Cloverfield has the honor of being the latest movie that I disliked watching but love thinking, reading, writing and talking about. It’s not so much that it’s the kind of movie that’s better in concept than execution (as I was bored, millions of others were thrilled), but it is the kind of movie that — intentional or not — has much more depth off-screen than on. Originally I was going to devote a whole week to discussing all the different things Cloverfield has been said to be about, but the monster flick has been out for more than a week and its attendance has diminished so much that instead I’ve decided to put all the theories into a single post. I hope it gives you enough to ponder on its own.

Specifically, I present you with different perspectives on what the Cloverfield monster is. Even if the movie isn’t necessarily about the monster, these thoughts on what the monster represents carries over into what the movie is as a whole. First, though, I’d like to relate a story about my experience seeing the film. I saw Cloverfield with an audience that included some of its stars, including T.J. Miller, who plays the obnoxious cameraman character “Hud”. At the end of the movie, he thanked everyone for coming and invited a question from the audience. A number of people shouted, “What is it?” Miller replied, “We have no fucking idea!” What may have seemed like a cop out or even an invitation for viewers to come up with their own answer was in fact one of the many explanations. Find out what I mean after the jump.

The Cloverfield monster is …

1. 9/11 - The idea that Cloverfield is a metaphor for 9/11 came way before the movie even hit theaters, but it hasn’t stopped people from discussing it as such. It’s the most obvious way to look at Cloverfield, though, and the most boring. Still, as plain as it is to see, I must include 9/11 as being one of the things the monster represents. Or at least, if not completely the infamous day as a whole, at least the NYC/WTC part of it.
2. Osama Bin Laden - If the monster can be 9/11, it can also be the aftermath of 9/11. The hopeless idea that we may never see the end of the War on Terror, or that many people have fought in the ensuing wars and not had the benefit of seeing the killing of Osama Bin Laden or the elimination of Al Qaeda, etc. My favorite critic to make the analogy is Scott Weinberg, who apparently asked Morgan Spurlock (director of Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?) if he ever located the Cloverfield monster.
3. The Bush Administration - This one is sort of in the same category as the first two, so I don’t think I need to go much into it, but Bush and Co. are specifically named by Cinefantastique’s Lawrence French.
4. Ourselves - Much has been written about how Cloverfield represents the YouTube generation and its narcissistic obsession with self-documentation (my favorite being Lisa Schwarzbaum’s description of the characters in her review). With that mode of thought, I can easily see the monster as being us. The thing is destroying the real world just as we are metaphysically destroying it by focusing more internally and spending less time in the real world and more time with our computers and other more introverting devices (yes, again I’m ranting about us heading into The Matrix territory). Another way to look at the monster being ourselves, though, is in the same way that Godzilla represented us decades ago: we are the thing destroying our environment, world, etc. And we are both the bull in the china shop and the elephant in the living room.
5. The Unknowable - OK, here is where T.J. Miller was correct. The monster is the ever-unknowable stuff that lies outside our definite understanding. You know, that we can never truly know anything except our own existence kind of philosophical stuff. No matter what the monster may literally be, it can only be what we perceive it to be. And if we simply perceive it as something we don’t understand or know, it can only really be defined by that absence of knowledge. Meanwhile, there are some viewers who may have a little more clue as to what the monster is by following the viral marketing back-story and what not. I was directed to this idea by David Bordwell, who compares Cloverfield to other first-person point-of-view films like Lady in the Lake (and certainly the unmentioned The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) and different-vantage-point films like Rashomon and the upcoming Vantage Point, the latter type being more pertinent with claims that Cloverfield 2 could be about the exact same monster attack seen through the eyes of a new character located somewhere else in the city.