Feature Story: Movies as Metaphor
Movies are a medium like any other, with the capacity to tell stories out of our wildest imaginations. Like any other medium, the stories we see in movies can be straightforward or metaphorical, interpretive parables. Movies have come a long way since the advent of the camera; they’re no longer used to simply record and report events, they’re a transformative story telling method. Almost all movies can be interpreted as metaphor if one looks hard enough, but today we’ll be looking at some films that are more clearly metaphorical, and the techniques they use to convey a meaning deeper than the surface.
Let’s first look at The Magician (1958) directed by Ingmar Bergman, a black and white Swedish film made outside of Hollywood and the strict Production Code that governed American films at the time. The Magician is a movie I initially described as meta, and it reminded me of One From the Heart (Francis Ford Coppola, 1982). They’re polar opposites in terms of style and substance, but they’re both deeply personal, director driven films that serve as odes to the filmmaking process.
The shots in Bergman’s understated fairy tale are all almost dreamlike, it’s a period piece that goes back to a century before the film’s release, the narrative lending a storybook quality to The Magician. Its a perfect marriage of content and style; intense, drawn out close ups and claustrophobic shot composition makes the viewer feel like they’re in an alternate reality of sorts, the kind of place and time where magic just might be real. Bergman also uses many thematic elements that are allegorical to his own career as a filmmaker — the artist in disguise, the critics who mock his craft, the love that keeps one moving forward. Truly The Magician is as close to a fairy tale as a movie can get, with timeless themes and plot elements that any viewer could draw deeper meaning from.
Unlike the films we’ll touch on later in this post, Cloverfield and Colossal, the metaphor of The Magician isn’t found in any monster, but in the work of its protagonist Vogler. Vogler is the leader of a traveling “Magnetic Health Theater”, his job to manipulate the untrained into believing what he shows them to be true. Vogler is a sort of self-insert for Vogler, a man who despises his various audiences for different reasons, who must disguise his true nature so as to appear serious. Through Vogler’s plight in Stockholm, Bergman conveys the plight of the director — the want to be loved, the endeavor to challenge the audience beyond belief, and the struggle of rejection even when at the brink of success. Vogler moves his critics in ways even they can’t understand, and while some may never come around, there will always be another king with a hunger for his craft, a desire to be amazed.
Cloverfield (2008) directed by Matt Reeves is a film rife with metaphor, although in a much more specific, more topical way than The Magician. Cloverfield is a film that uses reminiscent imagery, setting, and themes to mirror the events of the September 11th attacks on the Twin Towers. It is a disaster-horror film shot entirely with shaky handheld cameras, presented as found footage. Through the found footage technique one is reminded of the civilian documentation of the 9/11 attacks, and Reeves adds plenty of additional symbolism to drive the point home for the viewer.
Movies can be metaphors for anything really, they could represent a part of an a filmmaker’s life, a period of social change, or a particular event. The latter is the case for Cloverfield, which took on an event with such immense psychological significance the United States still hasn’t yet recovered 18 years later. Allegorical art about massive historical events has a long precedent, Casablanca served this purpose for World War II, The Matrix did the same for the advent of the Internet. Cloverfield served a similar purpose, a way to make sense of these world changing events and, through art, helping the audience come to terms with how the world has changed.
Part of what Cloverfield is coming to terms with is the fact that America is not as safe as we think, that alien forces (take that term as literally as you like) could strike us at anytime and our capacity to deal with that is much more limited than we think. But Cloverfield is also about how Americans saw the 9/11 events as they happened. It was a moment in time in which an entire nation jumped to the nearest television set and experienced mass tragedy through the eyes of people on the ground. Cloverfield was in a way a look into the future, where we witness horrific events through the eyes of the victims and perpetrators themselves.
Finally, we’ll examine Colossal (2017) directed by Nacho Vigalondo. A real genre misfit, Colossal pulls a bait and switch with it’s initial rom-com format, and swiftly pivots to a more psychological drama film. The whole thing is tied together by it’s premise, that our main character Gloria (Anne Hathaway) is controlling a giant monster on the other side of the globe. Colossal’s opening is a direct homage to Godzilla, and it borrows much of Godzilla’s metaphorical nature as well. The difference in Vigalondo’s film is that the monster isn’t simply a metaphor for an event, its representative of Gloria’s problems, whether its addiction, abuse, or self-sabotage, that’s for the viewer to decide.
Colossal is filmed with a relatively traditional style compared to the last two films, perhaps in order to sell it’s initial image as a romantic comedy. Its traditional cinematography also helps relay the film’s point about avoidance of consequences. While shots in Seoul are sweeping wide lens aerial views, upstate New York is filmed with an almost tranquil pace and composition, symbolizing Gloria’s ignorance to the consequences of her actions. Oscar (Jason Sudeikis) is perhaps an even better metaphorical vehicle for the “monster within us” theme than Gloria is. His transformation from plucky loser to insolent sadist is an incredible reveal, and his character becomes a more obvious “monster” than Gloria ever was. That’s what’s interesting about the metaphor in Colossal, both of the main characters have their “monsters” manifest in the same way, but their real problems are rather different. It leaves the audience to their own devices when deciphering the meaning of the film, which works to great effect. That’s the difference between this film and one like Cloverfield, where although it’s obvious what the latter is speaking on, somehow Colossal feels like more of an artistic statement.
