할리우드 재난영화와 미국적 이데올로기 그리고 〈클로버필드〉의 장르 전복

Abstract

This essay has twin foci. First, it reviews some of the 2000’s disaster movies—particularly, Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men (2006) and Francis Lawrence’s I am Legend (2007) along with a 1988’s hit movie Die Hard—from the perspective of American cultural archetype moulded and developed by Ralph Waldo Emerson and later R.W.B. Lewis. Then it argues that all the Hollywood disaster movies are likely to reinforce American ideologies such as American dream and American exceptionalism by repeating and recreating American founding myth. Such a reading would possibly provide a new perspective through which we can read Hollywood disaster films prevailing these days after the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic. Second, this essay demonstrates how Matt Reeves’s 2008 film Cloverfield revises the codes and conventions of those Hollywood disaster movies through a strategic use of subjective camera. Its peculiar use of first-person camera not only effectively debunks the metaphysical center of the film hallucinatorily created by third-person omniscient viewpoint; it also strips white male heroes—especially, father figures as saviors of the world from disasters—of American cultural authority. Furthermore, the film’s telling representation of unlimited and relentless violence that exceeds the subjective camera angle makes it difficult to imagine what the post-disaster America would be like. In this sense, Cloverfield expands the ideological and political possibility of the disaster genre, although we could hardly say that the film is an outright avant-garde film that provides a new vision about disasters and America.