Many months ago, when I first got word that Steven Spielberg intended to use elements reminiscent of the aftermath of 9/11, I questioned the window of the move, mistakenly believing he would be perceived as using what has become something sacred as an effect for his block bluster interpretation of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds.
Not until I saw the movie did I realize that these images, along with images of the Holocaust and possibly other examples of human outrages committed against other humans did I realize that these were at the heart of his interpretation of the books, meant to be as shocking to us symbolically as Saving Private Ryan was graphically.
In many ways, War of the Worlds is not about an alien invasion at all, but about the alien within our own society that emerges at times to commit unspeakable crimes upon our people before being contained.
It is for this reason, the original name proposed for the movie "Out of the Night" might fit the film's themes better, or perhaps if focused entirely on the main character, we might call it Saving Ray Ferrier as he is symbolically brought back to the human side of the equation as noted in a previous essay.
In presenting an interpretation that suggests that we are already our own worst enemy, we find a new meaning to the advertising slogan "they are already here," and find an almost demonic explanation to the symbolic burial and the eventual activation of the enemy craft that lay in waiting for this moment since the dawn of human evolution. While on the surface, Spielberg keeps to the Wells' story line of an invasion from space, but symbolically - as shown by Ray - these aliens are likely those of us who have in George Lucas' terms turned to the dark side of our own existence, becoming perverted, blood sucking, soulless beings that lack culture, lack morals, lack any of those elements that we define as being human. Is it any accident that the aliens use bolts of lightning as their means of arrival, a symbol also used to describe the air and ground assault known as Blitzkrieg?
War of the Worlds' deeper message reminds us that we have done things just as terrible to ourselves as these so-called alien invaders, and remarkably, this is conveyed through the near constant use of these images of our past.
Bodies floating in the river, remains of clothing floating in the air, people ripped out of the water or off the ground, blood being sucked from them, people in cages waiting for their turn to die, posters lining the streets looking for word about lost loved ones are among the most horrifying and thought provoking images I have ever seen on the screen, and images of a reality that is barely veiled by fiction.
There is something so provocative and so much a part of our base fears contained in War of the Worlds that I can compare the film to no other film ever for its message of terror - because what Spielberg hands us is a forecast for no fictional future, but for our future out here in the audience. He is saying to us through the use of these symbols, that this has happened, that this is happening and that this will happen again.
These images continued to haunt me hours and even days after I viewed the film. Some of them we have seen in films like Schindler's List and in news reports following the aftermath of 9/11. It is no accident that Ray stumbles out through the wreckage of an airliner - symbolic of the planes attacking the World Trade Center, crashing in the Pennsylvania woods or hitting the Pentagon - to find a television crew hopeless scrambling to find someone to tell their news of human carnage - a clear mockery of the blood sucking nature of media that can watch such disasters with supposed dispassion and objectivity, and do nothing to help the human misery they witness.
Use of these images in War of the Worlds tells us deep down that the horrors we witness on the screen cannot be contained by the neat package of the past, but that they are part of the endless potential of our existence.
Graham Greene, a writer I admire greatly, used similar images in his 1955 novel on the Vietnam War, depicting canals bloated thick with bodies that soldiers and civilians hardly noticed.
In a world in which the average person has become numb to suffering, Spielberg's War of the Worlds seems determined to shock us into understanding that this numbness, this lack of attention, this alien-like disregard for human suffering are the very things that allow holocausts of these kinds to take place: mass murder occurs when good people refused to notice.
These images of human beings being vaporized before our eyes, of course, are taken without great fanfare. There were no screams of horror from the audience. This was just one more movie in which mass slaughter is being depicted. We have become numb to such images - and perhaps even resistant to the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan when human body parts are strewn across the screen as if the inside of a Chicago slaughter house.
In War of the Worlds, Spielberg appears to be using another tactic, determined to shock us into consciousness through our subconscious. Not by use of squealing slaughtered pigs as in The Omen, but through symbols that have come to bear great meaning even to the most numb of us. Spielberg is pushing buttons with each scene, seeking to shake us to our moral bones and to make us understand that this will happen again until we wake up. The bodies we see vaporized are more than just movie extras, just as the bodies floating in the water are, these are our friends, our neighbors and our families.
For those of us from whom the dust-covered survivors of the World Trade Center and the desperate search of family members whose body parts have been buried in Brooklyn landfills, this was no device for depicting film horror when Cruise looked at himself in the mirror, but a haunting reminder of a past when humans fled devastation caused not by an attack of aliens but by other human beings, panicked onto ferries in their desperate attempt to cross the Hudson River to the supposed safety on the other side.
The ferry crossing in War of the World and the parade of posters leading up to the ramp sent chills so deep into me that I felt as I had witnessed again the attack on the World Trade Center and could do nothing to stop it. This, of course, gave me a personal clue to how many Jewish families must have felt surviving the Holocaust when their loved ones had not.
The random, inexplicable slaughter - the lack of reason for why the aliens killed this person and yet another person managed to survive for a time - reinforced the real horror that there is no good reason for these murders. The Robbins character said it best: We are being exterminated. Wells in his book and God in our lives seemed to intervene, but neither gives a clear reason for why one person survived and others died.
The Jews, guilt-ridden over their survival when loved ones had not survived, vowed never to let the memory of the slaughter fade. For the most part, they have kept their promise over the last 60 years. Yet gauging from the cold reaction I saw in the theater, we have not kept our vigil nearly as well, leaving many of us to forget after a mere five years the desperate slaughter that took place within sight of the Secaucus theater where I saw this film. While Spielberg's use of images woke in me the same passions I felt when I stood nearly on that same spot and watched the Twin Towers fall, most in the crowded house seemed numb.
As I sat, I realized that Spielberg was mounting a campaign of images literal and figurative that were even more powerful than those he gave us in Saving Private Ryan - the blood and the perpetual loss of life, the agony over the missing, the hopelessness and more, each image rolling like missing thunder through me as I sat once more helpless to do anything. With each blow I gripped my chair, feeling the symbolic horrors as the fictional slaughter became more and more real to me, because I had seen the real thing in real life.
In those few moments when the pressure eased, I glanced around the audience wonder if how everyone else could remain so calm. Was it me alone who felt this way?