If Hook entered ‘a minefield of psychosexual obsessions’ (Baxter 1996: 364), and A.I. was ‘a seething psychological bonanza’ (Hoberman 2001: 16), these are understatements compared to War of the Worlds (2005). It retreads familiar Spielberg concerns, combining large-scale disaster-movie spectacle, science fiction fantasy involving alien contact, technological trauma, technical virtuosity, cinematic self-reflexivity and auto-citation, with family psychodrama. Close Encounters’ and E.T.’s negative, it resurrects a darker, misanthropic Spielberg glimpsed intermittently over three decades. Its blockbuster treatment of America threatened by an unstoppable alien force is Jaws writ large. Also evident, infinitely multiplied, is masculine testing against a ‘projected’ mechanical double as seen in Duel, which, I suggested, alludes to earlier versions of War of the Worlds. Most remarkable is these discourses’ inextricable interweaving.
The family of man
H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds retains mythical status for establishing key science fiction iconography and presciently describing mechanised warfare against civilians. Published amid fears of Germany’s developing power, as it recognises (1946: 39), it especially resonates during heightened international tension. Orson Welles’ 1938 radio broadcast fed anxieties concerning Hitler’s designs on America, the 1953 movie joined a cycle of Cold War creature features, and Spielberg’s version, released just a week before the worst bomb attacks on London since World War Two, is replete with imagery from recent humanly-perpetuated cataclysms. The New York skyline following the credits, collapsing buildings, dazed dust-covered crowds, roadside displays of hand-made posters seeking missing loved ones, and a crashed airliner recall 9/11 and associated outrages. Massed bodies floating downstream universalise inhumanity beyond the West’s immediate concerns by evoking Rwandan genocide.
Colin MacCabe likens the movie to ‘Operation Shock and Awe from the point-of-view of an Iraqi’ (2005: 9). This makes sense in shots of heavily-armed troops looking down indifferently from passing trucks at the helpless protagonist before launching a conflagration, struggling to maintain order among panicking refugees, or standing by as, eventually, a war machine topples ignominiously like Saddam’s statue. ‘Shock and awe’ also describes expectations of a state-of-the-art science fiction horror movie. As the allusions to real-life conflict suggest, the alien invasion projects human attributes onto an imaginary Other. The return of the repressed, always informing these genres, reveals worst fears about human capabilities and the destructive power members of our species possess.
The central family, however, is not merely a point of access for focalisation but appears to originate the cataclysmic events. These, in a personal mise-en-abyme of the wide-scale socio-political allegory, represent the protagonist’s relationships and inner turmoil in an unusually literal realisation of projection metaphors and doubling. ‘Projection’, psychoanalytically, embraces ‘qualities, feelings, wishes, objects, which the subject refuses to recognise or rejects in himself [sic] [and which] are expelled from the self and located in another person or thing’ (Laplanche & Pontalis 1973: 349). Ray (Tom Cruise), then, up in his crane at the start, reflects the alien that slips, dying, out of the fallen tripod at the end. From his vantage point of dominant specularity, Ray looks down, ‘cool and unsympathetic … with envious eyes’ on human affairs, along with ‘intellects vast’ – the imminent invaders, to whom these words in the narration actually refer and whose point of view a montage of aerial shots suggests. Ray jokes with his children about his imaginary brother – between them they ‘know everything’, the brother having the answers to questions that defeat Ray. His surname, Ferrier, encapsulates this duality: he ‘ferries’ his daughter to safety and mirrors the ‘ferrous’ invaders. Like Elliott’s counterpart, E.T., but different in that they are isolated rather than telempathically connected, the alien realises Ray’s unconscious desires by venting his frustrations against the human race with its Heat-Rays – as Wells’ novel (with a very dissimilar and anonymous protagonist) names them.
This superior vantage point evokes the power of the all-seeing Father that Ray would like to be – embodied in Morgan Freeman’s Wellesian Voice-of-God framing narration. Cocky at work, but a responsible teamster who follows union rules rather than a maverick, Ray fails in familial roles. ‘What are you – your mother or mine?’ he asks his precociously wise daughter, confirming his gender-role confusion. Mocking his ex-wife’s partner’s car as ‘one safe-looking new vehicle’, he drives a souped-up sports car, unsuitable for family use, yet still arrives late to take custody of his children. Later, fleeing with them in the one operational vehicle following the attack, he drives a smaller, cheaper, older version of Tim’s people carrier. He is unprepared for the children’s stay and has no food (not that he knows what they eat). Class difference, between his clapboard house under the freeway, and Mary Ann’s (Miranda Otto) luxurious villa and his former in-laws’ Boston townhouse, corresponds with his masculine inferiority. He fails to quell his surly rebellious teenage son (Justin Chatwin), whose name, Robbie, hints at a castration threat that drives the entire narrative.
Playing baseball catch in the yard, that archetypal US father/son bonding ritual, but wearing different teams’ caps, Robbie and Ray appear more like squabbling brothers. They trade insults until Ray, hurling the ball forcibly, brings the sexual undercurrents to the surface by accusing Robbie of being ‘such a dick’. Robbie misses the catch and the ball smashes a window – the first significant disruption to normality and the first damage to property, correlating with escalating destruction that will approach apocalyptic proportions. This physical manifestation of Ray’s failure breaches domesticity, social values and security before any attack commences.
1960s horror effected a shift, from community and domesticity threatened by external threats to danger latent within the family (Wood 1986). War of the Worlds unites the two, paralleling Ray’s domestic dysfunction, in a street bedecked with patriotic flags, with a journey to the seat of the American Revolution. A Minuteman statue, pointedly encrusted with invasive weed, recalls the origin of a (masculine) gun culture that according to the film exacerbates conflict and leads to murder. Ray’s guns – his pistol which, relinquished, almost immediately kills another refugee in a crisis where no official leadership is evident, and Ogilvy’s (Tim Robbins) rifle, over which he and Ray wrestle – are no match against ray guns. That the war machines have been long buried, awaiting their moment, clearly relates to former paranoia concerning Reds under the bed and contemporary fears of terrorist sleeper cells, but suggests also civilisation’s deep-rooted potential to undermine itself from within.
The broken window precipitates the invasion in the way Jim in Empire of the Sun more consciously believes he has prompted war with Japan. Once the assault begins, Ray has to take responsibility. A mirror shot figures his acceptance of the Symbolic. He delivers Rachel (Dakota Fanning) (his ‘Ray-child’) safely to Mary Ann (‘Take care of our kids’, she has charged him), and has to release Robbie to his manly destiny. He regains patriarchal respect on both counts from Robbie, who, having survived, greets him with an embrace, and from Mary Ann and her parents. The ending seems bathetic, however, as this successful pursuit of the Lost Mother is a hollow victory, an illusory Imaginary; the marriage is long over and Mary Ann pregnant by another man, while the alien defeat results from harmless bacteria rather than the combined military forces of history’s greatest superpower. Irrespective of intercultural and interpersonal conflicts, life, as in Jurassic Park, ‘finds a way’, symbolised by Mary Ann’s bulging figure and the green bud on the desiccated branch in the final shot, while Ray remains, as he started: alone.
Self-reflexivity
‘Every film is a veritable drama of vision’, Stephen Heath, citing Jaws, insists (1986: 397). War of the Worlds is no exception to Spielberg’s self-reflexive highlighting of this. As a representation of social and cultural insecurities (for of course, the protagonist, being a textual construct has no unconscious), the movie implicates its own mechanisms in the fantasy. The preceding Paramount logo materialises out of falling stars, Spielberg’s signature motif but here also narratively motivated as (the novel explains) the aliens’ descent. Sinister music accompanies the DreamWorks logo, consisting of clouds and a moon that return during the first scenes, the brand name practically screaming for psychoanalytic reading of the projected nightmare. The opening shots blend metaphorically and metonymically like dream condensations. DNA strands, anticipating the strings of invasive alien weed, control bugs within a water droplet that morphs into the Earth, which dissolves into Mars, which in turn becomes a red traffic light, part of a montage of crowded cities, before the entire screen becomes blank as the sun shines into camera, mirroring the projector beam.
Inscribed screens, literal and metaphorical, frame much of the action. TV news reports, largely ignored by the characters, narrate the imminent threat and place the US invasion within a global attack. Passers-by record the brewing storm on pocket cameras and the first human massacre appears on a vaporised victim’s camcorder viewfinder. Sunlight shines in a focused beam through the rose window of a church as its façade breaks away. Ray later discovers, along with the viewer, the secret of the lightning via a freeze-framed video in an outside broadcast van. ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet!’ a CBS journalist misquotes The Jazz Singer (1927) to Ray: doubly oriented address promising the audience technological marvels of wonder and realism. Screen doors, car windows, a kitchen window with a peanut butter slice adhering to it, and cobwebs frequently come between the camera and protagonists looking off-screen. These inscribe the fourth wall, the movie’s screen, allowing its rupture to figure in reverse point-of-view shots. Among these, a mob smashes the car windshield, an off-screen plane crash causes it to explode with flames and a shock wave before the auditorium plunges into darkness, and an alien, the first seen in close-up, pushes through net curtains. Rachel, carried from one horror to another, wide-eyed and alternating between hysteria and catatonia, particularly represents spectatorship. A rectangular patch of light illuminates one eye as she witnesses her father in life-and-death struggle with an older patriarch over a phallic gun; the outcome is so traumatic Ray blindfolds her and the ensuing act occurs behind a closed door. Widescreen-shaped windows in dark cellars, often with light beams flickering through, provide views onto the unfolding catastrophe (notably contrasting with a ‘triangular hole’ and ‘vertical slit’ in the novel (Wells 1946: 130)).
War of the Worlds – nowhere to hide: the screen explodes
As ever, the fantasy is explicitly cinematic and its intertextuality, including allusions most obviously to the film’s literary, radio and cinematic precursors, and to Hitchcock’s The Birds, involves numerous auto-citations. These range across Spielberg’s career, and include an alien’s fascination with a bicycle, the wheel playing no part in their technology according to Wells, which is also a nod to E.T. in the midst of a tense threat scene. Humour plays its part elsewhere, as in the prominent ‘No Littering’ sign while the first tripod lays waste to the neighbourhood. Particularly noteworthy, however, in a movie that foregrounds special effects, are examples of technique, rendered ‘invisible’ by comparison – presumably CGI-processed – that in any other context would be breathtaking. The first shot of Ray on the crane arcs seamlessly from an aerial extreme long shot to close in on him, safely encased in glass in the cab. Hand-held camerawork in Ray’s house jumps edgily between close-ups on significant details in extended takes, narrating visually without apparent edits. As the family’s requisitioned car careens at speed through stalled freeway traffic the camera captures their conversation in a two-minute-and- 23-seconds shot which arcs more than 720 degrees around them, passing through both side rear windows, moving back and forth, up and down, between long shots and medium close-ups, eventually pulling out from the front, craning up and panning around as the car accelerates away. Typically, numerous points of access and levels of address and appreciation exist, with respite from continual psychological assault and opportunities for reflexive and identificatory readings or the jouissance of repositioning between them. This is neither mindless bombardment nor unilateral manipulation.
Wells’ book, published in serial form in 1897, coincided with early demonstrations of the cinematograph. This new technology, far more than a couple of motor cars and oblique references to experiments with flight, informs Wells’ nightmarish vision of twentieth-century scientific-technical rationality. Surveillance, whether ‘across the gulf of space’, from where humans appear no more than ‘infusoria under the microscope’ (1946: 9) or atop a war machine is central to the invaders’ power. Wells’ narrator explicitly uses the word ‘camera’ in describing the machines (1946: 69, 119), while the imagery surrounding them evokes the flickering of early cinema:
And this thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod … A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with two feet in the air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as it seemed, with the next flash … [A] great body of machinery on a tripod stand … So much I saw then, all vaguely for the flickering of the lightning, in blinding highlights and dense black shadows. (1946:51)
Fitted like a camera with a pan-and-tilt mounting, ‘the brazen hood that surmounted it moved to and fro with the inevitable suggestion of a head looking about it’ (ibid.). Recalling that the Lumières’ cinematograph doubled as camera and projector, this is strikingly similar to Metz’s image of vision as simultaneously projective and introjective, particularly as ‘a light-ray, like the beam of a … searchlight’ (1946: 40) precedes the Heat-Ray the aliens ‘project’ (1946: 32).
Aghast spectators complete the inscribed apparatus, their scopophilia, like that of the audience at a horror movie, taking the form of irresistible morbid desire. ‘I did not dare to go back towards the pit, but I felt a passionate longing to peer into it’ (1946: 27), reports Wells’ narrator, while so powerful is Robbie’s compulsion to look that he risks his life for the spectacle of the military counter-attack. Loss of self, engulfment by fascination with the object of the gaze, adds the spectator’s projective and introjective gaze, voyeuristic in the sense of wanting to maintain mastery by seeing without being seen, to commingle with the opposing currents of the aliens’ look. The initial spectacle of the storm conforms to Spielberg’s trademark ‘solar wind’ – a character even attributes it to a solar flare – as washing lines flap and leaves swirl. However, as Ray points out, the current flows unusually towards the eye of the storm, reinforcing the trope that it emanates from the frightened citizens, and rather than project onto their faces it seems to suck light from the bleached cinematography.
The mother of all wars
Part of the tripods’ dreamlike monstrosity is their dizzyingly intangible suggestive-ness. On the one hand they are emphatically phallic assertions of voyeurism’s simultaneous sadism and masochism. As giant cameras, they have blades in their tripods to impale the spectator-victims whose reflections they are, like that of the protagonist in Peeping Tom. One of the most intensely threatening images involves penetration into the cellar of a cobra-like tentacle equipped with a lens and spotlights, recalling a body-penetrating endoscope, which visualises the intrusive, dangerous, sexual power invested in the gaze, the castrating threat implied in reducing its object to just that. (Spectatorship and horror imbricate with sexual difference when Rachel, reflected light flickering over her face, confronts the floating corpses after withdrawing from her father’s sight to gain privacy to pee.) Hanging beneath each machine’s body at the top of its legs are two testicular baskets, containing its live human food store. These giant, devouring, obscene fathers require emasculation for Ray to secure his place in the Symbolic. In fact, Robbie has earlier argued that if they ‘had the balls’ they would fight the aliens.
Conversely, before Rachel and Ray’s incorporation into the machine its dazz-ling light shaft transfixes them. Medusa-like, with hanging tentacles, the machine exemplifies Barbara Creed’s (1989) conception of the monstrous-feminine. Possessing, as MacCabe put it, ‘what looks like the largest and most aggressive vagina in the history of the planet’ (2005: 8), she is the voracious archaic mother. The vagina dentata links also with menstrual imagery as Ogilvy, the man in the basement, associates the machines’ red discharge with reproduction (‘fertiliser’ he calls it, believing it relates to the red weed). The aliens thus equate with Ray’s aggression towards Mary Ann, whose advanced pregnancy highlights motherhood. Having already hacked the end off the one-eyed snake with an axe, he now shows he ‘has the balls’ when he enters the vagina and withdraws, leaving two hand grenades inside, thereby effecting the only human defeat of a machine. Ray’s figured rebirth, as a ‘real’ man, parallels an alien’s on-screen death, continuing the uterine imagery: the machine’s waters break and the creature, essentially a smaller version of the body containing it, emerges head first, and dies. From this stew of sexual anger in the midst of Spielberg’s darkest fiction, it is a small step to seeing this as representing the wished-for stillbirth of Mary Ann’s baby, disavowing Ray’s irrevocable exclusion from ‘his’ family.
Ray’s protection of Rachel again illustrates the Talmudic verse from Schindler’s List – ‘Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire’ – borne out in the framing discourse that ‘neither do men live nor die in vain’, part of a holistic environmental message that puts faith in the planet’s natural selection to defend itself. Yet this is a bleak outlook when extended beyond evolution of resistance to organisms such as the common cold and applied to human relationships. In saving Rachel, Ray murders in cold blood – the act itself literally ob-scene, out of the scene – Ogilvy, another obscene father in Ray’s eyes (the act juxtaposed against his castration of the tentacle), who creepily promises to look after Rachel. Ogilvy appears to have no narrative function other than to undergo death by the hero. Ray’s actions cancel the value of the Schindlerjuden’s survival because ‘there will be generations’, Cinqué and Adams’ appeals to their ancestors in Amistad, and Ryan’s ‘earning’ of Miller’s death. Plumbing the depths, his ambiguous heroism achieves nothing beyond perpetuating his genes and a futile attempt at protecting Imaginary childhood innocence against power struggles in the Symbolic and the horrors of the Real. He advances out of the sun’s low projected rays to deliver Rachel to her family. They don’t even invite him in.