A Xenobiological Romance, Part II

Tuesday night the Little Womedievalist and I celebrated the end of Winter Quarter by rewatching War of the Worlds.   Of course it's not the best film out there, but it enabled us to mock thetans mercilessly.  (Let me tell you: we need the enabling.)  The film, we thought, would be exactly the sort of thing we needed to establish a sound boundary between the Winter quarter which ended on Monday and the Spring quarter which begins on . . . Monday. 

Can you smell the panic in the air?  Because I'm emenating it as I once "emenated" sweat at baseball clinics held on astroturf in humid Louisiana summers.  (By "humid" I mean "precipitationish days in which the periwinkle sky contained nary a puff of cloud yet made one feel end-of-a-marathon wet the moment one stepped from air conditioned bliss.") 

Check below the fold for my initial reaction to the film.  (Far fewer of you read me then.  I was but a babe.)  While lacking historicist oomph of my typical diatribe, it still bears some relation to yesterday's objections.  (I remember wanting to edit some grammatical infelicity from it earlier.  Only I can't find it now.  First person to point it out wins Recognition For Being the First Person to Point It Out . . . and a yellow ribbon.) 

The usual caveat attached to things I wrote before yesterday applies here:

If I say anything stupid it's only because I wasn't that bright and haven't read widely enough yet.  All of which is only to say that my new theories about the film and novel will be expounded upon in the comments tomorrow.  I can't see to put two sentences which aren't about S.W. Mitchell together tonight. 

It's a personal failing.  I understand.

_____________________

18 July 2005

A chunk of narration near the end of Wells' War of the Worlds has always bothered me.  That same chunk of narration in Spielberg's War of the Worlds bothers me even more. 

I haven't read Wells in years, but as I started working the influence of evolutionary theory ca. 1890-1910, I realized I'd have to account for War of the Worlds.  After all, it's one of the few novels in which evolution qua evolution wins.  Pure and simple: the best laid plans of man and alien fall before the unremitting logic of Darwinian adaptation.  That's why the inclusion of this passage--in the form of a voice-over by Morgan Freeman--seems so, dare I say, conciliatory:

And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians--dead!--slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.

Spielberg, founding member of the Actual Jewish Media Conspiracy (a.k.a. Dreamworks), kowtows to an increasingly Christian marketplace of ideas by including that narration out of context.

In the film, Tom Cruise and his daughter shack up wtih Tim Robbins, a former ambulance driver.  Robbins--like Cruise's son in the film--is compelled by the need to do something to, well, do something.  As the aliens approach, Robbins becomes increasingly unstable, and so Cruise must put him down.  The scene works.  The murder of Robbins the ambulance driver--in addition to sounding like a Smiths' B-side--expresses the limits to which Cruise will go to survive. However, Spielberg focuses entirely on the revelation of Cruise's character--Robbins shuffles onstage, speaks bravely, cracks, and is shuffled off--whereas Wells' focus is as much on the curate as the unnamed (and decidedly less heroic) narrator. 

That's right: I said curate.  The criticism of the cloth in the novel is unmistakeable.  To wit:

At Halliford I had already come to hate the curate's trick of helpless exclamation, his stupid rigidity of mind. His endless muttering monologue vitiated every effort I made to think out a line of action, and drove me at times, thus pent up and intensified, almost to the verge of craziness. He was as lacking in restraint as a silly woman. He would weep for hours together, and I verily believe that to the very end this spoiled child of life thought his weak tears in some way efficacious.

Once God abandons him, the curate's "stupid rigidity of mind" becomes blinding, his lack of restraint--appealing to the period's gender stereotypes--transforms him into a little more than "a silly woman."  But here's the most damning phrase, the one that puts the film's final theocentricism to lie: "to the very end this spoiled child of life thought his weak tears in some way efficacious."  Those "weak tears" poured forth from his eyes as the words of the Lord, as supplications to God, poured forth from his mouth.  In the end, the narrator has to knock him unconscious lest he witness Christ's love to the Martians:

"I have been still too long," he said, in a tone that must have reached the pit, "and now I must bear my witness. Woe unto this unfaithful city! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! To the inhabitants of the earth by reason of the other voices of the trumpet----"

"Shut up!" I said, rising to my feet, and in a terror lest the Martians should hear us. "For God's sake----"

"Nay," shouted the curate, at the top of his voice, standing likewise and extending his arms. "Speak! The word of the Lord is upon me!"

In three strides he was at the door leading into the kitchen.

"I must bear my witness! I go! It has already been too long delayed."

By the time the narrator utters that the Martians had been "slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, put upon this earth," the efficacy of the appeal to God's love, His wisdom, His Justice, &c. have been undercut not only by the ineffectiveness of the narrator's prayers--muttered as a dying secularist hedging his bets--but also by the ineffectiveness of the curate himself, his faith, his earnest prayer, not to mention his eventual insanity.  In Spielberg's film, the uncontextualized appeal to God as Intelligent Designer undermines the importance of the evolutionary narrative, of the (for its time) sophisticated understanding of the relation of species to environs. 

Furthermore, invest those final lines with theological relevance and you create a conundrum: why did God, "in his wisdom," create the Martians who would put beneath this earth their tripodal molluscoid human-evaporating machines?  Why wouldn't he grant them immunity?  And really, have generations of humans suffered the common cold to protect us from the possibility of God's great Martian experiment making its way to Earth?  In other words, a Christian walking away from the Spielberg film finds his or her assumptions unchallenged.  The same cannot be said of a Christian who reads the novel. 

Comments

[Rebecca]

"started to working the influence"?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I only wish I had time to personalize it:

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Or figure out where it went. It was there when I previewed. Hm...

[badger]

Have you ever seen the 1953 version? The characters are, in fact, in a church when they discover the martians' bacterial weaknesses. (There's a priest in this film, but the martians not the main character kill him.)

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I haven't seen the 1953 version, but that doesn't surprise me, as I'm incredibly ignorant about pre-Breakfast Club popular films. I've seen the arty ones, but not the popular ones; that said, I've added the '53 one to the Netflix queue, and anticipate a lively conversation once I've seen it.

No pressure, though.

[badger]

I'm actually teaching a SF class next term, and my students are reading 3 "classic" SF novels, then watching the "classic" SF films on which they're based: Frankenstein, and War of the Worlds, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. I think the themes of religion and (vs?) science will feature prominently.

[badger]

I mean, watching the films based on the novels. Plus a little Octavia Butler, for good measure.