Review of Chronicle (2012) by Shiira — 02 Mar 2012

"...film everything," that's the manifesto Andrew comes up with in his room. This idea comes to him well before the amateur filmmaker and his "friends" acquire their superhero abilities.

It's not spectacle that he's after. Compared to other "found films", such as The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, Andrew's intent, in Chronicle, as the fllm's protagonist, differs strikingly from the investigative journalism-minded Heather(who leads the two young men to their doom in the Maryland woods), or Hudson, the videographer turned documentarian, at a friend's farewell party, when NYC comes under attack by a monster.

Like Cloverfield, it's an inciting event that transforms Chronicle from a prosaic record of mundanity into an exercise in genre. Differing from Hudson, however, is the fact that Andrew starts off with an aesthetic, a narcissistic one which echoes the hyper-real self-art of Jonathan Caouette, the brainchild behind Tarnation, the 2003 doc which formalized navel-gazing and surpassed the voyeurism of Capturing the Friedmans.

Andrew uses the camera like a salve, as does Caouette, and as does "Heather", who screams, "It's all that I've got," after being told repeatedly by Josh to put down the camera. And thus the troubled teen points the lens fixedly at the physical abuse he suffers at the hands of an alcoholic father, and also to apply some objective distance between himself and his ailing mother, the latter parent recalling Renee from Tarnation, with the difference being that Caouete's mom suffered mentally.

As Jonathan does, the introverted boy looks through his lens unflinchingly, not shying away from his mother's decay, bedridden on account of some unnamed disease. Uncannily, The Magnetic Fields song "Strange Powers" plays over the Tarnation soundtrack, bridging both Cloverfield("On a ferris wheel looking out on Coney Island," the place where the J.

J. Abrams film ends, from a section that Hudson doesn't tape over, featuring Beth and her China-bound beau, just days before the invasion), and the strange powers accrued by Andrew and his cohorts from their contact with the monolithic object that they discover in the hole, itself possessing a magnetic field.

The boys become telekinetic. In particular, Andrew, a modernization of Carrie White(Sissy Spacek), from the Brian DePalma shocker. At school, Andrew is a target for bullies, mean boys who think nothing of breaking the his camera.

Are they a match for the mean girls who taunt Carrie? It's hard to say, due to the film's first-person perspective. What humiliating footage does Andrew leave out? The audience's knowledge is limited.

When the camera is off, for all we know, Andrew is being pelted by condoms in the boys' locker room, therefore, the inter-textuality of the aforementioned films includes Carrie, too. Tarnation also chronicles Caouette's school life.

We see that Caouette also brought his SUper-8 camera for the expressed purpose of taping stage rehearsals, a Blue Velvet remounting; a musical adaptation cut in the same vein as the infamous Stephen King-inspired Broadway fiasco.

During this period, Caouette, the teen impresario, had an affinity for Carrie, as he and his collaborator would quote lines, according to the extra-diegetic titles. Most memorably, the admonition forewarned by Mrs.

White, Carrie's fanatically religious mother, who warns, "They're all going to laugh at you," just before her daughter leaves for the prom with Tommy Ross. Among the revelers, joining in the mass chorus of guffaws, is Miss Collins, the the shy girl's so-called mentor.

Whereas Matt is nice to Andrew because they're cousins, the P.E. teacher befriends Carrie, purely out of a professional obligation that presupposes a teacher treats both the popular kids and the misfits with equal measures of kindness.

If not for the blood ties, Andrews figures that Matt would be his adversary, prompting the documentarian to ask his relative, "Do you even like me?" Matt's answer: "You're really hard to talk to," will have grave consequences for his best friend.

It's the same conclusion, in regard to Miss White's true feelings toward her pupil, that Carrie arrives at too late. If only she could've hard the educator admit to the principal that she knew how those girls felt, since "the whole thing," referring to Carrie's first period, "made me want to take her and shake her too.

" At the prom, you realize that Miss White was once a mean girl too, regaling Carrie with the tale of her special night with the captain of the basketball team, a scenario that the girl couldn't possibly relate to.

After Carrie gets doused with pig blood, the teacher's latent disdain for her underling comes out, and dies for it. The same fate that awaits Steve, as Andrew turns into the anti-Thor, striking his cousin's best friend with a lightning bolt in the night sky.

Andrew is his own worst enemy, the Elephant(the 2003 Gus Van Sant film) in the room.