O'Neill/Wee/Cloverfield

Today I read the first fifty pages of Joseph O’Neill’s 2008 novel Netherland. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W2ZXzM6wuI. I’ve heard this novel described as a ‘post-9/11’ novel but I think that misses the mark, and it would certainly be misleading to group Netherland with novels like Falling Man and The Reluctant Fundamentalist. It’s true that the novel begins in Manhattan shortly after the 9/11 attacks, and that the attacks are, in a way, responsible for the collapse of the protagonist’s marriage, but beyond those facts, and at least for this first part of the novel, 9/11 is not the determining event or focus of the book and it remains firmly in the background. Instead, Netherland is the story of Hans van den Broek, a Dutchman who moved to Manhattan with his young British wife when they both took up well-paying jobs in the financial sector. When his wife leaves him and takes their young son with her back to England, Hans more or less falls apart until he finds some kind of meaning in his life in the unlikely form of cricket. He starts playing with a group of amateurs at the Staten Island Cricket Club and this routine gives Hans a sense of structure and community. Based on the fact that the other members of the club are overwhelmingly Indian or Caribbean immigrants (with Hans as the token white guy) I’ve also heard Netherland described as a postcolonial novel. We’ll see whether this label turns out to be any more accurate.

I also read the first fifty pages of Valerie Wee’s Japanese Horror Films and their American Remakes. http://www.routledge.com/9781134109623. Oddly, the publication date is listed as 2014, so I feel very cutting-edge discussing a book from the future! Appropriately, the subject of the book is very timely, considering the success of films like The Grudge, The Ring, and One Missed Call, and although a great deal of critical work has been done in recent years on Japanese and Asian horror, much less has been done on American remakes of Japanese horror films, a subject that would also allow for interesting connections with the burgeoning field of adaptation studies. So far, Wee’s treatment of the subject is well-organized and comprehensive. She begins by reviewing the arguments for the cultural and aesthetic significance of horror film and does a particularly nice job of addressing the issue of whether or not film adaptations should be faithful to their sources. As she points out, part of the problem with such an argument in relation to Japanese horror films is that those films can’t be considered ‘original sources’ in the sense that they are also influenced by earlier films. She then moves on to a discussion of the representation of ghosts and the supernatural in American and Japanese horror film. One of the most interesting points she makes on this subject is that because Japanese culture has a very different relationship to the supernatural, Japanese horror films are much less concerned than their American counterparts with finding a ‘rational’ explanation for supernatural phenomena; instead, the supernatural in JHorror is allowed to exist on its own terms, as it were.

I also watched the 2008 film Cloverfield, which could be said to have a connection to Japanese film in as much as it’s essentially a transposition of the Godzilla genre to contemporary Manhattan. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvNkGm8mxiM. I first watched this film on a flight from Chicago to Seoul not long after it was released. As it was a long flight and it was the only film I wanted to see, I watched it six times in a row. It wasn’t until I looked out of my hotel room in Seoul and saw a city not unlike the one I’d just watched being destroyed by a giant monster for the previous 12 hours that I realized what a bad decision I’d made; I felt so paranoid I wanted to just hide under my bed until it was time to go back to the airport! Despite this inauspicious beginning, I still watch the film fairly regularly because my dislike of models and yuppies is only matched by my dislike of yuppies that look like models, and so seeing a whole group of them traumatized and dispatched during the course of this film is very entertaining. I have to say that to me it’s ironic that this is a described as a ‘found footage’ horror film. Technically speaking, it is, but the suspension of disbelief required to accept the fact that the amateur videographer whose footage constitutes the film would have both the presence of mind, not to mention the intestinal fortitude, to keep on shooting throughout the film’s apocalyptic events, is considerable. Although a much less entertaining film, Barry Levinson’s The Bay (2012) does a much better job of interweaving various forms of found footage into the film in a consistent and believable manner.