I’d be willing to wager a hefty sum that not many viewers of Cloverfield emerged from the movie thinking about the poet Ezra Pound, which is (I believe) all the more reason to obsess over what’s to follow.
The likeness has nothing to do with quality. Cloverfield has been enjoyed by many and is, for what it is, good. Ezra Pound’s poetry has been enjoyed by almost no one outside the stuffiest of literary circles … and is not good. I was assigned several works of his during a seminar in college, and met them with all the affection of the barrel of an Uzi. That he’s an able writer and knew a lot of pretty languages just made his inscrutable nonsense all the more vexing to me.
What smacked of Pound to me about Cloverfield when I finally saw it (I somehow missed it during college, though I was an avid moviegoer and fit snugly within its core demographic) has almost nothing to do with the movie itself. Rather, it’s the ardent and incredibly detail-attentive J.J. Abrams fanbase, whose buzzings amplified the mysterious and whispered-about project to the level of near phenomenon before it had even come out. Even now, a simple Google search will tap you into an avalanche of theories, “facts”, clues, portents, inside references, outside references and outright guesses that together compose the Cloverfield mythology.
What may be a mite perplexing to the casual viewer, though, is that elements of the mythology widely held to be accurate simply are not indicated by the film’s actual onscreen goings-on. Most famously, the film’s unnamed behemoth was supposedly slumbering for centuries beneath New York Harbor before being jostled into wakefulness by a fallen satellite. Technically, the last shot of the movie includes a glimpse of the satellite crash far in the distance but this a) is still far from explanatory and b) is so imperceptible that no one could ever be expected to have noticed it. Knowing of its alleged existence, I watched the film frame-by-frame a dozen times or more looking for it and, if it’s really there, I missed it.
There are tidbits more tenuous even than this. The film’s main character, who in the movie’s timeframe is preparing to depart New York for Japan, has (I glean from the annals) been offered a job at a Japanese company in some way responsible for mutating the creature that eventually takes his life. There’s even a staunchly refuted supposition that the alien in the Abrams-directed Super 8 is in some way tied to the Cloverfield alien and that the connection will be revealed in a later sequel/prequel. I’ve never heard anything about either movie having a link to Lost, but you have to believe the rumors are out there. That’s part of the fun of the J.J. canon. His hardcore fans have an infinite superhighway of goodies to absorb that only they’ll ever be privy to.
By a similar token, readers of Pound’s The Cantos are meant to bring much more to the table than simply what’s on the page. His sources are so numerous and varied that even the most well-read scholar must have a commentary on hand to figure out what the hell he’s getting at. He’ll shift freely between languages – the Classical languages, the Romance languages, a bunch of Chinese dialects. His defenders will claim to their friends he’s going for well-roundedness and not obtuseness, but then I’d imagine that Pound’s defenders don’t have a lot of friends.
Most persuasive in making me realize I was never going to be content as an academic, maybe, was this notion of “critical reading”. Professors would stress to me time and again that reading at the collegiate level was meant to be done dispassionately. You’re supposed to react to texts with your brain, not your heart. And being told that just made me want to rip the ivy off the walls and lash them with it. (Of course, these were all people who enjoyed the process of deconstruction and I was not – so we were never going to come eye to eye.)
Part of the reason I’ve always loved reading film criticism more than literary criticism is because it’s necessarily done from the heart. Detailed as one may get about dissecting the fine points of it, the medium is on the whole too enveloping and literal to be approached on a purely academic basis. And if that’s a nebulous way of saying I hope to Christ they never try to make a movie out of anything written by Ezra Pound, so be it.
I love J.J. Abrams and, outsider though I am, I’m admittedly fascinated by the ongoing hypothesizings of his rabid fans. Because, when you sit in a darkened room and watch J.J.’s creature alight on a ravaged Manhattan, it doesn’t matter where it came from or what awakened it. The answers are out there for you if you’re interested, but what’s there on the screen is still whole and self-consistent enough to be satisfying.
Even if it’s not how I do things (I’m more a believer that the story should start and end on the page), I can safely say my copy of Cloverfield will lie unscathed on my bookshelf while my Cantos is flying through the window and into the rainy gutter where it belongs.
