Stephen Spielberg is driving me crazy.
By Spielberg I mean that collection of brainiacs that he assembled to put together his version of War of the Worlds.
The more you look at it, the more there is to see - especially when searching out the root ideas for characters and plot lines in his 2005 adaptation of the classic tale by H.G. Wells.
Spielberg clearly drew his materials from the rich archive of Wells-related material, even previous film and radio adaptations, and other Wells material not particularly specific to War of the Worlds.
New Jersey - especially Newark - became the source of Spielberg's story largely because of the 1938 Orson Welles radio drama, from which Spielberg adapted several important features for the film, including the reports of seismic activity, strange weather, and even the time of the year.
Spielberg modified the radio drama, too, so that his main characters ended up in Boston rather than New York. The 1950s movie featured Los Angeles as the end scene. While the original book centered on London.
Spielberg also adapted his crazy ambulance driver from a character in the radio drama's hero meets in Newark before traveling to New York for the conclusion. Much of the philosophy the ambulance driver spouted came from this radio speech, including the idea of forming an underground to take back the world from the invading aliens.
Both Spielberg's character and the radio drama character are vaguely based on the mad minister in the original book, although the 1950s movie - drenched heavily in religious faith - cleans up the minister to give him the more noble role of peace maker, then has the aliens kill him off early in the movie
UPDATE 2/13/08 -- After re-reading Well's novel, I realize that the Ambulance driver from the Spielberg film and the guy in Newark from the radio play are adaptations of the soldier that the hero of the book meets up with early, and then later near London. I write more about this elsewhere, but the differences between Spielberg's film, the radio play and the book are hugely important. The officer from the book is a dreamer, but the radio character and the film character are nuts -- although we get a even more intense feeling of perversion in the film, which may be due to Spielberg's family being stalked in the late 1990s (more of this in another essay).
The radio play gave many of the more subtle images to Spielberg's film, such as the dead cows and the constantly squawking birds.
While Spielberg drew heavily on the radio play as well as the book and the previous adaptation, he seems to have reached out into other works Wells, in particular, The Time Machine - both the book and the 1960 film, for some of his inspiration.
In fact, Ray in Spielberg's movie strongly resembles the time traveler of the George Pal adaptation of Time Machine in which the traveler refers to himself as "a tinkering mechanic."
Spielberg also seems to have probed other texts for ideas for his themes, which I am still researching.
Essentially, Spielberg's adaptation seems to be a melding of the previous presentations - restoring some of the essential scenes the first film adaptation had neglected. But as the ambulance driver speech in the farm house shows, Spielberg reshaped the old text, weaving in sounds, images and ideas from these sources - so that at critical times we hear the echoes of the radio show in the sound effects, or critical scenes from the 1950s War of the Worlds in remanufactured images, or even - when necessary, images, sounds and ideas from George Pal's The Time Machine.
The fact that the 1938 radio drama mentions Bayonne, Newark and other places is not lost on Spielberg, who filmed in Bayonne and Newark for his work.
Spielberg during one interview said he had gone back to the novel and noticed things that had not been used before. Indeed, the aspect of red weed, blood feeding, even the essential ferry crossing scenes were missing from the 1950s movie.
While the roots of many images in Spielberg's War of the Worlds remain a mystery to me, you can easily see those he used from the book War of the Worlds, the previous movie and the radio drama. But it also appears clear that he also drew from George Pal's "The Time Machine" for images that dealt cannibalism, and that Spielberg's aliens seem to be adapted in theme and in essence from The Time Machine's Morlocks.
Over the next few months, I'll write a lot more about many of these influences, but one very easy comparison can be made by way of showing just how Spielberg brought these sources together.
While the radio play did not deal extensively with one of the most essential scenes from the book, Spielberg and the 1950s film did, and to look at how he adapted this scene using elements from the radio play, the previous movie and the book gives you a fair idea of the complexity of Spielberg's War of the Worlds.
For me, the core of War of the Worlds is the farm house scene because it is the point at which human beings come into the most direct contact with the aliens. While I have not yet done a shot by shot comparison between Spielberg's War of the Worlds and the George Pal version, some superficial observations can be made showing just how clever Spielberg (the collective) was in assembling the 2005 film.
In the book, the hero is trapped in a farm house with a mad minister he met while at the ferry crossing. The two get to see the aliens close up, including the parents feeding their alien children human blood. In this scene a snake-like probe with an eye at its end searching the wrecked farm house to make certain the place is safe for the aliens to build their nest just outside. The mad minister eventually dies, even without the hero's help, and the hero manages to eventually escape.
In the George Pal movie, the mad minister of the farm house scene is replaced by a woman, who is rapidly becoming the hero's love interest. The probe into the farm house is a three-lens affair that snakes through the wreckage twice. The first time the hero and his gal manage to avoid being spotted, hiding behind some debris until the probe is confident that the farm house is empty. Then the woman glimpses an alien outside, and in a series of shadows moving behind a curtain the alien comes into the room and touches her shoulder. The hero kills the alien, and then when the probe reappears, cuts off the lens with an ax. Eventually, he and the girl escape.
In this scene, Spielberg brings back the mad minister in the guise of the ambulance driver. At pointed out earlier, this character was derived from the 1938 radio play, the man whom the hero meets in a doorway in a largely abandoned Newark. In Spielberg's film, the ambulance driver invites the hero and his daughter, Ray and Rachel into the house, where he has food and water enough for months, contrary to the character in the radio play who horded this wealth. But the philosophy of using the underground of the New York City subway and the rest is almost word for word from the radio play.
Spielberg also retains the woman from the George Pal version, only makes her into Ray's daughter, who he must protect.
As with the previous Pal movie, we get two visitations by the one-eyed snake (a strong sexual metaphor), the sighting of - but no the physical confrontation with - the aliens themselves. As in the Pal movie, Ray eventually cuts off the head of the one-eyed snake and escapes with his daughter. As with the book, he leaves behind the dead ambulance driver (mad minister).
But the scene is much more symbolic in the Spielberg film, as he enhances the Pal images for increased drama. Spielberg, for instance, lengthens the confrontation with the snake; allow this to frame a much more human conflict between the hero and the ambulance driver. The hero is seeking to escape notice - in much the same way as the hero in the Pal movie tries, while the ambulance driver true to the characterization of the radio play wants to strike back at the snake and later the alien visitors.
Spielberg repeats images from the Pal movie, though adds touches of his own, framing the characters in the same way but adding a mirror or an abandoned shoe for effect.
When the probe is satisfied that no one is there, the aliens come down into the basement. For me, they seem like children - but this may be the influence of the book - with the way they finger photographs and accidentally knock down the bicycle.
One of the amazing touches in the Spielberg film for me (and something rather minor in the overall scheme of the film) is the dramatic enhancement of the curtain, and how he takes the arrival of the alien from the Pal movie of the shadowy shapes moving slowly along the wall behind the curtain, and increases the tension by letting us see just a little detail.
This visual reproduction of the original scene is so powerful that it leaped out at me when I went back to the original film and realized just how much better Spielberg managed to convey a moment that unlike the original film did not end up in a conflict between alien and man. Instead, Spielberg had the hero and ambulance driver struggling while the aliens played.
Spielberg also repeats other critical aspects of this scene such as the return of the one-eyed snake and the nose to nose confrontation between it and Rachel (the love interest in the first movie). For me, seeing the transformation of mixed images in this way makes me understand how Spielberg (the collective) works and thinks. I'll be looking at both films again, and looking for other sources from which Spielberg drew his inspiration and talk about them in later essays, including some of the important differences between Pal's film and Spielberg's.