As a follow up to a previous essay that depicting Ray slowing evolving into heroic father figure, this essay deals with a possible important focus in the movie concerning technology, cutlure and what it means to be the fittest to survive.
These are questions I raised in essays speculating on what Spielberg's War of the Worlds would be like, and now that the film is out, we have the answers to some degree - though as in most things of Spielberg creation, the answers are not always obvious, but generally issued to us in some symbolic moment or moments in the film.
As with most modern science fiction writers, Spielberg is concerned with the impact of technology - on our species and to some degree with the alien life forms with whom we come into contact.
This is very much the case in War of the Worlds.
Theories on technology's impact on a species vary.
Technology can be an extension of our natural senses. A telephone can let us speak at great distance far beyond which we could even hope to shout. A television set will allow us to see beyond what we can normally see, a radio beyond what we could hear, a car, plane or rocket ship take up beyond where we could ever hope to walk. Most machines are what we would call "labor saving devices" from sucking up dust out of our rugs or to performing super human feats such as a single man like Ray being able to lift giant cargo containers and place them onto the back of tractor trailer trucks.
While technology can increase what we hear, how far we go and how much information we obtain, it can sometimes reduce our ability to appreciate things close at hand such as what goes on in our children's lives - which is somewhat symbolic of Ray's problems early in the film. His love of technology seems to be a substitute for real love, I suppose.
Some believe technology can actually make you dependent, creating an addition by which a person or species would be helpless without them.
I'm not sure what I believe although I would be lost without my CD of The White Albumn.
Wells in his book took a very narrow view of technology: primitive, advanced and more advanced. Those with the most advanced technology dominated. He had created an allegory for colonial conquest to show how European powers would seem as primitive as the African and other tribes they conquered if confronted with a truly alien race. While Wells gave mankind a biological way out of this dilemma, we need not go into the biological aspects here because in that regard Wells and Spielberg follow an identical course. But what if the more primitive race had superior technology? What then defines survival of the fittest?
Speilberg film adaptation of Wells' masterpiece appears to take a slightly different course when it comes to technology and culture, both of which seem to figure into his idea of what it means to be fit to survive.
Wells in his volume paints human reaction to a race of superior technology in grim terms. We panic, or despair, grow savage or go mad.
Spielberg appears to give us a fifth option: we adapt and endure.
But by this, he probably means not only physically, but culturally as well.
In Wells survival of the fittest meant the ability to survive. Period. His aliens didn't stack up because of a biological fluke, not because of their lack of technological force to carry out their wishes.
Speilberg seems to define survival of the fitness in more than technological or biological terms.
Biologically, the aliens - despite Ray's inability to keep his refrigerator stocked with anything edible - rely entirely on their machines to hunt and kill their food. If both alien and human were stripped of technology, is there any doubt which would be most fit to survive?
It is this concept of culture upon which Spielberg appears to hang a lot of his definition.
While he has given us little information about what the aliens are like, we have a few clues. Whereas Wells painted his aliens as a race acting out of desperation, attacking Earth in order to avoid extinction, Spielberg's aliens appear cold hearted and ruthless. They have long planned this attack on Earth seeding the planet for an eventual harvest.
Their motives seem to come out of the most primitive and savage need to hunt and feed - and while human motivations can be boiled down to survival instinct, they take so many forms that we have no space to put them down here. Much of human technology is not for war or for hunting, but in labor saving. While the alien technology seems totally dedicated to hunting and feeding, making them savages possessing a remarkably advanced technology.
If they love and are loved, it is not seen here, and, in fact, there is one telling moment about them when they are loose in the basement pawing over a family's photos that seems to indicate their lacking.
Since family (a broad assumption I know) is the foundation upon which most human culture is based, it is the ability of the family to survive and even thrive in the fact of superior opposition that counts.
The symbolic moment in this film comes when all seems lost, when alien bloodsuckers encircle the house, and yet Cruise sings Dakota to sleep. He, of course, does not know the songs she requested, but he does remember the lyrics to Little Duce Coup - and that counts for something.
Devoid of machines, even devoid of hope, Cruise and Dakota are preserving human culture, adapting it and themselves to the situation, and in terms of the survival of the fittest, this might actually be the turning point when they prove their race superior. An apt comparison might be the way many Jews struggled to keep their rituals during the worst of Nazi occupation. They won a moral victory despite the superior fire power of their enemies. In fact, War of the Worlds is heavy with images to the Holocaust (such as the blindfold over Dakota's eyes and telling her to sing) and 9/11 (such as Tom Cruise covered with dust), but I shall go into those in depth later.