The trope of invasion by otherworldly or mutated others has often been used in the science fiction film genre as a metaphor for terrorism and conquest. From the Communist-threat, mind-control original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and War of the Worlds (1953), to nuclear-bomb-test fears in Godzilla (1954/56 U.S. release) and Them (1954), to the nuclear war instigated by cybernetic beings in the Terminator films and television series (1984–2009), these sorts of monster movies have played on our fears of losing control of our minds, bodies, and cities. In the post-9/11 era the fear of “the other” invading us, intent on both physical and psychological terror and conquest, has been given new impetus. In two J. J. Abrams films, Cloverfield (producer, 2008) and Super 8 (writer and director, 2010), we see this concept play out in different ways. A fuller definition of terrorism and the question of whether it is ever morally justified will help us see how these two films may be understood as a reflection of their times.
Deriving from the Latin terrere (meaning “to frighten”), terrorism is a concept that has been defined in multiple ways, and like many politically charged concepts there is no universal definition upon which all can agree. Yet in Inside Terrorism, Bruce Hoffman notes features that we can point to as indicative of terrorism.1 Paraphrasing Hoffman, terrorism is an act that is:
(1) Violent, namely, causing physical harm or death. This violence is directed toward some intended target that the perpetrator believes deserves physical harm or death but usually entails harm or death for innocent persons who act as collateral damage. Thus, beyond the obvious harm done to the intended target, the suffering and death of innocents seem to be a key feature of a terrorist act.
(2) Perpetuated in such a way as to cause psychological trauma to those who survive or witness the violence firsthand or are privy to the effects of the violence through experiencing the aftermath of the violence, through word-of-mouth, or through media sources. In other words, a terrorist act is orchestrated so as to have a threatening and frightening psychological effect beyond the immediate victim or target. This causes the specter of a “we don’t know when it’s coming, but it’s coming” kind of terror. So it’s not just the terror associated with the violent action being carried out right before someone’s eyes, so to speak, but also the terror that is burned into people’s memory banks, as well as the terror that haunts the various scenarios that people can imagine taking place at some future time.
(3) Intended to bring public, media attention to some smaller group, cause, ideology, or individual that usually perceives itself as being treated unjustly or inappropriately by the larger group, cause, ideology, or other individuals that make up the social world of both groups.
The above characterization of terrorism comports well with the description in a United Nations Secretary General report from 2004 of terrorism as any act “intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act.”2 And this certainly was the intent of Sergey Nechayev, who was one of the first persons in Western history (documented, that we know of) to use the word terrorist to describe himself and the activities of his Russian faction, People’s Retribution, back in 1869.3 Examples of terrorist acts include assassinations, bombings, sabotage on a grand scale, kidnapping, and hijacking of airplanes or facilities.
Most people think that a terrorist act is wrong and immoral and that there are no situations whatsoever in which a terrorist act is, or could be, justified. However, there are those who would maintain just the opposite. What might the justification(s) for terrorism be? One commonly held justification for terrorism goes something like this:
If a person or minority group is being treated unjustly in a social situation (for example, through genocide, systematic torture or rape, general lack of basic rights and privileges, etc.), and there is no way to address or redress the injustice through the social situation’s own legislative, judicial, and/or administrative system(s), then the person or minority group is justified in utilizing terrorist actions to address and/or redress the injustice.
One example comes to mind where terrorist acts seem justified, and it has to do with the fascist totalitarianism of Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler’s regime (1933–1945). There exist volumes and volumes of historical accounts, as well as firsthand accounts, of the utter horror experienced by minorities (including, but not limited to, Romany gypsies, Jews, the disabled, and homosexuals) living in this regime in which historically unprecedented forms of suffering, genocide, and general injustices took place. The minority peoples in this regime—pretty much anyone not considered to be an Aryan German—were treated in grossly inhumane ways.4
In fact, terrorist actions against Nazi Germany have been documented. For example, the film Valkyrie (2008), starring Tom Cruise, was based on what has come to be called the 20 July Plot of 1944, which was a failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler orchestrated primarily by Claus von Stauffenberg. Von Stauffenberg and many other German nationalists had become convinced by 1944 not only that their country was losing World War II but also that a government agreeable to the Allies needed to be put into place so that Germany could survive. Further than this, the Nazi atrocities committed against Jews and other minority groups were unacceptable. Thus, according to von Stauffenberg and his conspirators, Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis needed to be assassinated and a new governing body put in place. The 20 July Plot of 1944 bombing assassination attempt failed to kill Hitler—the bomb went off underneath a sturdy table Hitler was seated at during a meeting, and it is believed that the table shielded him from the full force of the blow—however, few would dispute that this example of terrorism was a good thing and that a better thing would have been for Hitler to have been killed in the attack.5
But what about innocents who suffer and die as a result of terrorist acts? In fact, in the 20 July Plot of 1944, although two Nazi generals and one Nazi colonel died, both of whom it could be argued deserved it, an innocent German stenographer also died. Surely the stenographer did not deserve this, and in fact, causing him harm is considered immoral, correct?
There are two responses we can note here. The first is that any terrorist act—almost by definition, as we saw above—will include harm done to innocents, and this harm is justified on the grounds of collateral damage. In any kind of war or fight, there may be innocents who suffer, and that’s just par for the course in these situations. There is an obligation to avoid such collateral damage, or at least minimize it as much as possible; no one should intentionally harm innocents just for the sake of harming them. Thus, when the terrorist is carrying out a plan, the most moral thing to do would be to target only those who are directly responsible for the injustices. So, for example, von Stauffenberg in the 20 July Plot of 1944 seemed to have the right idea in trying to blow up only Hitler and members of his cabinet.
Another response regarding the immorality associated with innocent victims of terrorist acts is that there really are no innocent persons in these social settings where a minority group is being treated unjustly. By virtue of living in the social setting perpetuating the injustice, all those benefiting from the privileges of that social setting are complicit, all are responsible, and hence all are guilty. There may be something to this concerning Nazi Germany, where it seems as if the majority of the population—judges, legislators, doctors, scientists, businesspersons—knew about the Holocaust (or at least knew about the straightforward scapegoating and prejudice against Jews and other non-Aryan types) and either did nothing to prevent it or assisted in some way.6
However, there are those who would argue that citizens are not directly responsible for the policies and procedures put into place by their government—especially in totalitarian regimes like Hitler’s Germany, Joseph Stalin’s U.S.S.R., or Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic of China—and so they are not guilty and should not be targeted by terrorist acts. In more democratic regimes it may be the case that innocent citizens are not so innocent, but we all know that even in the most democratic of regimes, the “common person” often does not have the power to influence public policy. Hence a strong case can be made that the “all are complicit, all are guilty” argument does not work, and terrorism is not justified. Further, it’s even harder to justify that young children, the mentally handicapped, and the mentally ill in the offending social setting—even the most evil and vile of social settings—are complicit and responsible in the same way that, say, the governors of that society, or rational adults, are.
In talking about the suffering of innocents, we hinted above at one important reason why the terrorist act is considered immoral. Many would argue that the harming of innocents, even for the “necessary evil” of collateral damage, is wrong. There are at least two positions in the history of Western philosophy that can be appealed to as justification for the immorality of harming innocents.
One contemporary philosophical argument that harming innocents is wrong can be traced back to the work of the famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant observes that persons are unique in that they are conscious, rational beings, capable of making their own free and informed decisions. From the fact that humans are unique in this way, Kant tells us that we should “act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.” Kant is not ruling out the moral possibility of treating people as means. After all, we have to use people to acquire goods, services, information, and such things in order to live our daily lives. What he is ruling out is treating a person as nothing but a means for such ends. In other words, a person must always be treated as an end in him- or herself, even while also being used as a means to some other end. Because we are conscious, rational beings, persons have a “sanctified” and intrinsic value (as ends) and not just an instrumental value (as a means to an end), like some object, tool, thing, or instrument of terrorist objectives.
From this perspective, then, morally right decisions are those decisions that treat a person as an end, and morally wrong decisions are those that treat a person as a mere instrument or means to an end, specifically the end of some terrorist’s master plan.7 Also, Kant makes it clear that any kind of murder is considered immoral since the one murdered is being used by the murderer for the sake of the murderer’s satisfaction, malice, or other selfish reason. Interestingly enough, the same goes for the avenger, where a person is used for the sake of vengeance.8
So from this Kantian perspective, persons, by virtue of their conscious rational capacities, are free and autonomous beings having inalienable worth or dignity. Because of this intrinsic worth, a person should never be treated as collateral damage resulting from terrorist activities, whether that person is a prince or pauper, saint or sinner. It’s primarily from this Kantian perspective that we are disgusted by the terrorist’s actions in harming or killing innocent persons.
Another philosophical reason that terrorism is immoral can be traced back to the ideas of the famous British philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873). Mill argued that an action is morally good insofar as its consequences promote the most benefit or biggest payoff, or pleasure for the most persons affected by the decision. This view has been termed utilitarian because of the apparent usefulness (utility) to be found in generating the most satisfaction for the group of persons. The foundation of morality, as far as utilitarians are concerned, is simply happiness—actions are good insofar as they increase the pleasures or decrease the pains of people, in general.9 “What is most beneficial for the most” is the utilitarian’s slogan.
Now, the utilitarian position justifies treating persons as means to the greater good of achieving benefit for the majority. For example, if the greater consequence of saving the group from some evildoer requires killing one, two, or even a hundred people in the process, then, on utilitarian grounds, this may be deemed morally correct. Think of the assassination attempt on Hitler cited earlier.
Or, if you’re with a group of people on a lifeboat trapped at sea, you might be justified in taking the rations from the guy who is near death or beyond help; you could even be justified in killing one person and surviving on that person’s flesh until you’re saved by a passing ocean liner! It’s the whole “killing one to save many” kind of thinking. Back in 1972 a Uruguayan rugby team crashed in the Andes Mountains and survivors actually had to eat the dead.10 Mr. Spock said it best in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), and he even walked the talk by sacrificing his own life: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few . . . or the one.”
The utilitarian position can be used to argue that terrorist acts are wrong, given that the majority in a social setting are terrorized and suffer pain. If pain on a grand scale is the result, then the action should not be performed—period. The suffering of innocents adds an extra bit of pain that the utilitarian could argue makes the terrorist act all the more immoral.
Using the Kantian perspective and Mill’s utilitarian position to examine the actions of the invaders in both Cloverfield and Super 8 will allow us to determine whether or not their actions may be defined as terrorism and whether they may be seen as morally justified. In addition, this should allow us to make comparisons as to how each film, made in a post-9/11 world, deals with the question of how to depict terrorism relative to the events of that day.
The narrative begins with the first frames, indicating that this film was recovered from the rubble of “Incident Site U.S. 447, formerly known as Central Park, New York City.” One is immediately caught off guard and intrigued because of one’s own direct visual experience of the destruction of parts of that American city in the 2001 terrorist attacks. Even if one was nowhere near any of the sites that were attacked that day in Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, and New York, every media outlet was focused on the unfolding events. Images of paper from the offices above fluttering down like giant snowflakes, the wave of ash and smoke barreling over and then enveloping those standing or fleeing in the streets as the towers collapsed, the shocked faces of people watching from inside the relative safety of storefronts or taking shelter behind cars—these are all set in the national memory of that day. Opening this film with reference to the destruction of a major landmark in that same city sets an expectation of disaster.
The conceit that this is, in effect, a home movie, is indicated by the filmmaker’s deliberate imitation of an amateur handheld style (many of the sequences were in fact shot by the actor playing Hudson “Hud” Platt [T. J. Miller] or camera persons wearing the same pants and shoes), reminiscent of the at times nausea-inducing Blair Witch Project (1999). The opening sequence, dated “APR 27” continues with a domestic “morning after” scene where two main characters, Rob Hawkins (Michael Stahl-David) and Beth McIntyre (Odette Yustman Annable) are introduced. Rob films their outing to Coney Island, and snippets of the scenes on this section of the tape reappear at irregular intervals through the rest of the film and finally bookend the piece to form a frame. Because they have been accidentally taped over they are apparently “bleeding through.” The banal, everyday romance they show is contrasted with documentation of the terrifying alien attack that forms the main action of the film.
The scene then switches to a loft-style apartment in lower Manhattan on May 23, where there’s a bon-voyage party for Rob, who has taken a new job and is moving to the Godzilla-referent Japan.11 This realistic portrayal of an ordinary activity is needed contrast for the extraordinary events that will soon unfold. In “Picturing Paranoia: Interpreting Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” Steven M. Sanders states that this sort of establishing of realism may be seen to symbolize “that everyday life, even the most ordinary, is essentially unstable and potentially verging into darkness and disorder.”12 The ante is upped when Beth arrives with a date—the budding romance glimpsed in the first scenes has apparently ended—and Rob causes a scene trying to talk to her alone. The domestic drama soon takes a backseat to an incredibly loud noise and short blackout as the scarier part of the film begins. A local newscast describes the sinking of a large ship in New York harbor, near Liberty Island, and a possible earthquake in the city. They wonder aloud if it is another terrorist attack even while going to the roof to get a better view.
As Hud, Rob, his brother Jason (Mike Vogel), Jason’s girlfriend, Lily Ford (Jessica Lucas), and a girl from the party who Hud was trying to chat up, Marlena Diamond (Lizzy Caplan), make their way downstairs to the street, we have the scenes most directly visually quoted from 9/11. A large projectile crashes into a skyscraper and then ricochets down, destroying cars and streetlights, coming to rest in the middle of the street. As it stops we realize that the object is the decapitated head of the Statue of Liberty. The improbability of this—we question what sort of force could do such a thing—sets the tone for the horrors to come. In the distance something thirty stories tall and apparently alive passes between skyscrapers. Then the iconic Empire State Building collapses in the same manner as the Twin Towers, and a huge cloud of smoke and ash billows toward them. They all take shelter in a bodega, which shakes with the thunderous footfalls and unearthly bellowing of the creature. The windows are blown out and shelves collapse. Jason daringly heads out into the street that now looks like a war zone, as fires burn, alarms and sirens sound, and sheets of paper fall from the sky. Ash-covered pedestrians run or wander in a daze and we recognize one of them as Marlena, who appears to be in shock.13 Jason again takes the leadership role, reminding them that whatever caused this destruction is still there and advising, “We get the hell out of Manhattan. Now!” Again mimicking those who walked out of the city on 9/11, they head for the Brooklyn Bridge. Unfortunately the creature has the same destination in mind, and Jason is lost when it destroys the bridge. Hud continues to film throughout, because, as he tells Rob, “People are gonna wanna know. How it all went down. . . . People are gonna need to see this. This is gonna be important.” He continues to add running commentary through the rest of his appearance in the film, speculating on the origin and motivations of the invaders.
After Jason is killed, Rob steps into the leadership role and decides he must rescue Beth, who was trapped in her apartment when the invasion of the city began. The remaining members of the group attempt to make their way to her building, but are stopped by a very direct encounter with the creature and the soldiers who are attempting to battle it. Taking shelter in the subway, they decided to follow the tracks to a stop nearer Beth’s building. It is here that the most horror-film-style encounter occurs, underground, in the darkened tunnel.14 Fleeing rats clue them in that something is amiss. Through the camera’s night vision setting Hud can see that the spider-like, reptilian, Great Dane–sized creatures that drop off the larger one have followed them into the tunnel, crawling on the ceiling like orcs. They are attacked, and while bravely knocking the creatures off of Hud, Marlena is bitten. Making their way to an opening into a department store, they find it has been made over into a makeshift triage and ground operations center by the military. As with Jason, a direct encounter with an alien proves to be Marlena’s undoing: she screams horribly, then spectacularly explodes. Another innocent is lost to the creatures’ rampages through the city.
After finally reaching Beth’s building they are shocked to see that it has been sideswiped by the big alien and knocked into the twin building next to it, where it leans, precariously supported. In seeming imitation of the 9/11 first responders who went up the towers while the occupants fled down, Rob, Lily, and Hud climb thirty-nine floors in the adjoining building, then jump across to get to Beth’s apartment. Although she is impaled on a piece of steel rebar and her steeply canted living room is open to the sky, Beth is alive. As they free her, the giant creature can be seen outside the window, heading in their direction. “What is that?!” Beth screams. The only possible response is given by Hud: “It’s a terrible thing.” Just when they think they are safely in the other building, a spider lizard appears. After Rob disables it, Beth again screams, “What was that?!” Hud’s almost blasé, matter of fact, “I don’t know, something else, also terrible,” is the perfect response to the ridiculous level of terror to which they are now accustomed.
Dodging debris from the monster, they make it to the helicopter evacuation site but are separated from Lily and put into different choppers. Her fate is unknown, but Rob, Beth, and Hud’s chopper is literally knocked out of the sky by the creature. As they escape the wreckage and attempt to flee, Hud is killed by his direct contact with the alien. His encounter does provide us with stunning close-up images of its rilled, moveable ears and face, yet we are unable to determine whether there is any real intelligence there. We are given little time to mourn Hud (though we are able to see that he is not eaten by the creature) as we follow the only survivors, Beth and Rob, who take refuge in an arched walkway tunnel. As we hear the creature’s screams and the military jets’ bombardment continues, warning sirens blare and they know their deaths are imminent. The tunnel collapses; the film stutters, then returns to the scene of Beth and Rob’s day out to Coney Island, the barely visible crash of a space cylinder into the ocean behind them, and Beth’s final ironic statement, “I had a good day.”15
In his now-famous TED.com speech, Abrams spoke about the enjoyment he feels in deliberately holding back information.16 Like a magician’s Mystery Box, the secrets allow us to use our own imagination to fill in the gaps. Unlike what we learned about the Taliban terrorists of 9/11, in Cloverfield we are never told the giant being’s true identity and motivation for this attack on the city, nor do we know if this is an isolated incident or something happening simultaneously all over the country or the world. Is the creature an alien or something that mutated and rose from the ocean’s depths like Godzilla? Did the ocean crash of the cylindrical object (glimpsed best in a freeze-frame of the start of the final scene of Rob and Beth on the Coney Island Ferris wheel) bring the creature to Earth, or merely awaken it? Was it a government experiment gone wrong? If our definition of terrorism relies on the concept that there is a specific goal desired by the perpetrator of the violent and murderous actions, then the mysteries of Cloverfield leave us in the dark as to what that goal could be. In its rampage the monster comes upon Liberty Island and rips the head off of the Statue of Liberty, tossing it all the way into the Manhattan neighborhood where Rob and his friends were partying. As a special effect, it is stunning and led the mysterious trailers shown for months in theaters and online before the film’s premiere. As a metaphor, this is a bit heavy-handed—American liberty goes the way of the guillotine—or is it just that the creature saw the statue as a biped threat of its own size and attacked it? Does the creature intend to take over the city for its own use or simply kill those who drew it out of the deep? Is it the first wave of an invasion force or a one-of-a-kind nightmare?
The smaller insect-lizard creatures that drop off of the monster are also never fully explained. Are they its young? Another parasitic or symbiotic alien race? The males of its kind sent to impregnate new hosts? The equivalent of a virus, infecting each of us individually? The horrible exploding death of Marlena after she is bitten by one could be argued in any of these ways. Since we are not made aware of the creature’s goals beyond destroying everything around it, despite the film’s New York setting and reenactments of 9/11 visual tropes, a true analogy to terroristic acts is never fully realized in the film. The cameo appearances of three famous creature-feature monsters—the giant ants from Them!, the beast of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and King Kong—in the film seem to argue for an earthly, albeit mutated, origin for the creature rather than an extraterrestrial one.17 If it is a relatively mindless animal acting on instinct rather than with intelligence, its main goal is probably escape rather than conquest or revenge.18
The creature in the next film, Super 8 is something completely different. It is definitely an extraterrestrial; it is large, powerful, and intelligent and can read minds. It has also been held captive by the military-industrial complex for about twenty years, sustained by consuming large chunks of raw meat, and is really, really angry.
Though set in 1979, Super 8 is a modern post-9/11 work. It has certain nostalgia for a time before the dawn of the twenty-first century, when kids could more safely ride their bikes at night, your film took three days to get developed, and the Soviet Union was still the biggest threat to our national security.19 This is before people flew planes into buildings and the digital images you just captured on your iPhone could be immediately uploaded to YouTube. It was the era of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Star Wars (1977), when little gray aliens were technologically powerful yet benign or looked like us and battled evil empires “in a galaxy far, far away.” It also references many of Abrams’s collaborator Steven Spielberg’s slightly later kid vs. adult adventure films, such as The Goonies (cowriter, 1985) and E.T. (director, 1982).20 Like those films, the end of Super 8 features a reconciliation of parent and child and the return of the “lost boy” to his home.21 Where it differs from films of that era is not only in the thirty years’ worth of sophistication added to special effects but also in the alien’s search for home after he is stranded. Both ET and the Super 8 alien have sophisticated technical skills, the ability to communicate telepathically, and strange food cravings. Odd but cute and little, ET was lucky to have been found first by a little boy, Elliot, and to have escaped incarceration by the men with keys. Super 8 shows how a similarly gifted but twenty-foot-tall alien captured by the U.S. military has to go rogue, exhibiting behaviors that could be deemed terroristic.
In 1979 in Lillian, Ohio, six ordinary junior high kids are making a movie for a Super 8 format film contest. One of them, Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), is still mourning the loss of his mother, who died in a steel mill accident six months before. Working on the makeup and special effects for the zombiethemed horror film The Case, directed by his best friend and neighbor, Charles Kasnyk (Riley Griffiths), is what’s kept Joe going. As in Cloverfield, the film begins by setting up the ordinariness of life, this time in a small town and complete with seventies period detail in dress, cars, décor, and technologies.22 After the opening scenes, set at the post-funeral home visitation, establish Joe’s alienation from his father, Deputy Sheriff Jackson “Jack” Lamb (Kyle Chandler) and his father’s anger toward another mill worker, Louis Dainard (Ron Eldard), the scene shifts to the last day of school. With the freedom summer affords them, the two boys and their three friends—Cary (Ryan Lee), head zombie and pyrotechnics specialist; Martin (Gabriel Basso), lead actor; and Preston (Zach Mills), actor and crew—make plans to finish the film by the festival deadline. However, Charles has decided that they are missing something important—mainly a plot—for their opus. He asks a girl, Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning), on whom he has a secret crush, to play the wife of the main character. Charles comes from a large two-parent family, a home that serves as a refuge of sorts for Joe, even more so after his mother’s passing. For Charles, the true motivation for the film-within-the-film’s protagonist should rightly revolve around his loving family relationship with his wife.23
In a way, the zombie scenes shot by the boys for their Super 8 contest film become the same sort of framing device for Super 8 as the Rob and Beth romance scenes in Cloverfield. Alice, as Martin’s character’s wife, urges him to come away with her for a romantic weekend, but his investigative work is more important, so he refuses. Rob broke off any thought of a serious relationship with Beth because his new job was taking him to Japan. Martin’s wife is zombified and he must rescue her by finding and administering the one available vial of cure. Beth is trapped by the giant alien attack and Rob must rescue her. Also in the “real life” portion of the main action in Super 8, when Alice is taken “down the rabbit hole” by the alien, Joe becomes the hero protagonist, putting together the clues necessary to find her (subterranean creature, sinkhole by cemetery, dirt in garage windows) and is the only one who can save her.
If we use the United Nations Secretary General report from 2004 as our baseline, the actions of the Super 8 alien could be defined as terrorism. Recall that it describes terrorism as any act “intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act.”24 We know that the creature is a sentient being after learning of its telepathic connection with one of the scientists studying it, Dr. Woodward (Glynn Turman), who is now working at the Lillian middle school as a science teacher.25 Because of its experience of captivity and the torturous “testing” by the government agency at Area 51, it could be seeking revenge against its captors, chiefly the head of the project, Air Force Colonel Nelec (Noah Emmerich). After its ship crashed in 1958, it was captured and held by the U.S. Air Force, which was seeking information about its technology, a spacecraft made up of thousands of small silver objects resembling a Rubik’s cube that disassembles. Because of his physical contact with the alien, Dr. Woodward knows that it is intelligent and only wants to rebuild its ship so it may return home, but his pleas for its release are ignored. Dismissed from the project, Woodward later takes a job in Lillian that puts him in position to interfere with the train transporting both the alien and its craft across the country. Driving his pickup truck onto the tracks directly into the path of the train, derailing it, seems to be an act of desperation. Is it his own moral code pushing him to free the alien, or is the alien still somehow in mental contact or even control of him? This action could cause the deaths of not just the military personnel on board the train but many innocent people—the train crew and anyone in the vicinity of the careening, exploding boxcars. If fact, the young filmmakers have chosen the Lillian train depot as the site for that night’s filming and miraculously escape harm in the spectacular crash, which demolishes the station. They flee the scene, taking with them a small silver-white object resembling a Rubik’s cube that spilled out of a cargo container.26
The alien is able to break free in the aftermath of the crash and makes itself at home in Lillian, excavating a series of tunnels and placing its nest underneath the water tower in the center of downtown. Somehow sensing its arrival (like the rats in the subway tunnel in Cloverfield), all of the dogs in Lillian run away from their homes.27 It proceeds to use the cover of darkness to gather electronic and metal parts with which to rebuild its craft and to rather violently kidnap townspeople for information and to perhaps stock its larder. Those we witness being taken by it are the town sheriff, Pruitt (Brett Rice), the Kelvin Gas Station clerk and Walkman early adaptor Breen (Beau Knapp), a telephone lineman, and later, Alice. At the town hall meeting called after the sheriff’s disappearance we learn that others have been taken, several of whom are seen hanging (hopefully just unconscious) in the underground lair. The Super 8 alien is consciously using its captives to fulfill its goal of reconstructing its ship and leaving the planet. Remember, as Kant believed, because we are conscious, rational beings, persons have a “sanctified” intrinsic value (as ends) and not just an instrumental value (as a means to an end), like some object, tool, thing, or instrument of terrorist objectives. When Cary and Joe find the alien’s cave and witness it eating a human leg, they and we are repulsed. Should the alien have an aversion to eating the flesh of sentient beings, as humans do?28
The literally subterranean secrecy with which the creature operates and the crimes of theft, kidnapping, and destruction of property may all be seen as necessary by the alien to succeed in its goal to return home. However, not everything it does is simply to reach that goal. Some of its actions seem primarily motivated by revenge. After the boys have discovered the truth about the alien in their mission to rescue Alice, they are captured by Colonel Nelec and taken onto a fortified military prison bus. While they discuss the possibilities for escape, the bus is violently struck and knocked on its side by the alien. One by one it kills the air force airmen Nelec sends out after it, until he and the boys are left alone on the bus. Nelec tries to open the door of the boys’ cage, but one of the dead men outside has the key. While the alien works to punch its way into the bus’s interior, frenzied in its attempt to reach the man who tortured and kept it captive, Joe breaks out a window and the boys escape. Our last view of Nelec is similar to that of Marlena’s end in Cloverfield—a bloody splash on a translucent wall.
This incident fits the first part of Hoffman’s detailed definition of terrorism—violence, causing of physical harm or death directed toward some intended target that the perpetrator believes deserves the physical harm or death— but may fall short on the last: usually entails harm or death done to innocent persons that act as collateral damage. The intended victim of the alien’s wrath was Nelec, so the three airmen could be seen as collateral damage. However, the alien also made no attempt to capture and “store” any of the military men, probably because it saw their uniforms as emblematic of its captors. The boys are able to escape while it is distracted trying to reach Nelec, and it leaves after the colonel’s death without harming the boys, who are still nearby. Yet they could have been seriously injured or even killed by the attack on the bus, just as they could have been from the train wreck. That those incidents did not result in harm to them is more luck than design by the perpetrators of the terroristic violence, Dr. Woodward and the alien.
Another interesting question raised by the alien’s terroristic actions is whether or not it is even bound by human legal or moral obligations. To be fair, no rights, as such, were extended to it by humanity when humans deliberately shot down its craft with a nuclear device, captured it, drugged it, and held it prisoner for decades.29 In an audiotape found by the boys in Dr. Woodward’s storage locker, the scientist describes his understanding of the alien, achieved through a telepathic link: “Through pain and lack of compassion we have taught him to hate us all. We have turned him into an enemy.” After the attacks of 9/11, people searched for answers to understand what would provoke a group of people to commit mass murder in the name of a religious cause. On the world stage, Osama bin Laden and the Islamic terrorists who perpetrated the attack put forth their belief that the “great Satan,” the United States, was trying to destroy their culture and belief system through economic, social, and military imperialism. From their perspective, anyone associated with the government of the United States—any citizen, man, woman, or child—was an enemy combatant and deserved death. If we use Hoffman’s definition of one side of terrorism as coming from an “individual that usually perceives itself as being treated unjustly or inappropriately by the larger group, cause, ideology, or other individuals that comprise the social situation in which the groups inhabit,” the Super 8 alien’s actions fit the mold of a terrorist. Using a utilitarian position, a case could be made for its terroristic actions to be seen as justified. This is the crux of how we understand the final act of the film.
The subterranean alien in Super 8 is physically monstrous to human eyes and capable of extreme violence, yet it has the intelligence to build and operate an interstellar spacecraft and can telekinetically move large objects and explode weapons. In designing it, creature artist Neville Page, Abrams, and consultant Steven Spielberg needed something large enough to stop a bus and toss people around like kittens, strong and flexible enough to dig a twenty-foot-tall tunnel under the city, but with hands delicate enough to manipulate sensitive electronic equipment. Their solution was a double set of arms, jointed at the shoulders with long-fingered hands, and powerful legs with clawed feet capable of digging like a badger. With touch it is also able to understand the thoughts and emotions of its human captors and, later, captives and to project its own. The alien’s touch so affected Dr. Woodward that he gave his life to free it. Yet because of its terrifying physical form and its own rage at its mistreatment and torture at the hands of Nelec and the other government scientists, all of those whom it encounters in the town of Lillian (before Joe) are too frightened to try to communicate with it. Even Alice, who understands what it wants, cannot move beyond her fear to give it the same release to go as Joe is capable of doing. Joe is able to see beyond that “otherness” and recognize his own pain and loss in the creature’s actions. A quiet kid who would rather make models and monster movies with his friends than go to sports camp, Joe’s closest familial relationship was with his mother. Joe has been alienated from his father most of his life. Something was taken from both of them—for Joe, his mother, and for the alien, his freedom—and this allows the communion they reach in the tunnels after Alice’s rescue.
After Joe frees Alice, the sheriff, and another woman, they attempt to flee but are caught by the alien, who violently knocks the adults aside (possibly killing them) and grabs up Joe. He is able to somehow stay calm and really communicate with it. “We understand. But not everyone’s horrible. I know bad things happen. Bad things happen, but you can still live. You can still live,” Joe tells it. We see the alien’s face close up and in focus, the nictitating membranes (protecting its eyes from the dirt caused by its subterranean digging) flip back and its much more human-looking eyes focus in on the boy.30 Understanding between the two allows Joe to be spared. When a noise indicating something is ready with the alien’s device attracts its attention, it sets the boy gently on the ground and leaves.
The final reconciliation of both Alice and Joe with their respective fathers parallels the creature’s acquisition of the silver-white Rubik’s cubes that will allow it to reconstitute its ship and go home. The magnetic force that draws the cubes and other metallic items to the water tower pulls Joe’s mother’s locket out of his pocket and opens it, revealing the picture of which he symbolically lets go.
This examination of Abrams’s Cloverfield and Super 8 looked at the invasions perpetrated by two nonhuman “alien” beings on American soil. Cloverfield used visual tropes from the 9/11 attacks on New York City, which resonate in the minds of the audience because of our shared memory of that terrorist action. Its twenty-something cast would have been in junior high in 2001 (the same age as the young protagonists in Super 8), and so they grew up with that sword of Damocles—that expectation of another attack—hanging over their heads. Their initial reaction to the events unfolding in front of them is to automatically think that the terrorists have struck again. However, the origins, motivations, and even sentience of the giant creature attacking the city are never revealed, so even though it rains down death and destruction on the city even greater that the Taliban attack, we are left with an open question of whether its actions fit our definition of terrorism. Super 8, with its 1979 setting, draws on our nostalgia for the gung-ho, “let’s help the nice alien get home” of Spielberg films like E.T.: The Extraterrestrial grafted onto that same post-9/11 awareness that an attack on America is not just a possibility, it has happened.
Recall that one could argue that the terrorist act is justified if there is no avenue for addressing injustices in some social setting. Could there be other ways, besides blowing up buildings and people, to call attention to one’s plight? Consider the nonviolent forms of protest exhibited by the likes of Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. And why perpetuate terrorist acts on someone else’s land, as was the case with the 9/11 attacks? The alien in Super 8 believed he had no choice. He was shot down while observing our planet, treated horribly by his government captors, and had to survive as best he could when he was afforded the opportunity to escape. Obtaining the materials and technology to recraft his ship and return home necessitated sometimes violent and criminal actions that he seemed to feel were justified. The fear sowed in Lillian by his scavenging, kidnapping townspeople, and telekinetically setting off all of the military weapons was a by-product of these actions. There are social settings—for example, fundamentalist theocratic regimes—in which the most heinous acts are committed against good people and oppression, injustice, and frustration are commonplace. In settings such as these, it’s no wonder that folks commit terrorist acts or even preach anarchy—such people are powerless and downtrodden. Taking direct vengeance on his captors, especially the deliberate killing of Colonel Nelec and the airmen on the bus, was where the alien truly stepped over the moral line according to our definition of terrorism. He was not in imminent danger of death, his ship was ready (as shown in his departure soon thereafter), and he didn’t need them for building materials, information, or food; therefore this was pure revenge. Well, it is a monster after all . . .
1. Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
2. “Measures to Eliminate International Terrorism,” annex to 1994 United Nations Declaration on Measures to Eliminate International Terrorism, http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/49/a49r060.htm.
3. Phillip Pomper, “Russian Revolutionary Terrorism,” in Terrorism in Context, ed. Martha Crenshaw (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 63–104. Although, Nechayev’s form of terrorism is closely linked to anarchism, as this famous quotation from his Catechism of the Revolutionist (1869) makes clear: “The Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property, nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion—the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose—to destroy it.”
4. See, for example, Nonna Bannister, Carolyn Tomlin, and Denise George, The Secret Holocaust Diaries: The Untold Story of Nonna Bannister (New York: Tyndale House, 2010); Peter Hayes and John Roth, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
5. For an account of the 20 July Plot of 1944 and Operation Valkyrie, see Joachim Fest, Plotting Hitler’s Death: The Story of German Resistance, trans. Bruce Little (New York: Holt, 1997).
6. There is a debate about the extent to which ordinary Germans living in Nazi Germany were aware of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi leadership. See Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, 1933–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berebaum, eds., Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Washington, DC: Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2001); Eric Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany, An Oral History (New York: Basic Books, 2005).
7. See Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989). A classic exposition of Kant’s moral philosophy can be found in Onora O’Neill, Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
8. Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals; see also Suzanne Uniacke, “Why Is Revenge Wrong?” Journal of Value Inquiry 34 (2000): 61–69.
9. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002); Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
10. Read about this story and others in Frank Spalding, Plane Crash: True Stories of Survival (New York: Rosen, 2007).
11. In the Cloverfield DVD special features, Abrams says that he got the idea of creating an American Godzilla movie when he and his young son, Henry, were visiting Japan.
12. Steven M. Sanders, “Picturing Paranoia: Interpreting Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” in The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film, ed. Steven M. Sanders (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 65–81.
13. As they head for the Brooklyn Bridge we find out the reason for her state of shock as she tells Lily, Rob, and Hud, “It was eating people. It was eating everyone.” Just like the alien in Super 8, it has a taste for human flesh. It isn’t true cannibalism—it’s not eating its own species—but as humans we still find it abhorrent.
14. This is parallel to a classic of the genre. See Sanders, “Picturing Paranoia,” 67, where he states, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers internalizes [protagonist] Miles’s paranoia by having him frequently advert to his fear in his voice-over narration. It externalizes his paranoia with imagery such as dark, suffocatingly small closets, narrow hallways, tunnels, and other enclosures.”
15. According to Cloverfield director Matt Reeves, in the DVD special features, the final line was Abrams’s idea.
16. J. J. Abrams, “The Mystery Box: J. J. Abrams on TED.com,” transcription by Robert Thomas Carter, TED.com Forum, March 2007, Monterey, California, http://blog.ted.com/2008/01/10/jj_abrams/.
17. In the DVD special feature “I Saw It! It’s Alive! It’s Huge!” creature designer Neville Page explains that he imagined the Cloverfield giant as a baby, motivated by fear rather than anger or conquest, a frightened wild animal intent only on ridding itself of the tiny humans who are shooting at it.
18. If one comes from the point of view that the 9/11 terrorists were “mindless” in their use of such devastating violence to kill thousands of innocents, perhaps the Cloverfield alien makes more sense: a huge, mindless creature destroying everything in its path. The terroristic rhetoric of Taliban leader Osama bin Laden makes this interpretation untenable.
19. When military tanks and trucks roll into Lillian to recapture the alien, one resident says, “This feels like a Russian invasion.”
20. That both Abrams and Spielberg made Super 8 films has been well documented. As teenagers, Abrams and his frequent collaborator Bryan Burke also were handpicked by Spielberg to restore his original 8-mm-format films. Director of photography Larry Fong, Cloverfield director Matt Reeves, and composer Michael Giacchino were also Super 8 aficionados as kids. In addition, many of the same creative team who worked with Abrams on Super 8 were also involved in some capacity on Cloverfield.
21. We would argue that, like ET, the character Sloth (John Matusak), considered alien because of his physical deformities, finds a home at the end of the film The Goonies when he is taken in by Chunk’s family.
22. Among these are the many 1970s film posters in the boys’ rooms—Star Wars, Bruce Lee, Dawn of the Dead, Halloween—and the naming of the chemical company in the kids’ zombie opus after horror master George Romero. Kodak, Western Union, and Tinker Toys also have prominent product placements.
23. Abrams actually had the young actors write their own dialogue for the scenes in “The Case.”
24. “Measures to Eliminate International Terrorism.”
25. The character’s name is probably a reference to the crusading Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who broke news of the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s.
26. As a foreshadowing of real space tragedy, when the cube comes to life and shoots through the wall of Joe’s bedroom, the poster it punches a baseball-sized hole through is of the Columbia space shuttle. See the poster design used in the film at http://timgeorgedesign.wordpress.com/2011/08/07/super-8-shuttle-poster/.
27. How they sense it, by smell, psychic energy, or what, is never really explained. Dogs are a traditional symbol of loyalty, and in E.T. the family had a friendly golden retriever, Harvey, who frightened the alien.
28. In a scene cut from the final version of the film, Joe and Cary come upon a pile of coffins from the cemetery above them in the alien’s tunnels. Perhaps the leg was from a corpse and not a living captive? Those who are revived by the boys—the sheriff, the lady in curlers, and Alice—do seem to be in good shape.
29. As shown in the full version of Dr. Woodward’s film on “Operation Belt trap” as part of the Super 8 viral marketing campaign; see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U0hgGJRxCM&feature=player_embedded.
30. According to the Super 8 DVD special feature “The Visitor Lives,” actor Bruce Greenwood did motion capture for the alien’s facial expressions here.