Universal humyn story in "Cloverfield" masks ugly militarist tune
Cloverfield
Directed by Matt Reeves
Bad Robot (J.J. Abrams)
84 minutes
M/14A/PG-13/15
2008
2008 January 21
Big unstoppable monster thing with freaky spider spawn attacks. U.$. military retaliates. Gee, can't really object to anything there. MIWS would be running away, too. Or maybe collaborating with the monster to minimize the bloodshed necessary to defeat imperialism.
As usual, it is not possible to understand a movie like this in terms of just its fantasy fictional content, its escapism. MIWS just got done writing about robot, monster, alien, zombie movies etc. as expressing amerikans' visceral fear of dark-skinned working people, and here we have another movie to add to the list. It looks like Hollywood is going to keep churning out this crap until it capitulates to the international proletariat or is overthrown.
"Cloverfield" is being compared to "Godzilla." There is no comparison except in the minds of fascists and so-called communists who think an Islamic imperialism attacked New York in 2001, or think 9/11=Hiroshima. "Cloverfield" offers no explanation for violence and is deliberately vague about the nature of the monster, except for the bumbling, comical best friend's (T.J. Miller) speculation that the monster may be the Frankenstein outcome of u.$. military innovation. Sure, MIWS gets it, but most viewers won't. The special effects and action are too overwhelming.
The first Godzilla movies had some progressive potential seen in non-Japanese imperialist countries. "Cloverfield" is just reactionary in a visceral way. "Cloverfield" is so devoid of plot or intellectual substance that there is little MIWS can say that is specific to the movie. MIWS really has to scrape the bottom for something to talk about in this review. With a decapitated Lady Liberty in the trailer, "Cloverfield" was over for MIWS before it even started. The movie is not a call to arms to Liberals. It just allows dominator parasite amerikkkans to experience the excitement of being attacked from the comfort of their theater seats. The knee-jerk response is more itching for militarism and military and spy agency spending. The monster overwhelms the scrambling humyns and impressively armed military throughout the movie, but the movie's ambiguous ending conveys the optimism that, despite all the violence, amerika may still win. The movie appears as shaky amateur footage recovered by the u.$. government; this is the pretext used to hook and draw the audience into the film.
This movie's technical artistic merits are indisputable. MIWS has never seen anything like it. MIWS also does not doubt the authenticity of "Cloverfield." It absolutely represents the feelings and interests of the u.$. petty-bourgeoisie, the average Joe and Jane; the everyman, any boob with a cell phone or camera; the yuppie, the beer-guzzling, belly-itching TV watcher, a white female who had sex with a white male who is leaving her to go to another country -- so appropriate in these "globalized" times. The rest of the world is portrayed as a threat to Euro-Amerikan female-biology adults' gender privilege. Hysterical parasites whined about jobs' moving overseas. Now Hollywood comes out with these white nationalist attacks on "globalization" and foreigners from a gender aristocracy angle.
An amerikan adult female character at the end of the movie asks out loud (paraphrasing), why is all this happening to her. MIWS will answer: Because you and your boyfriends are exploiting, oppressing and repressing billions of people: the world's exploited, the world's colonized, and the world's wimmin.
Whites mingle with non-whites (Jessica Lucas) in this movie, but no migrants are conspicuous. "Cloverfield" is appropriate for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which for most amerikans means sharing the imperialist booty with Oprah Winfrey, Geraldo Rivera, Connie Chung, Tiger Woods, and David Blaine, while locking up "gangbangers" and drug addicts, repressing migrants, and bombing Third World people -- an attitude rooted in parasitism that makes a majority of amerikans part of the world bourgeoisie. Also, "Cloverfield" encourages oppressed nationals in the united $tates to unite with Euro-Amerikans against an external enemy. The Black nation, First Nations and Latino nations are internal oppressed nations inside u.$. borders. Part of the struggle for self-determination is opposing neo-colonialism in the guise of super-profit integrationism. As oppressed nationals living in the united $tates become bourgeoisified, the struggles of the internal semi-colonies become more intertwined with those of Third World nations. The Black Panther Party at its most revolutionary correctly recognized the limitations of relying on just the forces inside the united $tates, and the need for an international proletarian force to defeat imperialism from without, and related that to global imperialist exploitation.(1)
"Cloverfield" and movies like it, that are visceral or banal and lack substance, raise an additional question about the nature of culture. For the bourgeoisie, culture and other aspects of society are reflections principally of universal humyn nature (or the worst of it, if one considers moralistic reviews of "Cloverfield"), rather than of classes and social groups, forces and structures. Communism is seen as aberrant. The bourgeois theory underlies the majority of bourgeois ideology and habitual bourgeois conversation, despite biological, racist and postmodernist refinements that lead back to Liberalism and various theories of humyn development legitimizing colonialism. The theory of "human" nature was denounced by Mao Zedong in Yenan and by the masses during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which aimed to overthrow the new bourgeoisie that emerged in the Communist Party of China. MIWS could invent some examples of how the bourgeois theory would be used to understand "Cloverfield," but actually one only needs to look at a few bourgeois reviews of the movie. For example, Roger Ebert's review (which calls the spider things "parasitic lice"), besides being a mostly descriptive review, conveys an impression of frightened, bewildered individuals' just trying to survive and helping each other as friends or fellow humyns. The only twist the review mentions, which actually still represents bourgeois views of humyn nature, is that Rob (Michael Stahl-David) goes back for Beth (Odette Yustman), for whom he has romantic feelings. Additionally, Ebert's review does not offer a breakdown of the movie's likely effects on different groups of viewers, amerikans, First Worlders, Third Worlders, migrants, First Nations people, Blacks, Boricuas, etc. Everyone's the same, implicitly except for "extremists," "radicals," and "criminals," who are mostly oppressed nationals. (In what is supposed to be a comical and perhaps politically correct moment, main character Rob steals what he needs, a cell phone battery, from an electronics store, while other looters take more pricey items. Rob still ends up looking like a good guy.) Some people just get dizzy. Oh-so-witty Ebert compares his physical experience with others': "After the screening, I heard some fellow audience members complaining that they felt dizzy or had vertigo, but no one barfed, at least within my hearing." Hey, it's the white man's world...
Art and reviews that concentrated on situations and elements pertaining to supposed abstract humyn nature, or that focused primarily on technique abstractly, were criticized and denounced by Maoists and the masses in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. MIWS upholds the Cultural Revolution as the highest development of class struggle in history. There have been advances in theory since the Cultural Revolution in various areas, but the basic criticism of the bourgeois theory of humyn nature has not changed. There is no two-line struggle over the theory of humyn nature today, because the battle over that has already been fought, and the struggle has advanced. MIWS considers all manifestations of the bourgeois theory of humyn nature today in so-called Marxism in any area to be incorrect. MIWS would only discuss the theory to contrast it with historical materialism, to persuade some intellectuals, without confusing that with line struggle or scientific advancement. Grasping why the theory of humyn nature is wrong is a key link in opposing various forms of Liberalism.
Notes
1. http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/contemp/internalclass3.htm; http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/bpp/bpp19680928_6_14.html