Was it all a dream?
War of the Worlds as Ray Ferrier’s nightmare
Were the fantastic elements of Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds really only a figment of the main character’s imagination, something that Ray Ferrier dreamed up when he went to sleep after a hard emotional day?
That appears to be the actual working structure of the movie, giving us a Freudian glimpse into the troubled mind the film’s main character and explains some of the distinctly dream-like qualities of the science fiction elements of the film.
While the film begins starkly realistic – scenes in which Spielberg sets up the fantasy elements we get later when Ray falls asleep – once Ray closes his eyes the whole movie changes and we begin a magical dream quest through Ray’s unconscious, full of his emotional turmoil, his loves and hates, his fears and his desires, and, of course, his worst fears.
The clue to this dream works interpretation comes in a dialogue overlay just after Ray returns from his confrontation with the aliens in the heart of Newark, when he tells his son, Robbie and his daughter, Rachel, that “We seem to be caught up in a dream.”
This makes sense since all of the fantastic elements of the film happen after Ray goes to sleep and we see a dramatic change of film style from utterly realistic to a surrealistic, although seeds to the dream sequence are planted in the realistic portion so that we are seeing the internal side of Ray working out these conflicts on the dreamscape of his unconscious mind.
Using this model, we get explanations for numerous jumps and what seems like odd transpositions – such as the crash of the jet liner into Tim’s house and other scenes that seem to defy normal logic.
It helps to know that Spielberg like many of us who grew up on 1950s science fiction films – was terrified by one film in particular (one that terrified me, too): Invaders from Mars, in which a boy staring through his telescope one night notes the arrival of invaders, and through a series of horrifying experiences, manages to thwart their ambitions, only for him to wake up at the beginning with the arrival of the aliens again.
In War of the Worlds, Spielberg seems to use dream as the mode for telling the most fantastic portions of his film, only the character (and the audience) aren’t really shaken awake from the dream at the end. We simply get a very realistic ending in which the dream has been resolved and the family reunited in Boston.
War of the Worlds may be seen as similar in structure to Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol, with Ray playing the part of Scrooge, his daughter, Rachel playing the part of Tiny Tim, and his son, the role of Krachet. While it is possible to carry this metaphor too far, War of the Worlds does take us into the hidden recesses of Ray’s mind, as we are allowed to follow him through the resolution process. While we don’t exactly get the ghost of Christmas Present, Past and Future, we get a mingling of images that are clearly his unconscious mind remanufacturing reality into dream elements typical of Freudian analysis. Like Scrooge, Ray goes to sleep as a self-centered greedy man and wakes up a better man in Boston after a series of dreams that he cannot blame on a bit of undigested meat.
As in Scrooge, we can divide War of the Worlds into three sections: reality, the dream, and the aftermath. In the opening sequences, we get all of the issues that Ray will need to resolve during the dream sequence. The last scene in Boston is very much like the waking scene in Christmas Carol, although Ray doesn’t emerge from the dream the way Scrooge does to find that time has stood still.
In the opening scenes, we are given the conflicts that will later be converted into dream like images, such his conflict with his boss, conflict with his wife, conflict with his son, his lack of knowledge about his daughter, and such. Each gets acted out later as the planted seeds bloom into nightmare images, exaggerated by Ray’s fears.
For instance, it is no coincidence that the alien machine is a compellation of elements that include foghorn sounds, jet engines, tripods, a car headlight, grasping arms, baskets for storing and such. In the opening scenes we see Ray manipulating a cargo handling device with similar features, steering his car for his ride home, and the pieces of his other Mustang strewn across his kitchen for him to get rid of later. It is also no accident that the alien machine must be assembled before it can begin doing its dirty deeds. The alien sounds like a jet because of the constant wind up of jets Ray would hear from nearby Newark Airport during his work day – and the bellow of fog horns he would hear daily as well as ships coming in to be unloaded. These ships would emit steam and dump bilge water once they have docked, all those things the alien craft did within the first moments of their appearance.
The lack of food was established in the opening scenes as well, when his wife invades the privacy of Ray’s refrigerator to uncover nothing of nutritional value. I’m not knowledgeable enough to point out what each element that follows means, except as written in previous essays, but the relationship between the establishing realistic scene and the dream scenes later that depict the resolution of food issues is unmistakable.
Even Ray’s unwritten essay plays a huge portion in the dream sequence of this film with images of the French occupation of Algeria played out in several scenes, and serving to reinforce the holocaust structure of the film. The shooting outside the coffee shop in Athens alludes to the café wars in France where more than 5,000 people were killed, not by the fascist state, but by each other – factions of rebels, who killed each other while the Nazi-like French state of the 1950s oppressed Algeria. Even the Tim Robbins character echoes this as a perverted and disappointing French underground that is helpless to stop France from mirroring the monstrous behavior of the Nazi.
In the realistic portion of War of the Worlds, we hear Ray mocking Tim for purchasing a very safe vehicle, and yet in the midst of the nightmare, Ray steals a safe van and flees to Tim’s home.
As in any dream, things get perverted. So that when Ray tells Rachel to order food during the wakeful section, she comes up with health food, something of a comic nightmare for a man whose kitchen is filled with pizza boxes.
In looking at media from this reality/dream sequence, we can see how TV reports of freak lightning storms in Ukraine followed by earthquake-like activity into invading aliens in the dream-sequence after Ray goes to sleep.
Again and again, we see the realistic images presented before Ray goes to sleep perverted into nightmare images later, from lack of food to inappropriate blood sucking, from Ray’s wife’s pregnancy to the birth of monsters.
There are dark elements, too. In this subconscious world are images of public disasters such as 9/11 and personal conflicts such as perverted attentions the Tim Robbins character has towards Rachel. In this film, Tim Robbins and Tim seem to be alter egos of Ray, models of behavior Ray can choose: the protective father or the perverted beast. But we get this over and over again throughout the film, use of images to resolve Ray’s inner conflicts, acted out on a dreamscape where we witness his inner most feelings in metaphors of horror.
Each issue that confronts Ray before he goes to sleep is worked out in this dreamscape until Ray is transformed at waking the way Scrooge after his encounter with his ghosts: Ray sets his son free, comes to appreciate his daughter, comes to terms with his wife’s remarriage, comes to terms with his own fears and prejudices, so we have expect him to charge down some Dickens like street (say in a place like Boston) to have diner with a family he has previously made miserable.