New York experienced catastrophe for real during 9/11, but that hasn't stopped the movie-makers from revisiting the scene of the crime for yet ano ther disaster flick. Cloverfield is the latest brush with oblivion for the city that never sleeps. New York resident Belinda McKeonexamines why film-makers love to wreck Manhattan
ALRIGHT, Hollywood. This is starting to look like one serious spree of schadenfreude. Hot on the heels of the Will Smith vehicle I Am Legend (Warner Bros), which portrayed New York broken and deserted in the wake of a biochemical plague, comes JJ Abrams's Cloverfield (Paramount), in which a monster grinds the city to sorry, smoking dust, and smacks the Brooklyn Bridge to pieces with his mammoth tail.
One more marauding monster/ virus/alien craft, and New Yorkers will start taking this to heart. Signs are, in fact, that they may already be doing so.
"Hey, Cloverfield! Leave New York City Alone!" barked the Entertainment Weekly blog. Other bloggers and commenters wondered where all the hate was coming from Hollywood itself? From the West Coast? From the rest of America? Cloverfield's strike on the city's favourite bridge seemed less like a gutsy low-budget flourish and more like the tail end (sorry) of a long, bitter campaign of movie rage against New York.
Film reviewers scrambled to marshal the evidence, listing the films, from the original 1933 King Kong onwards, in which New York had been variously defiled, demolished and devoured. There were some 20 major films: King Kong; When Worlds Collide (1951); Escape from New York (1981); the late-1990s catastrophe glut of Independence Day, Armageddon, Deep Impact and the NY-based remake of Godzilla; and after 9/11 AI, Time Machine, The Core and The Day After Tomorrow.
It's a theme which has existed for a long time, long before the events of 2001 had Hollywood vowing never to make another urban disaster movie, let alone one set in Manhattan. Which is why, if New Yorkers are bothered by the battering their city is constantly getting in the movies, their ire has very little to do with the fact that abandoned Manhattan streets, terrified Manhattan citizens and a burning Manhattan skyline are such a recent memory.
New Yorkers are tougher than that. Besides, memories of that very real terror are vastly more complex than any amount of CGI tail-swiping can suggest.
In truth, what truly pisses New Yorkers off is the very real havoc such movies wreak on the city as they are being made. As if one monster wasn't enough for any 19th-century suspension bridge to have to contend with. I Am Legend brought the Brooklyn Bridge to a standstill last year, jamming it with Humvees and more than 100 National Guards, and giving the NYPD the headache of letting the entire population of lower Manhattan know that the sight of an apparent evacuation of the city - involving barricaded streets, hovering Black Hawks and more than 1,000 panic-feigning extras - was no cause for concern. Cue an island's share of extended middle fingers for the film's star, Will Smith, during the months it took to finish shooting. Have your comic-strip storyline, the response seemed to say. Don't drag the actual city down with you. Just don't get studio dreams and daily reality confused.
Then again, the filmmakers and the city-dwellers both know that it's all about the currency of the real. New York functions in Cloverfield as it has always functioned in movies of this sort; as a repository of the real, as a sort of dreamscape that triggers the emotions and the expectations attaching to all that is familiar, and iconic, and shared - and that triggers in turn, then, the rush of disbelief and excitement and awe that comes of seeing such things blasted to high heaven. When New York falls, everything else falls with it; so goes the symbolic shorthand.
Godzilla tearing lumps out of a suburban mall just wouldn't be the same. Nor would King Kong climbing up a cathedral steeple. Nor Charlton Heston, stumbling across a half-buried statue of a general on a horse. This was New York, says that moment in Planet of the Apes when Heston's character, seeing the rusted Statue of Liberty jutting out of a shore, realises what he has found, and what, therefore, has been lost. This was the world; your world, our world.
It's not quite so chilling a moment when the hip young things in Cloverfield whip out their iPhones to film the severed head of Lady Liberty smashing down like a meteorite in Tribeca.
But, ultimately, New Yorkers won't complain. Because it's because it matters that Manhattan gets mauled. It's because its ending is unimaginable that it is so frequently and fully imagined. Fantasies of destruction, deep down, are just a backhanded compliment. And that's the type this city relishes most of all.
Cloverfield is released today
