I had planned to write a piece connecting “Cloverfield” to J.J. Abrams’ other work. I assumed that there would be either thematic or literal ties that I could work with. And then I saw the movie and found out it was completely absent of father issues, numerology, characters named after philosophers or theoretical mathematicians. Nothing about the circularity of time, no characters who existed only in another character’s mind, not even a decent anagram. (That didn’t stop our founder, who came up with the brilliant “Clever if Old”.) Other than a brief appearance of the number 47, which appears frequently in Lost and in every episode of Alias, the connections just aren’t there. Would it have been too much to have somebody playing Driveshaft’s album in the background, Abrams?
