How Was Your Day?

“It’s about moments. That’s all that matters. You gotta hang on to the people that matter.” – Hudson “Hud” Platt from Cloverfield

In Hollywood, apocalyptic stories sell. Audiences delight in seeing our world, and specifically New York City, destroyed.  Some of the more recent films that I have seen that cash in on this oblique eschatological hope include the end-times survival tale of I Am Legend, and Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem, which takes a kind of cynical glee in the symbolic destruction of middle America.  These stories fit into previously-established subgenres well-suited to apocalyptic themes, but Cloverfield is the latest, and best, to venture into the most apocalyptic genre of them all: the giant monster movie.

In Cloverfield, a monster invades New York City, and Hudson “Hud” Platt, our single point-of-view amateur camera man, bears first-hand witness to the monster’s rampage as his camera tracks his buddy Rob and their ensemble through the devastated landscape.  The single camera “Blair Witch” P.O.V. employed by Cloverfield brings classic monster movie elements into the YouTube century, with an intensity not born of the monster’s ferocity, but an acute sense of imminence and intimacy. You’re watching someone’s home video, only instead of getting a baseball in the crotch, people die.  The conceit of the film’s opening is that you’re watching government property, recovered footage from a video camera, and this allows the film to set an odd pacing and jump-cut style that makes even Paul Greengrass’s Bourne movies seem steady.

Ultimately, I believe the story is about survival and redemption.  Like many monster movies, the story is less about the antagonistic forces and more about watching human relationships tighten or fragment in the pressure cooker of crisis.  Cloverfield naturally shows very real reactions to unthinkable events. In Rob and Beth’s case, their reaction to eminent danger is to drop all the petty static of life and cling to what really matters. Who means the most? Who would you run to when the world collapses? These moments show your true priorities quickly and clearly.  With lives on the line, Rob is forced to look deeply at what he wants in life, and what love means to him. His quest to rescue Beth isn’t just about saving her life, it’s about redeeming their relationship, which ultimately makes the film a love story with a giant squid and citywide destruction as window dressing.

There is also the haunting idea lurking in the shadows of the narrative, in regard to making a “video record” of our lives. It’s wondering what last thoughts or words we’re going to leave behind when faced with our own mortality.  It’s wondering about how, or if, we’ll be remembered. Coupled with the indiscriminate death that rains down on the film’s protagonists, their fear reflects the angst of Solomon and something we often try to avoid thinking about:

Then I said in my heart, “What happens to the fool will happen to me also. Why then have I been so very wise?” And I said in my heart that this also is vanity. For of the wise as of the fool there is no enduring remembrance, seeing that in the days to come all will have been long forgotten. How the wise dies just like the fool! So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me, for all is vanity and a striving after wind. – Ecclesiastes 2:15-17

The film’s ending, like the very nature of the film, is subjective and will undoubtedly have viewers debating its merit. It doesn’t answer all the big questions of what’s happening, or where the monster comes from, or why it’s here.  Rob does not become Will Smith and fly in to save the day. Hud does not remember the dying words of his wife and realize they are the key to disabling the monster. Lily does not discover automatic weapons in her purse and transform into Sigourney Weaver. And the monster does not develop a life-threatening cold and die.  Instead, in my humble opinion, the narrative ends precisely as it should have.

One of the more interesting parts of Cloverfield is that the video footage we see isn’t only of that last day. At the beginning of the tape, at a few points throughout filming, and at its end is a day that Beth and Rob shared a month earlier and that Hud is accidentally recording over.  The two main scenes from this other day occur at the very beginning and the very end of the movie. In the first, Rob tells us, “It’s already a good day.” Of course, the day that follows on the videotape turns out to be a horror. By the end, Rob and Beth are the only ones left. They both record terrified final messages saying, “If you’re watching this, you probably know more about it than I do” and “I don’t know why this happening.” Rubble crashes around them. The camera is buried. And suddenly, we are back with Rob and Beth before. With only a few seconds of recording time left, Rob asks Beth what her last words to the camera will be. And with smile, Beth says, “I had a good day.”

I have to say, the juxtaposition of those two “last” scenes is eerie. In many ways, their effect is to emphasize how horrible and surprising the events that took place are. You could say that by recording over Rob and Beth’s “good day” with their last day, death literally erases life. But because of the fact that the movie ends with a scene of life instead of death, I would say that Cloverfield actually points to the exact opposite.

Even though there is death, life still gets the last word. And at the end of it all, Cloverfield makes me think of life beyond death and reminds of C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce. Certainly death has a note of finality to it. But if there are such things as heaven and hell and eternal life, death is in no way the end. And to brutally excerpt and paraphrase Lewis, when it comes to eternity, “both good and evil, when they are fully grown, become retrospective.”  And whether our life on earth was full of peace, beauty, clarity, horror, tragedy, or confusion, we will be able to look back on it all and say, “I had a good day.”