Cloverfield · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Hud keeps filming. That is the whole movie, and almost its whole horror. A thing the size of a skyscraper is loose in Manhattan, the street has become a stampede, and the man holding the camera — an amateur named Hud, handed the device an hour earlier to record goodbye messages at a party — does the one thing a sensible person would not. He points the lens at it. He points it badly. He lowers it at the worst moments and catches the creature only in the half-second before a whip-pan tears it away. When the head of the Statue of Liberty comes to rest in the middle of a street, a monument reduced to inexplicable junk at sidewalk scale, what we get is not a hero's reaction. We get a recording of one.

Start with the genre this film thinks it belongs to. The kaiju picture — Godzilla, and behind it King Kong loose among named Manhattan landmarks — is about as pure an example as cinema has of what Deleuze called the action-image, and specifically its large form: a global situation, the encompassing milieu, presses on people until some decisive act transforms it. City leveled, army mobilized, counter-force found. The whole sensory-motor logic of movies runs on that circuit. You perceive a situation; you act to change it; the cut serves the chain. Cloverfield keeps the monster and quietly amputates the act.

Deleuze had a name for what is left when that circuit snaps: the crisis of the action-image — characters who can no longer react adequately to what they perceive. He found it in the rubble of postwar Italy, in people who could only wander and look. Reeves and Goddard find it in a consumer camcorder. The five friends perceive a catastrophe of a scale that admits no adequate response. There is nothing to do but run, film, and in most cases die. What floods into the gap where action used to be is pure seeing and hearing — what Deleuze calls opsigns and sonsigns, optical and sound situations with the motor end cut off. The film enforces this acoustically. There is no score inside the tape, only scream, siren, structural groan, and the creature's bellow picked up raw by the camera's own microphone. Hud is no longer an agent. He is a voyant, a seer, Deleuze's word for the figure who can only witness.

This is why "shaky-cam" undersells what the film is doing. The precise concept is the dicisign: a perception-image in which we feel the camera's presence, because a character is doing the perceiving and the apparatus perceives him perceiving. We are never given clean, ownerless vision. We are given Hud's hands, his curiosity, his panic, his habit of aiming at the wrong thing. Every compositional "flaw" — the exposure hunting as he swings from a dark stairwell into a fire-lit street, the cuts disguised as the tape stopping and starting — is motivated by who is holding the device. The unreliability is the form.

And the monster? It is the clearest absolute out-of-field in modern blockbuster cinema. An ordinary out-of-field is the next room, the implied space just past the edge of the frame. The absolute kind is a magnitude that cannot be located in space at all, a sense of something beyond that the frame can never contain. The creature is staged behind buildings, inside dust, in the dark, glimpsed for an instant. It is never given the reveal the genre trained us to expect, and that withholding converts it from a thing on screen into a pressure on the whole image.

The city decomposes to match. Manhattan stops being a map and becomes what Deleuze called an any-space-whatever — fragmented, deserted, choked with debris, no longer a setting that supports action, only a field of disconnected affective scraps. The single most disciplined choice in the film is the establishing shot it refuses to give you. You keep wanting the wide that would let you orient, and its absence is the subject.

One thread of old cinema survives: the walk across the island to pull Beth out of a broken apartment. That is the small form's last gesture, a vector, a zig-zag line linking disconnected spaces — apartment, subway tunnel, tilting half-fallen tower, military triage zone. It gives the chaos a direction. It transforms nothing.

Then there is the frame around the frame. The film announces itself as a recovered tape, catalogued by the government as material from "the area formerly known as Central Park," with the earlier Coney Island footage bleeding up through the new recording because the cassette was reused. This is the image as lectosign — an image that has lost its sensory-motor obviousness and asks to be read, deciphered, treated as evidence rather than lived as action. It rests on the old documentary contract, the wager that the camera does not lie, inherited straight from Cannibal Holocaust's recovered-footage frame and The Blair Witch Project's performer-held terror of partial visibility. The Dogme rule of Festen is here too — sound must obey the fiction, no music until Giacchino's symphonic overture plays over the end credits, the one moment the film steps outside its own tape. Battle of Algiers taught it how restaged chaos reads as newsreel when the faces are unknown.

What it did to film as an art is simple to state and was not obvious in 2008: it proved the break Deleuze located in difficult European art cinema — the seer, the stalled circuit, time felt rather than crossed — could be staged inside the most action-bound genre there is, and sold as a studio blockbuster. The most expensive images arrive partial, blurred, panned away from. It welded the spectacle of the monster to the witness-realism of a kid who won't put the camera down, and seeded a decade of found-footage scaled to ambition.

Watch it again, and watch Hud's hands instead of the monster. Notice how often the film denies you the shot you are straining toward, and ask whether the creature was ever really the thing you were afraid of, or whether it was the not-being-able-to-look-away.