“Are we still alive?” That’s the line incarnating the unexpectedly avant-garde challenge in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. It’s when the film steps beyond the simple conventions of genre filmmaking—of being a movie about an invasion from Mars—and expresses our very contemporary concern with survival. Yes, this line speaks to post-9/11 consciousness. It gets said when Ray Farrier (Tom Cruise) and his two children have retreated to a basement bunker in a suburban home to escape an unseen, explosive cataclysm that comes deafeningly closer. But more than that, it’s when Spielberg sublates our sophistication about filmmaking—and film watching—to address the worries that people have in their heads, even as they tell themselves they’re merely seeking “entertainment.”
Spielberg lets the screen go black for about five seconds. The communal experience of film-going then becomes a shared nightmare. With the screen unlit, the emergency lights in the theater are the only source of illumination. If you jump (as I did), you fear for a moment that the movie has stopped—the reel fallen off its plate, the fantasy interrupted by unfunny, drop-dead reality. “Are we still alive?” whispered by Farrier’s daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning) is an inquiry that invokes our own doubts about our safety, our capacity to dream, our possible awakening to dire reality. It recalls how many people felt after 9/11. Are we dreaming? Are we still alive? Bringing everyday experience and existential contemplation together so forcefully, Spielberg joins the ranks of the most audacious avant-garde filmmakers: He turns the popcorn movie experience into a consideration of the abyss.
War of the Worlds is the most powerful movie of the new century thus far. It’s no surprise that many critics have been skeptical about its meaning and its effect, because it overturns every assumption that is casually held about the purpose of movies. War of the Worlds challenges how we reconcile our need for entertainment with our awareness of political reality after 9/11.
Let’s immediately dispose of the naïve assumption that this is an entertainment about aliens—E.T. angrily remade by Bad Santa. It’s something far different—not snarky but alarmed. Spielberg’s previous film, The Terminal, confronted convivial, in fact benign, issues about America as an international symbol of freedom and welcome. It was a response to 9/11 that asked Why? Dramatizing Spielberg’s (and our) bewilderment, it jumped off from the notion of America as a world help-mate—a capitalist Arcadia no one would object to but might, possibly, have underappreciated. Tom Hanks’ misplaced immigrant Viktor is stuck at JFK airport while his home country undergoes a plausible eastern European revolution–thus leaving him stateless. But the naïf Viktor, doesn’t simply buy into mainline America’s preferred version of that utopian myth. The Statue of Liberty idea (“Give me your tired, poor and restless, yearning to be free”) was passed on to him by his ancestors – through his father’s reality-based affection for American jazz music; the articulation of a downtrodden people who magically found a means of expressing their dreams in a land that formerly enslaved them. The Terminal examined Hope. War of the Worlds is the equally valid post-9/11 examination of Fear. Instead of Why? it asks: What do we do now?
Working within the innocuous context of the science-fiction/fantasy genre, Spielberg has made a movie that, surprisingly, gets real about the need to prepare for war. (Just as Close Encounters contained images of awesome agape, War of the Worlds is filled with awesome shock.) That Pirandellian moment that wakes up viewers by blacking them out and leaving them in a felt state of emergency through the imbrication of theater houselights forces our consciousness about the cinematic and cinema-going process into moral awareness. We’re not just here to be entertained but to connect our imaginative faculties to what is most important in our lives.
Spielberg is aware American popular culture cannot, conscientiously, be made the same way after 9/11. And, despite conventional critical wisdom, he’s the one pop artist most alive to the profundity of the way we live now. He has remade War of the Worlds not simply as an homage to Orson Welles’ 1938 radio spectacular or Byron Haskin’s Technicolor 1955 dazzlement. Rather, Spielberg re-conceives this make-believe—internalizing the psychic trauma of 9/11—but with the faith, like Viktor’s, that American art-making is a serious endeavor. Movies like The Color Purple, Schindler’s List, Amistad and Saving Private Ryan were not Oscar bait but efforts of a Hollywood practitioner to contemplate the world and history more earnestly—though he proved it in the dark like a deceptively playful jazz artist.
II
Tom Cruise’s father figure at War first becomes memorable during a moment when he is stunned, rendered helpless. After seeing the attack of the aliens first hand, his face covered in the ash of vaporized innocent citizens, Ray Farrier becomes a lightning rod for his children’s awareness of the terrible state of things. How his daughter Rachel and his son Robbie (Justin Chatwin) react to the dire phenomena shows Speilberg’s real-life sensitivity. Ray isn’t sure what to do; yet he and his children have notions beyond the survival instinct. “Is it the terrorists?” Rachel wonders aloud. “Is it the Europeans?” Robbie asks, dredging up the recent hostility the European community has shown towards the American government.
Critics have been unwilling to see how the film plays out Spielberg’s not-namby pamby, not conventionally “liberal” response to 9/11. His concern is with the younger generation’s clear-eyed identification with the cause of humanity; their natural feelings and political instincts as embodied in the son’s insistence that he be allow to “enlist” or at least personally observe the battle. (“You have to let me do this!” he insists to his understandably protective father. Those who think Spielberg follows the standard Hollywood-liberal line might be taken aback when they realize that Speilberg is not mocking youthful bellicosity and patriotic fervor, a young man’s willingness to “sign-up.”)
War of the Worlds is about fear and action. While liberal critics enthused over the nonsensical references to George Bush in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (“This is how liberty dies, to thunderous applause.” And “Only a Sith believes in absolutes”), they conveniently disregard how Spielberg dramatizes war experiences: Rachel’s trepidation, Robbie’s eagerness to join-up and fight. This young generation’s idealism takes the movie beyond their father’s desperation and caution (which evokes the trepidation of the older generation and the cluelessness of the doctrinaire Left). Spielberg digs into grass roots intuition—the aggression that legendarily spurs us on. That’s why the movie ends in Boston, with a shot of a Minuteman statue that illustrates the historic American struggle for freedom and independence. This piece of statuary is a startling reminder of what freedom looks like; for alert viewers it may even serve as a deliberate contrast to those famous 2003 images of Saddam Hussein’s statue coming down (again and again) in that Baghdad square.
It is a sign of Spielberg’s uniqueness as a pop artist that he uses avant-garde, high-tech filmmaking means to articulate what some would call a conservative patriotic message. Leftist critics insist this is proof of his non-progressive thinking (his “lack [of] self-knowledge” according to The Nation). But War of the Worlds, so kinetically adept and visually astonishing, is certainly the work of a film artist fully in-tune with his emotional responses. What left pundits don’t realize is that he is also instinctively in touch with how audiences take in cinematic stimuli, aware of their subconscious response. Snob critics, satisfied with their sense of superiority, constantly relegate Spielberg to realm of non-seriousness and trivial manipulation. But it is an observable fact that audiences at War of the Worlds do not hoop and holler as they did at Independence Day, enjoying the violence, savoring the nifty death routines. That silly film (and its recent equivalent, Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow) wasn’t concerned with “Are We Still Alive?” It was demonstrably non-political. War of the Worlds should be appreciated for its political sophistication and subtle power.
III
The “Are We Still Alive?” moment evokes the scene in Hitchcock’s The Birds where a family under siege waits in their home, anticipating the worst. Spielberg recreates that ominous quiet but then extends the action-movie formula for excitation in taut, anxiety-inducing increments. After 9/11 he won’t play with dread. The poetic anguish of The Birds is revived here but re-imagined – ready for a world in which 9/11 has stirred long-suppressed fears among Americans who had previously imagined war as something that happened elsewhere—not in one’s backyard. Among the extraordinary images in War of the Worlds is the scene that follows that “Are We Still Alive?” blackout. As if awakening at some terrible dawn, we see an American home with its front blasted away, a downed jet-engine turbine where a dining table used to be. The juxtaposition is surreal. Farrier carefully instructs his daughter not to look, to keep her eyes on him no matter what. He doesn’t want her to see the destruction, the upheaval and devastation of domesticity.
Spielberg takes audiences through precisely what parents, after 9/11, are unable to shield their children against. He treats comfortable American audiences like war-torn refugees, not sci-fi geeks. The opposite of this noble impulse can be found in Sam Mendes’ Jarhead. Instead of addressing Operation Iraqi Freedom, Mendes goes back to the 1991 Desert Shield-into-Desert Storm. He rewrites David O. Russell’s good Three Kings—a surprisingly thoughtful and wide-ranging observation of American power and innocence —then slickly invokes Vietnam-era skepticism that was featured in Full Metal Jacket, Platoon and Apocalypse Now. Mendes, a British citizen who has never made a movie about his home turf, is committed to the easy, supercilious tactic of satirizing the follies of the world’s largest superpower. As slick as Mike Nichols, he knows this plays well among the left media. In Jarhead he casts a quick, lame glance at American foreign policy without risking the dissension caused by Spielberg’s native understanding. Mendes commits an insulting revision of pop art and pop politics when he implicitly encourages his ’05 audience to adopt a kind of unearned version of the cynicism once expressed by those who underwent the Vietnam experience. (He never evokes Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July perhaps because Mendes’ shallow social consciousness was born no earlier than March 2003.)
War of the Worlds pushes its avant-garde political art toward a new understanding of American history—lessons derived from the most complicated, not most fashionable, cinema. Spielberg has finally made his version of that movie brat staple The Searchers, John Ford’s 1957 western reverie of the Indian Wars that was also a revelation of the conservative and liberal split in America’s consciousness. Spielberg is fully cognizant of Ford’s political ambivalence; recent history has caused him to share it. Ray Farrier isn’t a racist pioneer like John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards but he does venture into new territory—the post-9/11 American trepidation that is not racist, nor xenophobic like Ethan Edwards’, but healthily skeptical, practical and defensive.
The Searchers doesn’t have a moment as stressful as Ray’s conflict with Harlan Ogilvy (Tim Robbins). Probably many lefties were disturbed by Robbins’ casting as a half-crazed survivalist; they expected him to personify the usual lefty positions of his own propaganda films Bob Roberts and Cradle Will Rock. But Robbins applies his full artistry to portraying a complicated, modern type—the scared American unable to rationalize his defenses. When he and Ray clash (a harrowing tete-a-tete that is also a power struggle), the shifts between heroism and cowardice, intelligence and desperation are actively visualized.
Spielberg realizes he’s portraying the reality of uncertainty—the doubts about American might and right and the difficulty of determining which character ultimately represents which. But the logic of his narrative implicitly endorses Ray’s will. Ray must take action he cannot fully justify to his daughter and, again, commands her not to look. The pop-wise audience is momentarily spared the sight of murder, but Spielberg subtly admits it in an ensuing moment of vicious pantomime: an alien, image-ed as a glaring eye—a nightmarish depiction of self-consciousness—is literally beheaded. The instant of Ray’s inhumanity, when he submits to his own murderous impulse, is also the moment when he kills his own sleep. He is neither condoned nor condemned. By the end of the movie, Spielberg clarifies the personal consequences of the ugly act that Ray was forced to commit, acknowledging what all the movie brats from Scorsese and George Lucas to Paul Schrader and John Milius have been reluctant to admit about Ethan Edwards in The Searchers. Although they celebrate intransigence, they don’t face up to the discomfiting reality of John Wayne’s hard man. Spielberg exposes their obliviousness in the controversial final moment of War of the Worlds, which fools mistake for sentimentality.
In this scene Ray Farrier is excluded from his family’s reunion. He is kept outside the miraculously preserved homestead in an image constructed just like the closing scene of The Seachers. After all he has gone through and what he has seen and done, he cannot sit easily at the American family hearth. And despite gossip column pariah Tom Cruise playing the part, the suffering of his character Ray Farrier is noble. It should not be disdained, nor his wartime suffering ignored as happened with Vietnam vets. He must stand outside the American home—a civilian-soldier whose humanity and psychic well-being have been sacrificed. This is not standard self-reflexive, post-modern iconography but a prescient movie image built on Spielberg’s familiarity with the cost of life during wartime—from pop zeitgeist (1941) to contemporary remembrance (Saving Private Ryan). The image of Ray removed from domestic idylls poetically defines the situation of citizens in crisis from the twin towers to Hurricane Katrina, from refugees to searchers.
Ray’s forlorn figure standing in solitary on an autumnal suburban street reveals that weight felt by every post-9/11 American desperately holding on for something to believe in, wondering “Are We Still Alive?” For some, the answer to this moral question may well be unimaginable, as if the screen of our collective consciousness has gone blank. Spielberg’s final scene fills in our doubt, suggestively. It anticipates every family reunion that occurs as a result of Operation Iraqi Freedom—that is, the lucky ones.
From December, 2005