The Failure of Cloverfield, Or, Why Experimental Art is Reviled

******HOLY SHIT! CLOVERFIELD SPOILERS! *******

Sigh. This will be long, but necessary.

I do love experimental art forms. There is something magical, to me, about the notion of taking an existing system, breaking it, rebuilding it and forming a new artistic experience out of the ashes of the contemporary form. However, doing so always incurs a certain amount of danger. When you break something, take it apart, fiddle around with the nuts and bolts, you always run the chance of fucking it up beyond repair...and then you end up with a piece of shit that will generally offend (on some level) everyone in the vicinity.

I'd like to think that my particular vein of experimentation sides with the audience in mind. I want to do some structural screwity, but I want to do it in a way that I don't leave people standing a quarter mile down the road, scratching their ass and saying, "Do what, now?" What I'm getting at, is, I think the difference between Avant Garde kind of experimentation, and a more blue collar type (for lack of a better term). Avant Garde experimentation operates on the following notion: "I am doing something artistic, and it is awesome. If you are too stupid to figure out why it's awesome, then you aren't a member of the cool kid club." I've read some of that stuff, and some of it is good...if you're willing to lay down a lot of effort to become a member of the cool kid club (I think Ben Marcus' Age of Wire and String would be a pretty decent example of this kind of writing). The cool thing about Avant Garde, though, is that it's fearless.

Cloverfield, too is fearless in design (in the movie, everyone is pretty fucking terrified). In addition to being fearless, it was surrounded by an incredible amount of hype (which should have been a clear warning sign). Cloverfield is an example of an Avant Garde art form, but it is also a flawed experiment in theatrical form. It used a lot of good ideas, but it alienated its audience. And with movies, far more with books, you can't ever alienate your audience. For the rest of this post, I want to illustrate the experimental attributes of the movie, as well as how these attributes led to the the movie's failure instead of it's success.

First, let's identify what I would qualify as the "experimental" elements of Cloverfield.

1. The entire movie is shot on a home video camera.
   
2. It uses a framing structure that insinuates that the home movie that you're watching is part of some Department of Defense project
3. It uses a modified version of Freitag's triangle for its establishment of dramatic structure.
4. It avoids standard, Hollywood, events and structures
5. The movie presented itself in a metafictive situation, ala the Blair Witch Project's "this is real" argument

Now, let's establish some things we take for granted, things that come as standard equipment for movies, and literature in general:

1. There is an identifiable beginning, middle, and end
2. The protagonist character struggles against some form of antagonist and either succeeds or fails in his/her struggle
3. somewhere between the middle and the end the climax of the protagonist's struggle is reached. The character is forever changed from this point on.
4. The nature of the artform is transparent (the author is invisible); focus is placed upon the action/plot/characters of the story rather than the story's construction
5. the purpose of the artform is to entertain its audience
6. the artform is accessible to a large number of people

The big experiment in Cloverfield is to distance the audience from many of the assumed trajectories, and create a new kind of monster movie. If done well, Cloverfield could have launched a new wave in cinematic style for monster movies. And if you look at what a lot of people are saying on RottenTomatoes.com, they're saying exactly this, that Cloverfield has breathed life back into the dead monster movie genre. The problem is that Cloverfield is making such a big scene, and getting good reviews, because it's different, not genius. Cloverfield is really a kind of Avant Garde monster movie, and since the masses can't quite figure all of it out, they've decided that it must be good because they can't understand it. You hear the same thing when folks read experimental literature for the first time. I've seen a lot of people pick up John Barth and give the same kind of reaction to a story like "Lost in the Funhouse." They'll say it was great, or that it blew their mind...but since they've never seen anything like it before, they lack the cognitive ability to analyze the work to see if it, well, works. And coming from the creator of Lost, I think Cloverfield is banking on people going with the "I liked it because I didn't understand it" mentality, because, Lost operates in the same manner. Not only that, but Cloverfield has a very extensive Alternative Reality Game attached to it, so moviegoers that didn't get involved in that are further made to feel inferior, leading them to assume that "they're just missing something, and that the movie must be better than what it is."

Sorry folks. You're not missing anything. Cloverfield is broken on the structural level, and because of that, it cannot aspire to be a complete movie. I wouldn't be surprised if Cloverfield 2 came out in six months from now (with Cloverfield 3 coming out six months after that).

Let's start with the framing. We all know the framing motif in movies: movie starts and is framed by another ontological layer of existence. Think of The Princess Bride--it's a movie of a grandfather telling his grandson a story, and then we go into the story, which becomes the movie. At the end of The Princess Bride, we then shift back up one ontological layer, and finish with the grandfather finishing the story. This is a well established gimmick, and works with varying degrees of success. In Cloverfield, the movie opens with an interesting Department of Defense reel, as if the movie is part of some manner of collection. As part of this reveal, it seems to suggest, also (by the titling) that there are other such videos/clips available, and to appear in the movie. However, we only get the one video. Once the video starts, we remain with it to the end of the movie. Once the video camera dies, we get maybe 10 seconds of Department of Defense do not copy footage and then end credits. The framing element, then, really does nothing for the movie. It suggests that the army found the tape amid the wreckage of New York, but it doesn't explain why it's being shown to us.

A frame, in the best sense, always should act as an element that defines the purpose for the thing it contains. This frame really doesn't provide any useful depth to the story, nor does it explain or otherwise validate the film it contains. In short, the frame was used as a flashy way to roll opening credits without "making it look like a movie."

Since the frame doesn't give us a true sense of purpose to the film, we turn to the content itself--a horribly shot (My God, if you go to see the movie, take Dramamine if you have ever gotten motion sick in your life) home movie of a party and then four friends trying to survive in the aftermath of the monster attack. It doesn't explain why the monster attacked, what the monster is, or even if the monster was finally destroyed, nor should it do any of those things--this camera is tied to the viewpoints of the characters that control it. However, by putting the audience in the hands of unreliable narrators, the film makers have sacrificed a large portion of audience appeal; they've sacrificed the reward of finding out "what really happened."

Had the movie included multiple viewpoints from several sources, not only would the frame be more strongly defined, but also we would be able to view the incident from several viewpoints, and thus be able to piece together "what happened." But the movie makes no amends to explain any of those things--this is a purely avant garde move. People don't like not knowing what's going one, ever. If you're going to withhold information, you better damn well come up with it later, otherwise, you're establishing a Red Herring, because your audience will spend the entire time trying to find out "what happens," and they hate it when they can't get some form of resolution. Remember how pissed off you were when you never found out what was in the suitcase in Pulp Fiction? Things like that eat at you. We're wired to want to know why. This movie not only keeps the answers from us, but it punches us in the gut at the end when the lead character says to the camera, "If you're seeing this then you probably know more about what's going on than we do."

I think if you asked one of the makers of Cloverfield why they chose not to reveal things, they'd probably say something like, "it's not about the monster; it's about the characters' relationships, and coming to terms with their love for each other." And deep down, Cloverfield is exactly that: a love story about friends who are about to be separated (the guy is going to work in Japan), and they just realized they love each other. The climax of the movie following this model is when Guy saves girl from girl's apartment--they have united in their love for each other and forgiven each other for the fight they had at the party. But this is a monster movie, not a love story. However, only the love story gets any sense of resolution; the characters do change, and their dramatic arc is upheld. And since this is a monster movie, the audience gives less of a shit about the protagonist and his girlfriend, and a lot more about identifying the monster, and seeing how it gets killed--such is the nature of monster movies. Unfortunately, we learn very little about the monster. We don't know what it is (alien, water creature, other). We don't know why it attacked. We don't know why it isn't being harmed by FUCKING TANKS, BAZOOKAS, and BOMBS. Nor do we know if the military managed to kill it.

So, structurally speaking, Cloverfield also departs from the standard scheme of dramatic structure to it's very own modified version. Now let's take a look at Cloverfield's Dramatic Structure
First look at the standard dramatic structure model. Line AB represents a story's exposition. BC is the story's rising action, which climaxes at point C. CD is the Denouement of the story, which should be resolved relatively quickly. This model of dramatic structure is the standard model used in most forms of art and film; it's predictable and we expect it.

Cloverfield uses a modified model. In Cloverfield, AB is the party scene--this is the portion of the story that is wholly exposition. Once the Monster attacks, however, the movie's true plot takes off, leading on a steep incline of increasing tension. The reason Cloverfield's BC line is so steep is because Cloverfield abandons the traditional pattern of building and releasing tension throughout the progression to the climax. The tension levels in Cloverfield continue to rise, because the danger never abates, nor is a resolution met. Essentially Cloverfield is all rising action that climaxes with the characters' deaths at point D. Notice how there is no Denouement here. Denouement is important, and though it should be kept short, it shouldn't be left off unless it is well justified. Had the movie made use of its framing structure, the denouement could have been relayed within the frame--much like the Princess Bride.

Also notice how Cloverfield's climax isn't really the climax of the film. Point C in Cloverfield represents the point in which they save the girlfriend from the tower. But since no one is safe, nor is anyone irrevocably changed, point C isn't the true climax of the film--it's more of a subplot climax, and within the subplot climax, the characters are finally together again, but they're not safely out of the city, so while the love plot is more or less resolved, it's still contained by the larger, unexplained arc of the monster plot.

Cloverfield uses its alternate dramatic model to keep viewers interested by overloading our sense of tension. We feel anxious and afraid, because for 84 minutes, we are constantly on the edge of our seats. Unfortunately, this model fails because it offers no real resolution at the end, and such an unresolved ending leads to audience dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction because we expect to gain some sort of reward for sitting through a movie made with bad video footage, and ultra-high tension. We get nothing. And because we get nothing, the movie fails in it's only true goal, entertainment.

It's unfortunate that many movie-goers think that this movie is too clever for them. It's not. It's unfinished, and it doesn't live up to our expectations, especially considering the hype surrounding it. And though most of this post seems to advocate a more mainstream approach, it's not what I'm calling for. I want to see more experimental films hit the big screen, and I have seen several that do a great job: Crank, Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, and Snatch all come to mind. But Cloverfield is not the new vein of monster movie. It's a failed attempt. And while it might garner some better copycats, its own nature is flawed. The movie has broken its bond with the audience, and did nothing to help restore that bond.

Those are my two cents; hopefully future film makers, fiction writers, and other creative types (including myself) will heed these paired pennies and make way for a future in experimental art where the masses aren't afraid to sample the weird, the strange, the unexpected.