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Of course no one has suggested burning or boycotts; I thought that was an obvious rhetorical over-the-top gag, as juxtaposed with the real choice, which I'm sure you and many others will make, to simply avoid this movie if it hurts too much.
I have a friend who was struck by lightning, and despite being badly hurt, he lived. A horrific thing, right? But he dealt with it in his own way (partly by buying a Harley with the insurance money, partly by realizing he was lucky to have escaped incineration) and he doesn't live in fear of lightning -- despite that whole "not striking twice" thing having been disproven -- nor does he think the Weather Channel is exploitative.
And he's a fan of Frankenstein movies, which exploit lightning as the jump-start for a life that shouldn't be...which, again, gets to the point of my earlier letter: Monsters, myths and other stories have reasons to exist aside from what is visible on the surface.
Rollercoasters elicit a reaction from our biochemical shells -- not knowing the difference between perceived and real threats -- a kind of thrill. Which is often followed by a kind of sickness, perhaps the result of an overload of adrenaline into muscles that aren't needed to fight or fly. So why do we ride? is a question for further study. But the fact is, we do.
Many of us feel that desire to experience fright in safe, containable doses. Does it brace us for the next time that a real scare comes along, the way stressing a muscle makes it rebuild stronger? Thrill-junkies would seem to suggest so. Having inured themselves to the mundane, they push higher and harder. I know that once I've seen a scary movie -- "Alien," "The Ring," "The Others," whatever -- it's not the same the second time around. Maybe it's just that the surprise is gone, but so is that rush.
So maybe the reason "Cloverfield" -- or the idea of it; most of us have only seen trailers and the effective teasing marketing campaign -- has so many people intrigued is that we're all looking for a new and bigger scare.
And maybe (I know this is a buttload of maybes, but I'm trying to extrapolate from the specific to the general here, always a crapshoot) being scared by measures is, in some ways, good for us.
