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We do not live in the pre-Information Age in which the Mercury Theatre players convinced a sizeable portion of the United States populace that Martians had indeed landed in New Jersey.  The near-omnipresence of the Internet and broadcast television has forged a double-edged sword of suspicion and gullibility.  On the one hand, extremely clever hoaxters — technologically savvy and with way more time to kill than their parents’ parents — are shockingly adept at constructing rather plausible home videos of things that have not happened. Star Wars fans can make fifteen-minute videos of very realistic-looking lightsaber battles; politically subversive activists can upload doctored videos of public figures saying things they never said. The “reality” we each perceive and understand, according to the information fed to us by our senses and its organization by our amazing brains, is generally “constructed” by our neural circuitry.  Humans are hardwired with essentially the same incalculably complex archive infrastructure that files away the stimuli we experience.  Living in the age of mass media, with the Net taking precedence as The Source for information about the world around us, we may be witnessing the development of new forms of neural organization, as well as increasingly complicated ways of dissecting and understanding the information we consume on a daily basis.

The rise of online journalism, most notably in the blogosphere, poured a metric ton of gasoline on the burning debate over journalistic standards and how they are — or aren’t — upheld by writers unaccountable to editors, publishers, and a paying public.  However, for the entertainment industry, truth vs. untruth is a negligible issue, especially where “publicity is as publicity does.”  Gossip columns, which one reads for salacious detail, not for accuracy, can boost a falling star’s visibility or provide a convenient platform for leaked information about a highly-anticipated project, or to build hype for projects that would otherwise fly entirely under the radar.  Though the various media have for centuries been subject to both reasonable skepticism and idiotic credulity, especially where information flow is concerned, the built-in apparatuses of critical thinking or doubt that were cultivated over the last few generations are no longer adequate to the task.  Information spreads too rapidly and in rapidly evolving form for the older, cruder methods to be able to successfully vet good information from bad.  I perceive a tendency emerging to doubt too much or to be so overwhelmed by the mass of data that screening out the bum raps just isn’t worth the effort.

However, simple litmus tests remain.  A video of a pair of geeks fighting with realistic lightsabers is more likely to be understood as “false” than a doctored video of a politician’s latest speech because everyone knows that laser swords are fictitious; they’re the stuff of fantasy, however plausible the battle may appear.  Beyond the lightsabers themselves, though, more acute scrutiny will quickly recognize the rudimentary techniques of narrative cinema, which, though pervasive in our media-saturated society, are apparent upon inspection.  Editing for continuity; added, polished sound or music; the careful choreography of the fight, etc. all point to authorship, the deliberately constructed illusion of reality that we see in our movies and television programs.  Just because we’ve accepted these conventions in our popular narratives does not mean we honestly tend to honestly mistake the illusion in our entertainment for objective truth.  Even viewers who are less than media savvy recognize that the tidy little 45-second news spots we see are comprised of pickup shots, carefully selected sound bites, and the hastily-written narrative of the reporter, whose stretch for objectivity is never entirely successful.  [1] In short, a quick-and-easy litmus test for whether a video clip is “real” or “unreal” is whether or not it incorporates any genre tropes.

Since zombies and ginormous amphibi-reptilian beasts are not part of the accepted lexicon of what constitutes “reality” for most humans, there is little danger that the images of Diary of the Dead or Cloverfield would be mistaken for genuine “found footage,” however plausible the effects are.  Further destabilizing the illusion of authenticity is the fact that these were mainstream movies, which benefited from advance marketing hype.  Moviegoers who saw the first Cloverfield teaser before Michael Bay’s Transformers in the summer of 2007 may not have known what exactly the movie was about (or the film’s title), but they knew it was a narrative fiction genre film.  Anyone aware enough of Diary of the Dead’s existence to seek it out would be enough of a horror aficionado to know its premise, and certainly aware enough of its legendary auteur.  These were not cases of deliberate confusion sown by the filmmakers, a la 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, the most obvious antecedent of Cloverfield and Diary’s aesthetic.

Romero is evidently comfortable with acknowledging the artifice of cinematic structure and meaning in Diary of the Dead.  His premise pulls back the curtain a little from the start, with its narrator announcing her presence and her intentions.  Diary is identified as a documentary titled “The Death of Death,” assembled from footage shot by the protagonists and gleaned from the Internet after the onset of a zombie plague.  Music has also been added for effect, we are told.  The film then opens with a wink-wink tableaux of a student film crew shooting a thesis film in the woods that pokes fun of genre conventions that are nudge-nudgingly used at the film’s climax.  Since Diary is offered as a documentary rather than purely found footage, its structure and conventions are more digestible than the inserted framework of Cloverfield.  Even so, it breaks a lot of its own rules, with simple things like the amount of coverage violating spatial and linear continuity, and the postmodern jests at the horror formula.  Romero’s jokes are so well-timed and/or outrageous that their very entertainment value fractures the illusion of the documentary form.  As a “mockumentary,” it doesn’t quite reach for Spinal Tap yuks-a-minute, so the precarious balance between satire and suspense fluctuates from scene to scene.  When our narrator, Debra, finally arrives home to find that her family has already been zombified, the nature of the presentation inclines us to react with empathetic despair, but the money shot of her kid brother getting an arrow through the head (pinning him to the wall) is a little too crowd-pleasing for the moment to register on a gut level, the same way that way that a little girl stabbing her parents to death with a garden trowel hit home in Night of the Living Dead.  Romero has never played the absurdity of rotting corpses feeding on flesh for pure jocularity; his preoccupation with social satire has always solicited laughs, but the situation itself has never invited howls.  Romero wants to have fun, but he wants us to take it a little seriously, too.

Diary’s infrastructure is forced, and as usual, his soft targets are mass media disinformation, paranoid fear of the government, the rise of the oppressed, etc.  As an cross-sectional study of a post-apocalyptic U.S.A., Diary is par for Romero.  His greatest success lies with a theme that has recurred throughout his films, but more as a plot necessity than pointed barb: the inhumanity of man to man. Someone always does something selfish and stupid that screws over the rest of the survivors, and usually brings the dispassionate wrath of the zombie hordes down on the pitiful human band for the flesh-munching finale.  There are casually cruel soldiers, opportunistic scavengers, and ruthless members of the ruling elite.  Again, soft targets we expect Romero to assail, since he came of age in a decade where hating the Establishment and regarding upstanding citizens as the real monsters was what all the cool kids did.

Romero finally hits a hard target without didacticism or the kind of broad, almost farcical characterizations that weakened his previous films.  When the RV full of survivors is stopped by the the Army (or National Guard, or whoever), the soldiers steal all the supplies.  The most terrifying moment comes when the Head Soldier orders the cameraman to turn the camera off… and the camera goes off.  Hitherto, all the gore and violence had been shown in all its CGI-enhanced glory.  But that was zombie gore.  When the real men with real guns show up, all of a sudden, for a few seconds, we’re left entirely in the dark.  Anything could be happening.  Rape.  Torture.  A mass execution.  Then the camera flicks back on, and the Men With Guns are departing with all the food, the survivors’ faces emaciated by disillusion.  By not showing such a personal violation, Romero elides simply bashing Establishment figures and makes his typically scattershot ideological attack sharp, focused, and concrete.  The shit that goes down when no one’s watching: that’s what we need to be afraid of.

Well, until the climax, that is.  Throughout the film, Romero toys with the voyeurism inherent in any horror picture.  His situations and characters are too, well, Romero-esque to work as plausibly “real;” they’re judged by the measuring stick of plausibility in a post-apocalyptic Romero zombie flick.  However, one thing one does not see in Romero’s other zombie films is genuine sadism.  It lurks under the surface, usually exerted upon the undead by the more privileged, bourgeoisie living, but most of the graphic onscreen moments are simply instances of a walking corpse getting its snack attack on.  When Jason, the aspiring director who has become obsessed with filming the events around him, finally snaps, he shoots the footage of a zombie chasing his scantily-clad friend through the forest as she screams for help, rather than actually helping her.  Though the film’s opening scene foreshadows this sequence, the astonishing inhumanity of it is appalling.  Rather than madness, Romero suggests that this is merely a logical extension of Jason’s disconnect from reality; his disconnect from humanity.  By virtue of keeping his camera trained on the horror rather than engaging it directly, the cameraman is worse than a zombie.  At least an undead cannibal hungers for physical communion with the living; Jason cannot bring himself to commune with the quick or the dead.

For Jason, a member of the YouTube generation, reality and fiction haven’t blurred; reality and fiction were always somewhat inseparable.  Genre tropes or no, the extent to which he could control his perception of reality dictated his reality.  Of course, karma, in the form of another, freshly zombified friend, bites Jason on the ass (or, more accurately, his neck), but his work lives on.  His ex-girlfriend finishes his film for him, using clips from the Internet for context, and uploads it.  Her ostensible rationale for finishing the film is so that the viewer “won’t make the same mistakes,” begging the question of whether or not the mistakes are violating the ground rules for surviving a horror film, perpetuating the social problems Romero broadly satirizes, or engaging in voyeurism-as-participation.

Confronting the audience members in this fashion asks them why they watch.  Since most films do not directly address the existence of the real-world audience, the purpose of the films’ existence is assumed to be diversion or thematic relevance — if a movie has “something to say,” it will do so through its story, and we glean it to the best of our critical training.  Found footage, especially of the variety uploaded to the Web, serves no real “purpose” apart from the creators’ desire to share fragments of their life experience, or for posterity.  Documentaries are esoteric by virtue of most moviegoers’ preference to spend leisure time experiencing something other than reality; found footage is esoteric by virtue of its unbounded solipsism.  Perhaps because there is no set “purpose” to existence, watching real lives shaped by the conventions of documentary narrative is viscerally appealing for its own sake.  Blending “reality programming” with genres of the fantastic combines the preference for escapism with the thrill we get from mastering our own destinies by framing the human experience within a satisfying narrative.  Cloverfield took that a step further by attempting to scale the mountain of utter verisimilitude: making a film in the YouTube vein — a film so pointless, it could only be real. [2]

Unlike Blair Witch directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, Romero and Abrams did not limply perpetuate the veneer of a hoax — they traded on their established reputations as storytellers.  However, Abrams & Co. picked up on Myrick and Sanchez’s clever viral marketing campaign, conducted mostly online, providing “clues” and disparate pieces of leaked information for Web-surfers to collate and obsess over as the film neared its 1-18-08 release date.

Rather than encouraging enterprising techno-geeks to determine whether or not there even was a witch, and if so, what her story was, Cloverfield courted the peculiar, recent phenomenon of what I will call Spoilage.  Aside from expanding upon the film’s story and its penchant for drawing viewers interactively into the story experience — making them active, engaged participants — a major, motivating factor for a lot of pre-fans (what else would you call them?) was simply to figure out what the hell the movie was actually about.  Nowadays, any genre film with a sizable budget plays a cat-and-mouse game with moviegoers.  With the advent of digital technology and the Internet, stories from the set, casting rumors, script pages, and video clips from the set can be disseminated around the globe in minutes.  The fact that we no longer have to wait for a movie to be finished for us to know the entire story (as well as the manner of its presentation) has created a bizarre subculture of film geeks who will deliberately spoil a film’s secrets for themselves months in advance of the film’s release date. [3] Besides genuine enthusiasm for the films, the modern genre film geek acquires a measure of status by being the first to “break” the latest Spoilage on a highly-anticipated project.  Much as scooping other journalists would give a reporter prestige, having a comprehensive mental picture of a motion picture before its first projection appears to be a demonstration of virility.  Our culture moves so fast that we can now “see” a movie before it’s even complete.

As one of the few films in recent memory to successfully thwart most attempts as Spoilage while dancing the tango with the spoiler kings and queens of the Web, Cloverfield cultivated an entire viral marketing subculture of its own.  The film’s alluring mystery remained mostly intact even as the interactive experience exploded.  Economically, this tactic was a smashing success.  Hype drove box office receipts through the roof, raking in a handsome profit for a modestly-budgeted film.  Aesthetically, however, the viral campaign was a catastrophe.

Cloverfield’s raw power derives from its verisimilitude (with some drawbacks).  Director Matt Reeves nailed the look and feel of how I imagined a ground-level monster attack would look.  If Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla had been presented entirely as newsreel footage, it would have been Cloverfield’s closest precursor.  Scenes of people fleeing across the Brooklyn Bridge, running through the subway tunnel, being caught between the monster and the army, climbing up and across the fallen towers, etc. are convincingly amateurish in style and potent in their rendering.  The young cast could not be better suited to the material, with the interminable first twenty minutes, smacking of YouTube generation indulgence, establishes a laid-back, fraternal atmosphere that is later galvanized into ironclad bonds of codependent survival.  We never get to see the whole monster (aside from a slightly disappointing face-to-face near the end), we never get the whole story; we just get the experience of one night of confused terror.  All Caught-On-Camera.  For all intents and purposes, This Is Real.

But it is Not Real.  A large portion of the pure enjoyment Cloverfield gives is that it is the first “realistic” Godzilla movie.  For decades, monster movie fans dug the cheesy scale models, bad dialogue, expendable characters, and, most importantly, the men in rubber suits duking it out in an endless cycle of arbitrarily delicious grudge matches.  Cloverfield not only ditches the camp, but runs in the opposite direction.  Like the 1954’s Godzilla, Japan’s response to its chillingly horrific induction into the nuclear age, Cloverfield evokes the ghosts of the national nightmare of 9/11 and embodies it in a big, slimy beastie that stomps around New York City on its gangly arms.  The fact that we are provided no context, no explanations, and barely any narrative signposts with which to identify and differentiate the victims all reflects the Zeitgeist of the United States (and NYC in particular) being rudely ushered into the era of global terrorism.  Yet, unlike Godzilla, Cloverfield dispatches with the overt parallels that would grant it social relevance.  It is meant to be a pure, nakedly visceral experience.

For all its faux-verisimilitude, Cloverfield does fall into the trap of attempting to channel the rich mythos of its Japanese antecedents, and this mythos formed the matrix of Web materials disseminated prior to the film’s release.  For all the realism of the film and the delightful mock-serious Web pages implemented during the Internet campaign, the strategy of inviting pre-fans to participate in meta-immersion heightened anticipation.  But by drawing attention to the hype bubble, the elaborate mythos detracted from the film’s authenticity.  Its “movie-ness” became more apparent the more one bought into the publicity.  If the extraneous mythos materials can be considered an integrated part of the Cloverfield experience, the overall aesthetic is at direct odds with itself, undermining the novelty of the cinematic presentation, depriving the film of so much of its power. [4]

Another foot that Cloverfield mistakenly plants in the past (apart from consciously aping the Big Green Meanie) is the conceit that it is shot on a camcorder — not just Caught on Camera; Caught on Tape.  The primary events of the monster attack are recorded on a tape had originally been used to record an idyllic day in the lives of a pair of lovers, who provide the film’s dramatic thrust.  So throughout the film, whenever Ben, the man behind the camera, drops it or stops recording, we are treated to “flashbacks” that articulate the romantic relationship of our two protagonists.  As clever as this conceit is (major kudos to screenwriter Drew Goddard and whoever offered most of the revision notes), the detectable “structure” of the film calls attention to itself.  For “found footage,” its story is too neat, its characters given a little too much history and internal context. [5] Not that Cloverfield is aesthetically conventional; its structure is just too obvious a concession to the mainstream audience for the magic act to be convincing.  Much like spotting a pigeon poking its head out of the magician’s sleeve, the careful attention to narrative thrust and storytelling actually undercut the movie by ever-so-slight a margin.  When you see the mysterious object fall into the water off Coney Island’s shoreline with a splash at the end of the film, [[6]] and Michael Giacchino’s wonderfully Morriconesque score finally kicks in for the end credits, you smile at the cleverness, rather than the invisibility, of the execution.

Ironically, the attempted escape from narrative parallels the human desire to escape from reality.  We escape through voyeurism, by altering our perceptions with controlled substances; we eagerly anticipate our nightly dreams and we create illicit lives for ourselves to shape an experience outside our carefully-cultivated status quo.  The closer our genre films get to verité, the more authentic the escape from reality can be.  Diary andCloverfield demonstrate a desperation to believe in the illusion of the fantastic that can only be manufactured in a world saturated with multimedia input.  When communications were primitive and reality extended as far as the nearest geographic barrier, imagination was the only obstacle to the reality that existed outside of personal experience.  With nearly every square inch of the globe photographed and indexed, the collision is not between imagination and reality, but between different representations of reality.  Some of the most popular shows on television aren’t populated by actors pretending to be other people; they’re populated by other people being themselves. [7] Why not drag big green monsters and zombies into the mix?

In part, the explosion of pseudo-celebrity culture is a natural extension of the obsession that non-famous and non-influential people have had with public figures possessing those qualities.  The gossip society columns of the Roaring Twenties haven’t changed a bit, only now “commoners” can elevate themselves to that enviable stature by simply appearing on television and doing their best to be memorable, if not likable or natural.  Judging by the unabated popularity of such reality programming, we have bought into the idea that reality is drama wholesale.  Drama is a narrative form; its extension to genre fare is unsurprising.

Films like Cloverfield or Diary of the Dead exhibit the human desire to deliberately blend fact and fiction, no matter how outlandish.  Authors like Philip K. Dick have been predicting this for decades.  If we haven’t reached the point that YouTube footage of a lightsaber duel and combat footage from Fallujah are literally indistinguishable, it’s because we’re still aware of the distinct separation of technologically-assisted representation from reality.  There’s room for reasonable doubt where big green monsters and zombies are concerned, especially if we’ve paid hard cash to be entertained by a good illusion.  But the fact that the films mirror such a desire could be problematic, and their inability to achieve utter verisimilitude (apart from the fictional conceits and their being marketed as fiction before arrival) is what both defeats and rescues them as genre exercises.  Both are first-rate pieces of entertainment, made by professionals who know how to pull an audience along for the ride; part of this manipulation involves a certain structure that negates the realism of the films, regardless of how realistic they may appear.  But buying into the narrative awakens awareness of their fictive nature; once we’re reminded of that, whatever flaws they possess as films are exacerbated.  No matter what, they feel safe.

A completely avant-garde maneuver would have been to dispense with the narrative structure and meta-commentary entirely; embracing verisimilitude would have made the films much less entertaining, but would have sparked a complete immersion in the experience that is already common among people who have followed the reality programming movement.  In other words, the films will do their best to be authentically pointless.

Ironically, we always want our movies to be persuasive and plausible, yet transparent. For a movie to be any good, it needs to be believable. [8] Once our mainstream filmmakers have developed a way to manipulate genre film in such a way that makes it look like “real” footage has simply been “uploaded” to our screens, after editing by professionals who simply want to tell the truth, we will have turned a corner in our journey toward the breakdown of separation of fact and fiction in our worldwide multimedia imagarium.  First will come the return of the hoax; then will come genuine disinformation campaigns; when people no longer know where to turn for verity, individual decisions of what is real and what is fake will become increasingly arbitrary.  Ideology in our splintered society will regain centrality as people look for anchors to guide their worldviews.  A filmmaker like Romero is aware of this, which is why he builds ideology into his films.  Despite his political leanings, his approach is intrinsically conservative: he’s unwilling to concede control to the viewer, or to other influences on the viewer.  Cloverfield, on the other hand, is as substanceless as a narrative film allows, which makes its ilk potentially more dangerous in the long run.  The mass media of our future may become so supersaturated that wars erupt between competing ideological factions who are fighting for control over what they perceive to be reality itself; technology, now the messenger of egalitarianism, may well become the harbinger of discord.  The ploughshare could, de facto, become the sword. [9]

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[1].  But almost nobody would ever say that a lightsaber battle and a Nightly News story are the same, and that’s because you’d never see the anchors whip out laser swords and have a majestically rockin’ duel on the newsdesk.  Although that would totally make the news far more interesting.

[2].  My esteemed Playtime colleague, Kiera Chapman, adds a very salient point to this whole discussion that I stupidly neglected to mention: “The issue with Fact and Fiction (or truth and falsity) in the new media also has to do with different forms of authority. You could say it’s a battle between a centralized model of truth-telling, with problems of authoritarianism and corporatism, and a decentralized one, with problems of sheer volume and lack of journalistic standards.  But, like most blanket statements, that would be a gross simplification of what’s going on. Jubilant ‘oh-it’s-all-so-democratic now’ celebrations are premature.  But the centralized media seem to retain huge amounts of power, and that they seem to be exercising even less responsibility than previously, if that’s indeed possible.  And this may point to the paradox at the heart of the very existence of these movies: they’re interested in decentralized, everyman-generated narratives, but they’re still relatively large-budget, relatively centralized studio productions.  And, consequently, they have a need to ‘make sense’ to an average teenage viewer to make their money back, which really constrains the way that they can tell stories, and in particular how fragmented they can be.”

[3].  In practice, this is not far removed from the machinations of villain Elliot Carver of Tomorrow Never Dies, who engineered world events so that he could sell tomorrow’s news today through his multimedia empire.  Knowledge and data being the currency of the Information Age and all that.

[4].  If the matrix of Cloverfield-related Web content is to be read more as reflection of post-9/11 anxiety, perhaps it is aesthetically unified; after all, Google searches for Islam, terrorism, and 9/11 relief spiked in the aftermath.  Dozens and dozens — maybe hundreds — of books have been written about the so-called “War on Terror.”  Regular folks who don’t have their heads planted firmly in the earth may try to assemble a cogent picture of What Went Wrong with Web searches that lead in circles.  Here’s a significant difference, and one that invites another level of metatextual media awareness: I’ve seen some critics and theorists describe 9/11 as political theatre.  Terrorism is a political tool, and the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were symbolic, designed to get the world’s attention and send a message to the U.S., invoking a plethora of contextual questions that have yet to be satisfactorily resolved.  At the same time, it was a singular tragedy that resulted in thousands of deaths, a mass murder staged for the benefit of those viewing at home.  At no time in the Information Age is a political action taken without regard for the audience.  It is taken for granted that the world could watch the towers fall on TV, that clips of people jumping to their deaths would circulate online, that this was not just an attack on several thousand New Yorkers and airline passengers, it was a symbolic attack on America and what she stands for.  The fact that it was symbolic does not at all negate the very real emotional and physical consequences of those killed, the survivors, and the families of all touched by the tragedy.  When news anchors commented that it was like something out of a Hollywood movie — in restrospect, an observation that is as tasteless as it was prophetic — that did not alleviate the very real toll on the people directly attacked, or those whose emotions were touched via the witness of TV screens around the world.  What’s more, despite that observation, no one really, truly questioned whether or not it was “really happening.”  They might have “not believed it was happening,” but the veracity of the images went unquestioned.  Certainly when people investigate terrorism and U.S. actions on foreign soil, they may remain skeptical as to the accuracy of the reports, or the motivations of expressed opinions, but there is no question as to whether or not 9/11 happened; there is no question as to the sheer myriadic magnitude of interlocking reasons for how and why it happened.  Making sense of it all may be ultimately impossible (or, if possible, the most cogent pictures will probably appear in our children’s children’s history class textbooks), but the investigation follows the event, and the conclusions offered by lay investigations are intended to provide a genuine understanding for an event that is emotionally beyond human comprehension.

[5].  Also, it’s on videotape.  In 2008, they expect us to believe that New York yuppies who can afford to party in a cushy studio apartment overlooking Central Park don’t even have a digital camcorder.  As if.

[6].  I didn’t even notice the splash the first time I saw it.  Ten points from Gryffindor.

[7].  More or less.  Obviously, people aware that they’re being observed tend to act differently than when they’re unaware they’re being observed.  In today’s postmodern era of self-image construction, even the most vacant nobodies on Big Brother or whatever understand that while they’re busy “being themselves,” they’re also characters in a drama, so they choose a part and play it.  So perhaps they pretend to be themselves.  Some of them are even aware of being cast based on the mix of people the producers are looking for.  It’s certainly all “real” — these people do exist somewhere, that’s not a question.  But the way they are presented on TV, and the way they present themselves, exists for the audience on a level of “reality” for which most of us have no frame of personal reference.  After all, we’re not the ones getting paid to wander around without clothes, get into dramatic catfights, and bitch about how unreasonable everyone else is to a little camera in a booth somewhere.  Well… I’m not getting paid to get into dramatic catfights and bitch about my friends on camera, at any rate.

[8].  Unless it’s some piece of didactic, experimental piece of garbage like Godard’s Weekend.  But even at his most unwatchable, it seems to me that Godard is always misleading the audience to the truth anyway, by deliberately upending narrative convention.  Since he makes use of the lies we’ve already been told, his films still flow with the pattern cinema has established.

[9].  And all because J.J. Abrams took his son to Japan and realized he wanted to make a Godzilla film set in New York.  Friggin’ tourists.