not with a bang but a whimper
Some people would shy away from reading deep meaning in popular culture. But everywhere around us are signs that even in our most habitual pleasures we are playing with reality.
For example, Americans take all sorts of complicated psychotropic drugs. Crystal meth, OxyContin, ketamine, cocaine, marijuana and LSD – all have been or are still widely consumed. They’re sought out by the rich and the poor, the liberal and the conservative, the unschooled and teachers, alike.
Movies are similar to psychotropic drugs. They induce altered states of consciousness whereby we lose track of our selves and focus, instead, on a mirror image of a fantasy world populated by familiar strangers. The Stephen Spielberg movie “War of the Worlds” is a particularly powerful trip, its scale and success a tribute to the rich inner life of the American moviegoer.
Unlike simpler blockbusters like “Independence Day” and “Transformers” which grant the viewer the childhood pleasure of knocking down a tower of blocks, “War of the Worlds” plays with a more mature emotional theme: the maddening fear of death.
The protagonist, Tom Cruise, is mostly inarticulate if not mute. He’s a hollow man. But he’s not a simple man. Like productions of Hamlet which divide the lead role into three parts (or, say, Dorothy and her three companions), Cruise’s personality has been broken up and assigned to three other actors: a precocious young daughter, a rebellious young son and a motherly ex-wife.
Together, they perform a thinly veiled re-enactment of the terrorist attacks of September 11 and their psychological aftermath. This layer of the movie, while certainly provocative, is not its deepest. Instead, “War of the Worlds” mines the older – and more terrifying – cave of mortality. Straight-up death – which may, in fact, be the movie’s lead. Curiously, this death is acted out as a deadly brute – an animal force. (Even the aliens’ death machine are squid-like.)
As in real life, the movie’s hero cannot battle death directly so instead he battles with death’s psychological impact on other people. In the movie’s final showdown, Cruise is at his most “emotionally distant” – his personality almost entirely absent. Quite literally, the noble son has run off to war, the daughter blindfolded like justice and the motherly wife still nowhere to be seen. In more figurative terms, the pilot has been ejected and the plane is now on auto-pilot. Driven solely by instinct. On cruise control.
In this emptied out state, the hero must kill a fellow victim who has succumbed to terror and will, because of his hysteria, hasten his own and the hero’s demise. This moral and mortal confrontation takes place in a dark and dirty basement, only a few feet from the tunnel the hysterical victim, a former paramedic, has begun to excavate while describing the eyes of the dead. We don’t often get this close to the dark fertile loam, the relentless eye of death floating just around the corner, slowly seeking us out. In the dead of Winter where instead of icy water clinging to trees, we are treated to the sight of frozen rivers of blood.
For better or worse, this is not where the movie ends. Fast forward and you’ll find yourself in a crisp, bright, sunny ending. It’s an early Spring day, if you will. As the eternal family is reunited and the hero’s personality is made whole, the story that began with a father’s struggle to be acknowledged by his son ends with the father acknowledging the son. It’s a markedly social gesture of continuity in a movie that is so often deeply personal and preoccupied with the hard stop.
Had it ended earlier, we may have experienced the Hollywood version of what Toni Morrison captured so well:
She lay down again on the bed and sang a little wandering tune made up of the words I have sung all the songs all the songs I have sung all the songs there are until, touched by her own lullaby, she grew drowsy, and in the hollow of near-sleep she tasted the acridness of gold, left the chill of alabaster and smelled the dark, sweet stench of loam.
Previously: War of the Worlds is similar to Spielberg’s earlier thriller “Poltergeist,” which also relied on buried monsters, bright lights and family dynamics to explore the meaninglessness of death. In that movie’s showdown, the beleaguered father denounces a hapless cheat with some very heavy words:
You moved the cemetery, but you left the bodies, didn’t you? You son of a bitch, you left the bodies and you only moved the head stones. You only moved the head stones. Why? Why?
Separating the signifier from the signified. That’s what makes it some scary shit.
Related: on John Carpenter’s The Thing.