Is Rachel Weena?

 

Just where Steven Spielberg got his character Rachel in his remake of War of the Worlds, we may never know.

Most likely Spielberg delved through the archives of other Wells tales the way he seems to have done to find Ray, and indeed, may have tapped the 1960 film version of The Time Machine to get if not wholly then some of the symbolic elements needed to create Rachel, basing her on Weena.

I say the film not the book because of the distinct differences between the 1960 film and what Wells wrote sixty years prior.

To begin with, Wells’ book is a rather sad tale, since the hero loses the girl at the end while in the movie, the hero rescues her.

This is important because of the repeated pattern of rescues we get in Spielberg’s War.

Ray’s relationship to his daughter Rachel is similar to the father-like relationship we get in the 1960 movie where the time traveler teaches Weena – although ironically, both films present a modern man learning how to become a hero.

Three particular rescues point towards an influence.

The time traveler in the first film rescues Weena from the river just as Ray rescues Rachel first from the horror of floating bodies and then from the overturned ferry.

The time traveler also rescues Weena from the woods just as Ray later rescues Rachel in several wooded scenes, although symbolically near the tree on the hill side when a well-meaning woman tries to take her away.

Just as the time traveler in the 1960 movie goes into the machinery-laden underworld to do battle with the Morlock and to keep Weena from being devoured, Ray goes up into the alien machine to keep his daughter from being devoured.

Rachel like Weena becomes the symbol of unsullied nature, a Mother Nature figure that must be saved from the industrial tyranny loose around her.

Both characters are presented as a kind of Eve and presented in garden like scenes hinting of Eden before the fall from grace and before evil – the morlock marches into the underground or the whispered talk of the ambulance driver – seduces them from the path of God.

Weena is part of a flower culture and often gives the time traveler flowers as a show of affection, something that he carries back with him from the future as proof of where he’s been.

Rachel is also depicted early in natural settings. She like Weena eats natural foods, and carries with her through the movie – if not a real flower, then a symbolic flower trophy that like the time traveler’s flower has managed some how to survive through the worst of holocausts.

In the book the time traveler loses Weena in the woods. In the movie, he watches her walk into the machine of death. In film War of the Worlds, a similar scene depicts Ray watching Rachel taken up by a machine that sounds exactly like the death engines we hear in the 1960 film’s death machines. Ray like the time traveler goes to her rescue.

Although Rachel and Weena are hardly exactly the same, they have common enough points to suggest Weena may have helped shape Rachel’s creation for Spielberg’s War of the Worlds.

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