Spielberg invades Bayonne
Carrying on the blood lines in War of the Worlds
Although I wrote earlier about birth and rebirth in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, seeing the film again allowed me to put more pieces together.
War of the Worlds is all about blood.
I mean this in the sense of blood lines and linage, and how civilization is preserved by passing on knowledge and tradition.
I suppose you need to compare War of the Worlds with Fiddler on the Roof to understand this completely – not merely the refugee scene that seems to mirror the refugee in the great film about the plight of Russian Jews, but also in some of the other scenes dealing with what is proper and not, and need for families to bond together to keep each other safe and to pass down those bits of information needed for human civilization to survive.
Those that survive, that do not flatline before reaching the hospital, the mad ambulance driver tells us, are those that look at you that keep thinking.
It is running that kills you.
The panic of the mob is seen again and again in War of the Worlds, the lack of thought, individuals reduced to their most primitive urges – personal survival.
“Where are they going?” Rachel asks.
“I don’t know,” Ray says.
“But we do, right, dad?”
“Yes, Rachel, we do,” Ray says.
While Wells in his master piece painted a world in which survival of the fittest could be interpreted on the most basic level, Spielberg’s film adaptation deals with it on a higher level, where rational thought means surviving as a race – not merely as scrambling “maggot” like beasts who fight over who gets to drive a van or to live for a short time longer.
Throughout the tale we get Ray as the selfish everyday man, concerned with his own personal pleasures, opening with his refusal to help out his boss when his particular talents are needed, to his unthinking behavior towards wife, refusing even to help his own daughter carry her bag.
How a Ray deals with his children is central to the film. So we are constantly besieged with nightmare images of birth, of machines impregnated by bolts of lightning, only to give birth water breaking as they come to life in our world.
This is a nightmare in which these children born of mother earth turn into monsters seeking to turn us into dust or to drink our blood.
But what we are really talking about here are the blood lines of heritage, and in some ways, the monsters rise up out of our lack of faith, and our rejection of tradition that allows us to teach our children well, and to pass on our blood line and our knowledge to the next generation.
Ray must go through hell in order to learn the value of his children and his role as father.
In the opening sequence, Ray’s car churns around the corner near the gas station. Although not evident to the viewer, a close study shows that he nearly hits a woman carrying an infant. This is later repeated near the diner on the approach to Athens, when he tries to flee the crowd and again comes close to hitting a woman carrying an infant.
As a Christian, these images recall the Madonna carrying the Christ child, an image of mother and child constantly presented through the film. But in many ways, this is the carrying on of blood lines since in history, before genetic testing, the only definitely proof of heritage was between mother and child – since mother can prove possession of the child through birth while the father is always in doubt.
According to Halakha (Jewish law and traditions), only a child born to a Jewish mother is counted as Jewish.
This image of mother and child is repeated so often in War of the Worlds, you can’t ignore it. Mother earth giving birth to its monstrous children. The mother carrying the child in the back yard. Mothers and children in the street out front and in Newark, mothers and children viewed in scene after scene from beginning to end as if to testify to how normal this is.
In fact, those images that stand out most in this film are those times when a woman is not seen with child.
And this viewing of Spielberg’s version of War of the Worlds seemed center on the journey to reconnect mother with children, with Ray charged with accomplishing this.
“Take care of our kids,” the pregnant Mary Ann says when leaving for Boston early in the movie.
“Don’t worry, Mary Ann, you have nothing to worry about,” Ray tells her.
Staying away from myths previously covered and looking more towards what the despoiling of blood means in this movie, we find that deviding families is a great evil that Ray must go through hell to overcome – a modern day Odysess that overcomes those flesh devouring monsters who violate all the rules of society. At close study of each espisode seems to reflect some of the same struggles the Homeric hero faced such as battling cyclopses even disasters at sea. Homer’s epic tale was about what is proper in society, and so is War of the Worlds. The media that picks the bones of the crashed air line is improper – the female figure taking instead of giving, and in some ways, as terrible as the monsters from which she flees.
In the scene where Ray is forced to choose between saving his son or his daughter, we found a woman and husband without a child, seeking to steal Ray’s, well-meaning people who on some level seem to understand the need to complete the family unit and carry on the blood line.
Although I have spent a great deal of time recently viewing War of the Worlds shot by shot, last night I watched the film the whole way through again, stunned by how much it grows with each viewing, and how birth and death seemed tied together though its images. The breaking of water when the alien machines first rise from out of the streets of Newark is repeated in the death scene in the street in Boston, only the placenta is tainted in red with blood in the dying scene.
The poignancy of Ray’s argument with his son Robbie over being called “Dad” or Mr. Ferrier fell into place during this viewing since it comes at a critical juncture during the film, when Ray begins to live up to the expectations of being a parent. While he made some attempts to play the role of father prior to this argument, he was extremely inept. But afterward, we see him becoming more and more competent, rescuing his daughter from near the river when the bodies appear, then rescuing his son and daughter when the van is assault, then leading them out of the water – a rebirth image – after the ferry is overturned. Perhaps he becomes a parent finally when he manages to sing his daughter a lullaby, then risks his own life again and again in order to live up to his promise to bring his daughter safely to her mother in Boston, regretting the awful choice he made between son and daughter.
Although I wrote about how he is reborn in each scene, how each time he slept he seemed to wake up into a stranger nightmare, and how Ray struggles against the image of mother until he eventually kills mother off with grenades, but the concept of blood – of carrying on, seemed to elude me, how the real survival of human kind is what gets passed on from generation to generation, and it is this parental duty that becomes the foundation of civilization. Or as was sung in Fiddler, Tradition. Ray didn’t know how to feed his family or how to sing lullabies, but he gave what he knew, and in the end, it was enough.
Although Spielberg’s films usually strike me as a big naďve when dealing with sex, War of the Worlds is among the most sophisticated discussions of sexuality I have seen, dealing with the concept of procreation and its social responsibilities, and connecting these to the survival of the species. After having seen nearly every film he has made, I am convinced that War of the Worlds is the most complex and meaningful, and – as far as the public is concerned – the least understood.