Real Life vs. the Movies

Watch these two clips...



and


(feel free to start at 0:58 and stop at 1:20)

and see if you notice any similarities.

Obviously, this is not a case of life imitating art (and how cliche a phrase is that?). An exploding propane facility in Toronto has very little to do with the fictitious Cloverfield attack.

Instead, I want to point out two things.

1) How quickly fiction--in this case, a movie--leaps into my mind when I see news; I assume it's not only me. Whenever anything at all out of the ordinary happens, I immediately think of all of the movie situations which seem to apply, regardless of how silly they are (zombies, aliens, combines, etc).

2) How YouTube was so crucial to the success of Cloverfield, in that the sort of footage that movie provided makes such instinctive sense to those of us who witnessed the 9/11 massacres from hand-held cameras, and to those of us who get much of our news from similar sources on YouTube.
I was speaking with a friend--a History major--once, who went on for some time about how interesting Cloverfield was to a history major, in that it displayed the relevance of primary documents, and highlighted the excitement a historian may have in finding a particularly good document.

There's a fair amount I could say as an English major, as well, but I don't really feel in the mood. Sorry.

I hope the links work.