War’s family comes out of time
An old popular song celebrated turn of the century family with “Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage.”
While this was meant to show how appropriate an institution marriage was to civilized society, time as altered the perception of the lyric to suggest marriage is now out of date, an considering the cars we drive, may have outlived its usefulness.
This is very apt in looking at the concept of family in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, and though Spielberg has often visited this theme in his other movies, we find strong evidence that his approach to family comes out of H.G. Wells – not from Wells War of the Worlds, but rather, The Time Machine – from which Spielberg apparently has taken numerous of his sub themes.
Structurally, Spielberg’s adaptation follows the text of Wells’ War of the Worlds. That is, we get some of the overall flow of action and most of the required scenes: the landing, the ferry crossing and the farm house. Some of the characters even match up, such as the ambulance driver taking on the role of the minister. And in the book, the main character does send his wife away and spends the rest of the book seeking to rejoin her.
Spielberg, of course, simplified the story line by putting the whole tale on the shoulders of one character when the original tale had involved the main character and his brother. Spielberg makes reference and pokes fun at this change when Ray claims he and his brother know everything since the two characters had recounted the whole tale of Wells War of the Worlds.
Yet Spielberg’s tale goes beyond a geographically divided family, but a family fractured socially as well, serving as a symbol for the ills of modern society. In this movie we have – if subtly – a class war, a race war, and an internal conflict inside the mind of mankind.
As pointed out in another essay, the hero of The Time Machine travels a million years into the future to find that society has been split along class lines, working class now feeding off the leisure class.
In some ways, Spielberg seems to be saying that contemporary times are the time to which that traveler went and that we are already as fractured a society as Wells predicted at the turn of the century.
In the Time Machine, Wells externalized the human mind into what we call animal and thinking brains: Morlock and Eloi. In his film, Spielberg does the same thing bringing us aliens that – like the terrorists and other dark aspects of our culture – are really the dark part of our own psychic culture, that animal inside each of us capable of any crime – even mass slaughter.
In Wells’ Time Machine, the hero sees the fractured family as the symbol of the decline of the human race, and ironically equates the collapse of the family to the fact that civilization has made life so safe that we have lapsed into a kind of social decay. Wells’ hero claims that the very thing we strive for most is the reason for our decline: safety and security.
“Hardship and freedom: conditions under which the active, strong and subtle survive and the weak go to the wall; conditions that put a premium upon loyal alliance of capable men, upon self-restraint, patience and decision. And the institution of the family, and the emotions that arise there in; the fire of jealousy, the tenderness for off spring, parental self-devotion, all found their justification and support in the imminent dangers of the young,” Wells wrote. “Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness… Physical courage the love of battle may be hindrances to a civilized man… Where population is balanced and abundant, much child-bearing becomes an evil rather than a blessing to the state, where violence comes but rarely and off spring are secure there is less necessity – indeed there is no necessity for an efficient family and the specialization of the exes with references to their children’s needs disappears.”
Wells character is convinced that once man kind overcomes all hardships, mankind begins to decay, claiming that part of the progress man makes is out of necessity, and the skills he learns and uses come out of the effort to survive. Of course, Wells character soon finds out how wrong he is in his conclusions, that mankind carries inside itself the seeds of a much more savage destruction, one that rises up out of the ground to begin slaughter whenever people believe there are safe.
Spielberg in War of the Worlds presents us with a truly modern family, one in which the father has ceased to pay attention to his children, civilization and a secure life turning him away from what was once the principle occupation of the family, to raise and protect its young.
But when evil returns rising back up out of our savage unconscious, then the family, in this case the father, returns to his traditional role to protect his children.
Spielberg like Wells seems to say that the danger never leaves, only that we live in the illusion of safety, and that when we least expect the violence to re-emerge it does. At the core of this battle between good and evil is the family, and somehow by preserving it, we keep the building blocks of civilization in tact. Without the family, we are but lost souls like the ambulance driver in the farm house, lonely and slightly perverted.