is not to distance myself from these films – I enjoy seeing them – but simply to point out that for all their violence, blood and guts, and explicit torture scenes they are incredibly conservative at heart. They may seem to offend, but as this offense only occurs clearly within the realm of cinema it never achieves a subversive potential.

Cannibal Holocaust thus enacts and stages itself – it narrates the violence visited upon indigenous people, while itself being just such an act of violence (mostly symbolic, but still). Seen in this light, the actual killing of the animals is necessary, though certainly not defensible. On the other hand, if it is legitimate to kill animals to eat them, turn them into clothes, feed them to themselves and so on, why is it wrong to kill them to make a film? Is film worth less than a pair of leather shoes?

In this way, Cannibal Holocaust is a commodity which questions our commodification of everything – from animals to indigenous people’s culture. The plot of the film, is that a group of ruthless documentarists travel to ‘the Green Inferno’ of the Amazonas to show Western culture how some people still live, just a few hours flight away from what is cast as the greatest pinnacle of civilization – symbolically represented by New York. The Green Inferno thus stands in contrast, but also in parallel to the concrete inferno of New York. There are several shots of New York that are similar in structure to the shots of the jungle, thus inviting us to see the two places in the same way.

The documentarists disappear and an anthropologist is sent to learn what has happened to them. What he learns is shocking; they were killed, but they were killed because they raped (and filmed) the natives, pillaged and burned the natives’ village in order to enact a conflict between two tribes that did not exist. The film reels that are recovered seem extremely realistic, and is obviously the cause for much of the outrage.

However, despite the violence it documents and the fact that all the material (except the last when the documentarists are killed) is staged, the TV network wishes to air the documentary. The anthropologist shows them the horrors contained within the reels, and they decide to burn the reels. However, the reels are not burned, but instead sold – thus playfully suggesting that we have seen actual, real footage.

However, it is this last turn of events – that the material is too horrible – which poses a difficult question for the spectator. Not because we may believe that the footage is real, but rather because it questions the act of viewing and even making such material. The film unabashedly presents us with exactly what we want to see: barbarous natives, barbarous westerners, blood, gore, nudity, sex and it is all fascinating in its repulsive glory.

The film squarely shows us how much we want to exploit and commodify and consume such spectacles, no matter what the price. The actual killing of the animals is precisely one such price, and therefore could not have been faked. But if we want to see such things, can we blame the people who make it? I don’t believe that Deodato is trying to escape or deny his part in this exploitation/commodification culture, but he questions the difference between his film and various other products, be it documentaries, news or any other text which draws its fascination from showing that which is taboo or transgressive. Deodato reveals the hypocrisy by explicitly stepping into the hornet’s nest, so to speak.

Cannibal Holocuast is not offensive, I would argue, because of the depictions of violence, rape, gore and so forth – although to some extent this is part of it, of course – but instead it offends because it is what it represents. There is no abstraction, no metaphor, no critical distance or reflection. Instead, the film conflates its own material existence with its artistic subject of commodification and exploitation – it is exploitation and commodity because of a belief, I would argue, that it is not possible to exist or stand outside of the structure it wishes to criticize.

Such a view of criticism is implicit, I believe, of most exploitation films and is the reason why so many people turn away from them, and find them offensive – even if what they depict is no longer offensive. It is not ‘good taste’ in Bourdieu’s sense, to enjoy texts that revel in their own economics of desire and deny that any form of cultural expression can stand outside of the demands of cultural, economic, and political reality.