If the shoe fits: Spielberg’s translation of symbolic images
Although Steven Spielberg seems to have drawn heavily on numerous sources for this adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, some key moments in the 2005 movie were suggested by passages in original text.
This is particularly true in regards to the floating bodies scene where Spielberg melded two minor textual images to help shape one of the most powerful and symbolic moments in his film.
In Wells’ text, neither the hero nor his brother actually see bodies floating down stream as is depicted in Spielberg’s film, but the hero’s brother while fleeing London hears a report of someone having seen a body floating in the river. Later, the hero sees some red mass – probably red weed – floating in a river, and believes the worst.
Spielberg in his looking through the text for images apparently saw these two moments as opportunity to create a powerful scene in his film, and is among the man subtle adaptation that gives the film authenticity while not translating the text exactly.
The boot scene in farm house went through a similar transformation, and appears to be part of Spielberg web weaving of symbolic foreshadowing we get early in the film, that are revealed later in the film in slightly altered forms.
As pointed out in an earlier essay, the boot appears to be part of a Medusa myth subtext, yet it also serves as part of the network of repeated images Spielberg uses to (pardon my pun) tie the film together.
Early in the film, we get a boot on a table as a fore grounded image. The location and the prominence of the image comes during a particularly important scene in the movie in which Spielberg is foreshadowing other themes such as the appropriateness of die and the expulsion of unnatural elements from the diet. This scene also follows several scenes in which other images such as the baseball through the window and the train on the TV set are introduced, both of which are repeated after a fashion later in the film.
The boot around which the camera moves to get a close up of Ray is part of a scene in which he expresses disgust over eating humus – a kind of parody to the concept he learns of later when the aliens eat or rather drink human blood. This same scene foreshadows the end of the aliens when Rachel talks about her body pushing a splinter out, while Ray argues that the wound will get infected if the splinter isn’t removed forcefully – since it is infection that does away with the aliens, more or less forcing them out of Gaia – the collective human body.
We can assume from the boot being part of this scene that it also serves as a foreshadowing to the later scene when the boot serves as decoy allowing the heroes to escape.
While the farm house scene is largely an update of George Pal’s scene from the 1950s film, the boot seems to have its roots in the book, where the tentacle feeling through the farm house pantry manages to touch the hero’s boot before passing on to leave him unscathed.
The boot’s use in the Spielberg film may also related to another Wells book, The Time Machine, in which the hero loses his boot while escaping from underground lair of the morlocks who are pursuing him.
This transformation of image extends to Spielberg’s dialogue as well -- most importantly to one particular metaphor used in the farm house scenes.
In the book and the radio play, the character of the artillery man (man in Newark in the radio play) refers to the battle between aliens and men as one between “men and ants”—men being as helpless as ants.
This is a brilliant use of irony because the character is saying men are helpless to stop the aliens from destroying everything, when in truth, the aliens are already dying from diseases men are immune to – the invisible shield men have that proves superior to the shield the aliens have.
Wells in the book used the ant metaphor because he compared them to colonies of ants on earth in the way they work and operate. Welles in translating the script for the radio play in 1938 carried this over more or less letting it reflect the almost fascist sensibility of the ant-like society.
In putting this same phrase in the mouth of the ambulance driver, Spielberg altered it, and made a comparison between men and maggots. This was not merely done for the alliteration, but to emphasized two important points: his theme of foot and the concept of parasites.
Maggots breed on spoiling foot, suggesting perhaps that somehow human kind as spoiled the environment, Gaia, allowing the invasion. The change also seems to paint a portrait of future humanity as maggots feeding on the dead body under alien rule—i.e. man as parasite. But it also alludes to the aliens who are parasites feeding off of human blood, and the parasitic bacteria even then feeding off the dying aliens, a foreshadowing of maggots winning the war of the worlds.