War of the Worlds becomes real with Katrina
I saw the picture on the front page of the New York Times of a floating body near New Orleans – and immediately, it brought back one of the most disturbing scenes of Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds.
For those who have not seen the film, it is the moment when the ten-year old girl sees a body floating in the Hudson River, and a moment later, sees hundreds of bodies there.
War of the Worlds – because of its release in June – becomes something prophetic since it – like the book by H.G. Wells upon which it is loosely based – depicts how savage human kind can be when threatened with extinction.
The shooting scenes over the van at the Athens Ferry in the film, suddenly become very, very real when we seem similar scenes played out in reality. In some ways, the Athens ferry scenes of the movie came to live in New Orleans where government officials failed to protect the population and panic leads people to attack those they might otherwise have helped.
In creating the Athens scenes, Steven Spielberg and his script writers seem to have looked into a crystal ball and showed the world what the aftermath of the Hurricane Katrina would be.
But this has always been a vision of certain people like H.G. Wells, who knew that civilized behavior is a very, very thin skin, and that we are still largely savage at heart. The presumption of culture that the 19th Century liked to portray was a folly at best disproven again and again when dealing with the masses.
But H.G. Wells as well as Spielberg clearly demonstrated in fiction what Katrina and New Orleans proved in reality that when dealing with larger than life situations, humanity as a mass is a beast – devouring other human beings in an effort to save ourselves. It takes great moral courage to be considered civilized. But as Plato long ago pointed out, civilization is a club to which very few human beings deserve membership.
The fact that the film’s premises are proven true so soon after its release scares the hell out of me, because once we revert to the savage it is hard for us to get back that basic sense of civility so necessary to operate as a society.
As in the movie, our government and basic institutions cannot be trusted to help us at need, leaving us to wonder to whom we can turn.
“God’s cursed the neighborhood,” one of Ray’s Newark buddies says in the film, beginning a sequence of events that has been repeated in reality in the south.
The most terrifying aspect of War of the Worlds for me is that it is not an exaggeration at all, and in fact, might well serve as a news report by the vulturous press that has to depict each floating body and send the feed to the blood thirsty millions of TV viewers who have an insatiable thirst – as long as it is someone else’s misery they are witnessing.
This includes me – although I have turned off my TV. I keep hearing John Williams’ violins in my head each time I look at the photograph in the New York Times.
I keep waiting for the toot of the fog horn and the arrival of the alien killing machines when I know down deep the aliens are us.