Evidence of Things Not Quite Seen: Cloverfield's Obstructed Spectacle

Matt Reeves' Cloverfield (2008) plays with vision and concealment, staging a game of "hide and seek" between audiences and the monster it promises to deliver. As a self-conscious entry in the monster movie genre, Cloverfield discloses its monstrous predator only in glimpses, through visual effects that allude to much, but reveal little. In this, the film departs from the usual cinematic treatments of monsters, which are typically displayed like curious zoological specimens: fantastic life forms whose features are to be studied, their destructive capabilities catalogued, and their weaknesses exploited. Our desire to experience the spectacle of these creatures is closely linked to our fascination with the novel visual effects technologies often tasked with animating them, creating interdependence between cinematic spectacle and cinematic technology – interdependence that Cloverfield uniquely complicates.

We often think of spectacular cinematic illusions as stimulants that short-circuit our intellectual engagement by overwhelming our senses, particularly, by stressing the visual, but these illusions can deliver powerful semic payloads even as they punctuate a storyline with shock and color. By exploring the limits of visualisation, special effects act as entry-points for spectators to consider the constructed nature of film (North 2008). Whatever sleights-of-hand they might use to cover their tracks, these special effects are self-reflexive devices that draw attention to visual deception, and bring into play an entire meta narrative about media technologies and illusion. This is most apparent in those films that foreground technical display (see, for instance how King Kong, in any of its versions, builds its story around a special effect that is also its pivotal character), but Cloverfield seems to complicate all of its spectacular opportunities, delaying any clear view of its central special effect. The monster at its heart is rarely glimpsed, usually obscured by buildings or misframed by the camera.

The film's obstructed views extend to the whole fabric of the movie, including its pre-publicity campaign and its framing narrative. I want to outline some of the ways I think the film uses this aesthetic of opacity to construct a critique of film's apparent realism. The amateur aesthetic of Cloverfield is not just a "trick" to allow spectators to imagine that the depicted events are really happening before the camera. By simulating the impression that the monster is a chaotic agent not under the control of the filmmakers, not served up for viewing as a spectacular "pay-off," Cloverfield feigns the appearance of documentary, where events should not seem to be unfolding in patterns pre-determined by genre or commercial expectation. Yet it is clearly a fantastic tale and therefore implies that, by convention, we associate documentary realism with specific formal techniques..

Cloverfield is a film about a monster attack on Manhattan, presented as the playback of a digital videotape shot by an amateur cameraman during the attack and later found in the city's rubble. A large creature of unknown origin emerges, presumably from the sea, and rampages downtown, leaving a tourist trail of destruction that takes in the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge and Central Park. The attack is shown from the point-of-view of a group of young adults who have been attending a party just before the city is thrown into a chaotic evacuation. The US military can be seen periodically, fighting a futile battle with the skyscraper-tall monster, which begins throwing off parasites that infect their victims with a lethal virus. One character defies the danger and attempts to cross the city to rescue the girl to whom he wants to declare his love, believing her to be in mortal danger. In this sense, Cloverfield follows a rather formulaic quest narrative, driven by a hero's race to rescue a damsel in distress from a high tower, avoiding the mortal threat posed by a fearsome beast. The story is the stuff of myths and fairy tales, but the film's elaborate experiments with form clothe it in very modern attire.

The film opens with a coded, time-stamped label announcing that the tape is now...