Hearts and Clovers

(This was going to be a much better post before I spent the whole morning on it and then Blogger lost the whole fucking thing. I'm much less patient now.)




I saw Cloverfield last night.

It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. It wasn't the masterpiece I was led to expect by its young fans, either.

And that was my first clue about what kind of movie it would be - all the people who told me to see it were young.

I've had a fetish since I was a grade-schooler about the way I watch movies - I feel the center.

In fourth-grade social studies class, we were asked to watch a crackly film version of "The Miracle Worker" and write an essay about the 'lesson to be learned.'

For everybody who missed that movie, its the story of how plucky orphan Yankee Annie Sullivan rescues plucky but wild blind deaf-mute-turned feral child Helen Keller from the smothering co-dependence of her antebellum family and leads her Into the Light.

Annie Sullivan's own bio was much better but that's not what we're talking about here.

There is a pivotal scene, when Annie and Helen are locked together in the dining room during lunch until Annie finally breaks Helen's stubborn will and gets her to sit her ass down and eat with a knife and fork. There is much symbolism surrounding a folded napkin.

I ended up writing about this scene.

"The room's a mess, but she folded her napkin". "My Helen? folded her napkin?"

What I wrote about, was when the 'servant' , Viney, slowly and cautiously opens the kitchen door to say "Should I start dinner now, Captain?"

That, to me, was the lesson to be learned.
There was so much in that scene.

"Yeah, miracles happen. I'm a slave. That means my children, and their children's children, and all my work, and everything I do, goes to someone else, forever. Your blindness to this don't even register anymore. It's a major blindness, compared to the more obvious blindness of that smartest person in your family there. What do we do except do the next thing? Somebody's miracle is always someone else's mess, and they're always dinner to be made".
My teacher wrote across the top of my paper - "You have found the heart of the story".

Ever since that day, me any my movie-watching buds have played 'Heart of the Story' with movies.

Most movies, the big, assigned ones like the Miracle Worker that we're told to like, don't have a heart.

In some movies the heart comes at the end of a long-ass action sequence, like a German verb.
It's the grace note that affirms everything that happened before - Rabbit taking the bus back to the factory at the end of "8 Mile"; the nearly-unnoticed sequence where Uncle Rico's estranged wife comes bicycling back into his deserted life in the closing credits of "Napoleon Dynamite".

Other movies are all heart. The center of the movie is like the green part in the middle of a white flower, the part that makes everything fresh and even more like itself.
The plastic bag dance in "American Beauty" does this, and not as anviliciously as most movies do. Love is literally in the air, right in front of you, or between that lonely couple there,and people are throwing it away to fill more plastic bags with trashy daydreams. Fear blows away once you recognize the love lurking in gutters.

Several minutes into "Cloverfield", I had a flash of deja-vu that I couldn't quite identify. I finally pinned it to "The Pianist" when the party spilled onto the Brooklyn Bridge scene.

The heart of The Pianist was when the urbane and handsome assilimated city boy finally discovers exactly what type of threat he is facing, exactly as we in the theater experience it.

The little tribe who we follow subjectively through Cloverfield are always just outside of this realization. That's good moviemaking, and makes for some good suspense.

Or so I thought until I found my mind wandering in the middle sequence.

Where did the movie get its name?

The most muscular heart to ever pump life throughout a life-affirming movie was in "A Very Long Engagement". Mathilde (another plucky orphan...hmm...) returns to the scene of the preposterously named "Bingo Crepuscle" trench to sift the ground for clues of her fiance's death. And there is no trace of the blood or mayhem, only poppies and daisies.

I finally figured out what bugged me about the movie I was watching.

This isn't about the threat to our security in the adumbrations of 9-11 blahblahblah. There is no screen time squandered on burned survivors, guilt-wracked rescue workers, or Falling Men.

This movie goes straight to the poppies-and-flowers part of the disaster, without even giving the fallen the dignity of showing realistic death...or anything approaching the portrayal of a real New Yorker's life. It made me long for the realism of "Mars Attacks".

Looking around the theater at the soft designer-jeaned butts filling the seats, I suddenly flashed on a quote from a recent Pete Townshend podcast - "This generation is dying of stupid vanity. Check out the headlines on the front pages of Social Network sites - 'Yes, I'm worried about Pakistan and Iran, and prepared for a terrorist attack, but first I have to save for my veneers and a boob job, and then you can put the tape on my Facebook'."



The heart of "Cloverfield" isn't the they-all-get-hit-by-a-bus ending.

Its when the beautiful dewy-skinned young people contemplate the nature of the threat racing towards them, with a Sephora storefront behind them.

It's not the Godzilla-with-nuclear-crab-lice monster lurking around the coasts of this big, increasingly isolated and divided paranoid nation-state.

What the hell is so scary about the kind of death immortalized in that I Melt With You last scene? They made a great movie and each left a good-looking corpse.

The threat is going unfilmed. The idea of living an un-YouTube-worthy life is a the real underlying fear.

,
Of being passed over as not worthy of being documented on digital (like the co-worker who deleted her Buzznet in tears today because some asshole called her 'too old').

Of a slow, gradual, unremarkable death. Of dying by invisible degrees, killed, like the poor souls brave enough to face the thing that bit them, by being dismantled from the inside-out by the un-prettifying monster.