No place to hide
Safety issues in War of the Worlds
You can’t run. You can’t hide. You have to use your wits to survive in the dream-like setting of War of the Worlds.
If you don’t keep your wits, if you succumb to panic, you’re lost.
Toughness doesn’t mean a thing. Technology can’t save you, and in the end technology will fail when you most need it.
Governments – as shown by the recent real events surrounding hurricane Katrina can’t be relied upon so rescue you either.
You have to think and keep thinking – it is the only way to survive.
This is one of the key and most obvious themes in Steven Spielberg’s movie War of the Worlds, and one that seems to have something in common with the H.G. Wells book upon which is it based.
The movie is a flight from one unsafe place to another – and a journey through the social fabric of our society, chasing rumors of safety with each element of civilization failing to provide the necessary protection it promises.
Ray Ferrier is a reckless guy. His life is full of mad adventures, of risk taking and carelessness that leaves him full of false notions of security.
We see him leaving work and arriving home in a rush, his Mustang’s tires squealing as he slams into the driveway. Here, he is confronted by his ex-wife Mary Ann and her new husband, Tim – Tim for timid as it turns out – and Ray mocks Tim’s choice of vehicles as something very safe.
“You got one very safe vehicle here,” Ray mocks – yet when seeking to escape in the dream sequence later, it is this kind of safe vehicle (if perhaps the only working vehicle) Ray seeks out.
Although Rachel’s splinter has several meanings in this amazingly complex film, the fact that she got it from the porch rail hints that Ray’s house will not serve as a safe refuge later when the aliens’ machines begin wrecking the neighborhood.
Still, when the lightning bolts begin to strike, Rachel wants to go back into the protection of the house. When Ray tells her to “go ahead,” she apparently has her own concerns and says, “Not alone.”
Ray calls the lightning “fun,” and “Just like the Fourth of July,” and his singing of the National Anthem alludes to a time when the flag remained flying over the Union Army’s fort at the beginning of the American Civil War – a reassuring moment in time which is meant to suggest that if that fort stood, so will they against the approaching holocaust.
The next bolt of lightning, however, soon dispels this notion and Ray scrambles after his daughter as they rush into the house. Once there, Ray feels confident again that they have reached safety. He spouts so pathetic piece of folklore about lightning never hitting in the same place twice, and when this wisdom gets stripped from him with the next strike, he leaps under the table to join his daughter.
Then, in one of endless series of puns, Rachel asks, “Am I okay? Are you okay?” – a less than subtle snipe at the parade of self-help books that plague the American book industry, not of which are any more sound than Ray’s foolish notions about lightning strikes.
But Ray is shaken to his core and doesn’t have a cocky answer for his daughter, he doesn’t know if he is okay or not.
And Rachel, devoid of her father’s confidence, asks after her brother Robbie.
Ray then decides he needs to gather some information about what is going on and leaves his daughter to the protection of the house.
When Ray finds Robbie, the first thing he asks: “Are you okay?” Once this is determined, he then scolds the boy about stealing the car and instructs him to go back to the supposedly safe house with Rachel while Ray seeks more information about what has happened with the lightning.
In the street, America has become helpless as its most important technology is extinguished – the car, something of a foreshadowing of the real world and the future oil shortages.
Ray, of course, shouts instructions on how to fix a van the local mechanic is repairing, then plunges into the Iron Bound section of Newark, where he encounters several street urchins, one of whom tells Ray God has cursed the neighborhood – so that one of the key pieces of urban safety is also no source of safety. This bit of prophesy soon comes true with the rise of the alien machines. Even the police cannot save people, urging them away from the growing hole in the ground – but are ineffective at actually doing anything to save anyone. One street urchin urges Ray to stay away from the growing hole, but Ray moves towards it anyway – and soon sees the machines slaughtering everyone.
Luck or fate saves him as he weaves through buildings and down side streets, keeping just ahead of the slaughter, until he arrives back at the house where Rachel and Robbie are waiting. Both demanding to know what has happened and why he is covered with dust.
Once roused from his daze, Ray realizes that there is no safety in his home and orders the kids to pack. He leads his children to the van at the gas station, which he hopes his hasty instructions to the mechanic earlier, has resulted in it becoming operational when all the other vehicles and all the other people are still stranded.
He assumes there is safety in the van – and if this is really a nightmare – it harkens back to his earlier waking mockery of Tim’s vehicle.
When Manny the Mechanic tries to stop him, Ray takes the van anyway, offering Manny the option to come with them or die.
Manny doesn’t listen and dies.
Ray sees the van as a safe space, but knows that it is a space that everyone else will want – a kind of symbol of American industrialism that presumes that our technology can protect us or allow us to flee out of danger’s reach. But Ray knows that if pressed, other people will want to steal it from him, perhaps suggesting the tensions between nations – and Ray seeks escape as concerned with preserving their small advantage – refusing to halt until they are out of harm’s way.
The kids – both of whom are classic American kids in some ways full of classic American phobias – are freaking out, although Rachel appears to be more out of control than Robbie.
Robbie, whose status as substitute father, engages in a routine with Rachel that helps her cope. Although the name of the therapy is mentioned, it is mumbled so quickly, I could not catch it – an important detail no doubt. Robbie tells Rachel to “make the arms” and she folds her arms before her chest creating a box-like space.
“This space is yours,” Robbie tells her. “It belongs to you, right? This is your free space. Nothing can happen to you in this space.”
Here seems to be the heart of the film’s concept of safety that it is not a particular place or technology that saves you, but an attitude you carry around with you. This is later echoed by the Tim Robbins' character, although in a somewhat different context, saying the people who keep their eyes open and their wits about them are the ones who survive.
Yet Rachel is still in a panic and begins to scream shrilly, “I want mom,” and repeats this again and again until Ray yells that they are going there now (meaning Tim’s house in the suburbs) and presumed safety.
But anyone who knows Spielberg films knows that the suburbs are hardly safe.
When they arrive at Tim’s house, they find all the lights on, but no one at home. Rachel calls for her mother again and again. Ray tells her she’s gone.
“Is she dead?” Rachel asks.
“No, she’s not dead, she’s in Boston,” Ray says with a snort. “She was never here. Hopefully, they kept going to Boston.”
“How come there are lights here and not back at your place?”
“Because nothing bad happened here,” Ray says, mistakenly assuming they can relax. “So we’re safe here.”
After a somewhat comic/tragic scene with the peanut better, Ray leans against the kitchen sink and sighs.
“Everybody just relax. We’re here now. We’re safe here. We’re going to stay here. And in the morning your mother and Tim will be here.”
Nightmare or not, Ray fears the worst and leads them to the basement to sleep, drawing a concerned question from Rachel: “If everything is fine, why do we have to sleep in the basement?”
Even Robbie is concerned and asks Ray, “What do you think is going to happen to us?”
Ray explains: “It’s like on the Weather Channel when they predict a tornado – they tell you to go to the basement for safety?”
The caution has the opposite effect on Rachel who asks in a growing panic, “We’re going to have a tornado?”
Ray tells her to shut up.
All of their worst fears are realized when – during the night – the house and neighborhood are hit with a crashing airplane. They are forced to flee into an even deeper portion of the basement to avoid the rush of flames from the jet fuel. When it is over Rachel whispers, “Are we still alive?”
After a brief confrontation with a television press crew who proves that media has no more ability to protect the public than the government, Ray leads Rachel – with her eyes closed -- and Robbie out of the house, back to the van, with the idea of heading north to Boston where Mary Ann and Tim have gone.
Ray takes the back roads because he still believes the van is a vehicle of safety, but knows he needs to guard it against other humans who would seek to take it from them.
Robbie asks where the other people are, and Ray says, running and hiding in basements.
When Rachel makes them stop so she can go to the bathroom, Ray says they have two things to watch out for. While he never says what the first is, the second, he tells them are other people trying to get their van.
Ray wants Rachel to stay within sight and when she doesn’t, she sees the bodies in the river.
As much as Ray would like to protect her from the visions of horror, he really can’t.
The illusion of the van’s safety soon evaporates when they get near the Athens ferry crossing and people attack them to get inside, all of them presuming the van can save them when it has become something of a coffin. This scene was echoed a few months after the film’s release when desperate people in New Orleans began to shoot at rescue workers who sought to save women and children first. The Athens scenes in the film did not go far enough to show just how viscous and beastly humans would become – but served as a terrifying foreshadowing of the murder, rape and mayhem that took place in New Orleans in the aftermath of the hurricane Katrina.
Ray, of course, resists, first seeking to outrun the crowd – insisting Rachel put on a seat belt as he put his on – then when forced to veer out of the way of a woman holding a child he crashes and uses his gun to get the crowd’s attention and his son – who had been dragged out of the van – returned. But there are always bigger guns and meaner people, proving the superiority of fire power or muscle won’t protect you either. Someone with a bigger gun and more muscles will always come along.
In the scenes that follow, we soon learn the folly of “safety in numbers” because when danger arrives, it is generally every person for his or herself – with only a handful of souls like Robbie who are civilized enough to help others. When threatened by aliens or hurricanes, human tend to kill each other.
Trains and ferries are not safe either. They are set on fire or turned over, becoming tombs for the people inside of them.
The army and air force – as the hurricane Katrina proved – cannot save you either – although they might delay the inevitable or arrive too late to help many.
Woods and rivers – (nature as most of us interpret it) – are not save either, becoming perverted places of refugees and floating bodies, where red weed sprouts and blood is spilled.
Even the Tree of Life in whose care Ray leaves Rachel when attempting to rescue Robbie, is not safe. Someone comes along to steal the girl.
Even the basement become violated when Ray flees with Rachel to the arms of the Tim Robbins character. It is a space in which the aliens soon come and despite Ray’s best efforts, steal Rachel anyway.
If there is a message of safety in this film, it comes by stripping away the preconceptions of what is safe in our world: we can’t trust government, media, technology or any of the traditional places we presumed as safe. You have to keep your wits and avoid panic. You have to use your mind and change your tactics to adjust to the ever changing threats. You have to learn to watch the skies as well as the earth beneath your feet, and above all, you have to watch out for fellow human beings.