Cloverfield, or destruction as entertainment

[lmpshd]

Yesterday, in the middle of a frustrating afternoon spent sitting at my desk trying to finish a paper, I read the New York Times review of Cloverfield. The level of vitriol with which reviewer Manohla Dargis expressed her hatred for the movie was almost sufficient to lift me out of my mathematical slump for a few hours. Cloverfield, you see, is

Comments

[daproofpimp]

I believe you are mistaken about the immediacy of the event for people without personal ties to NYC. In many (most?) ways, Katrina, the tsunami/earthquake in 2004, the genocide in Rwanda were much worse disasters. I remember all three of these horrible events, and yet they all seem somewhat abstract to me. I saw footage on TV. I have a ballpark sense of how many lives were lost. It feels abstract. September 11th doesn't. I remember the smell of lower Manhattan. I remember that I couldn't get around easily because the subway was not running normally. I remember a shopkeeper hugging me because he hadn't seen me in a while, and he was worried I had died.

I am not sure that "good taste" would prevail, even among those among those who witnessed Sept 11 first hand. I think a fair number of people vent their fear by making "inappropriate" jokes about a disaster. Look at all the tasteless jokes about death/the dying that people make, especially in the wake of a funeral.

[lmpshd]

I completely agree with you about the immediacy; didn't mean to imply that I didn't. By way of playing devil's advocate though, I wonder sometimes if my own tendency to "lay claim" to that particular event (compared with people who weren't in New York) is a bit arrogant. I can't speak for anyone else.