How War of the Worlds fits the myth pattern
(An item by item comparison)
As pointed out in previous essays, War of the Worlds continues Steven Spielberg’s use of myth through symbolic representations in depicting the myth of Medusa (see http://mywebpages.comcast.net/asullivan00/worlds70.html), but he also appears to have reinforced the mythological texture by shaping the character played by Tom Cruise mythological heroic figure – which using the Joseph Campbell model from “Hero with a thousand faces) – is a character that goes through hell, self understanding and development, sometimes with the help of another person to reach paradise and rebirth.
As pointed out in a previous essay on War of the Worlds, the Cruise character went through numerous rebirths to eventually become strong enough to take on the aliens (see http://mywebpages.comcast.net/asullivan00/worlds67.html). What I intend to show here is the step by step mythological heroic process Spielberg uses to transform Ray Ferrier into the heroic hero – as Spielberg has done in the past (see http://mywebpages.comcast.net/asullivan00/sully009.html).
In previous essays, I have used the Auden model on this mythological transformation. In this specific essay, I will use the Campbell model since it appears to fit War of the Worlds better.
The role of mythological hero is not to beat the enemy. The battle is moral, not physical. And the hero often needs to perform a right of passage in order to become worthy to deal with the moral issues.
But the hero represents mankind as a whole, and this transformation of Ray is symbolic of the change humanity must undergo in order to be saved.
In War of the Worlds, this process is often confused with the attack of the aliens.
In truth, the alien attack is a metaphor for the internal struggle ongoing inside Ray and humanity. You might see the alien machines buried under the earth as the seeds of temptation buried inside each of us, and that we allow this temptation to become activated.
More properly, these machines are the seeds of destruction we have implanted inside our animal brains that get stirred to life at some moment that lays ruin to our lives.
In connecting this with the 9/11 imagery, the film seems to ask what went wrong and requires an everyday hero to rise up from the masses to show us the way to the correct path.
Avoiding the obvious religious symbolism that Spielberg included, we looked to Campbell, who says that in myth the hero Ray must travel through hell where he becomes master of great power and returns to the world bringing to us the secret of our rejuvenation.
In Campbell, the mythological villain is someone that violates a basic trust, betraying the rules that define civilized behavior for personal gain.
Seen in this light, the villains in War of the Worlds, the villains are not the aliens – they are merely the trigger for the misbehavior of humans – who misuse their office again and again for personal gain. The collapse of the church in the early scenes appears to be a statement that this is one of the guilty parties in this betrayal of trust. But it does not end there, as we weave through the story, we keep encountering people who violate their humanity for personal gain – or, if we broaden this, seeking to survive at the expense of others rather than thinking as a community of human beings: the media people who seem more dedicated to finding someone to listen to their message than doing anything about the human misery their cameras record. We see this in the mobs that break the windows of the van, and eventually lead shooting each other over a van that will not let them escape for long. We see it in the panicked reaction of the ferry captain that closes the gates while he can still fit people on board. We see this in the character that Tim Robbins plays, a man that hordes resources in the basement, sharing them with the father and daughter, only because he appears to lust after the little girl.
The Robbins character, of course, is what Campbell calls “the outcast, someone who has refused to answer the call, who instead of working as an EMT helping heal the wounds left by the attack, he is hording resources for personal survival.
Even Ray starts out with these selfish unsocial tendencies, especially in the beginning scenes where he steals a van so that he and his family might escape while the rest of humanity burns. These and probably others are the villains of War of the Worlds, those who have betrayed their humanity.
The movie is a series of heroic tests in which the Ray character is shown again and again what is right and what is wrong as he makes his way through the hellish dreamscape – as pointed out previously, he is reborn each time a slightly different and slightly stronger man.
Oddly enough, Ray’s son serves as the guide to proper behavior, and routinely shows how human kind should act in given situations. He is the character that helps the Dakota character find her safe space. He is the character who wants to join the fight against the aliens, wants to help others when they ride through a landscape of stranded cars and panicked people. He is the character that rushes to help others when they need help getting on the ferry, and eventually pleads with his father to be released to do battle with the alien hordes.
In Campbell’s interpretation of world myth, we find two types of rights of passage: from adolescence to adulthood or from life to death.
While I have not had time nor energy to completely unravel all of the threads Spielberg has inserted into this movie, the most obvious mythological thread has the Ray character finally learning maturity.
While I have often speculated on why Spielberg selected Bayonne Bridge for his setting – there is no doubt larger points he needed to make, and while he might have wanted to use the Bayonne Bridge for his dramatic escape scenes, the Newark scenes appear to be well thought out in mythological terms.
Campbell said the setting which opens a myth can well be called the World Navel, a secret opening through which the secrets of the gods pour.
Spielberg has been a bit perverse in his interpretation on this point – giving us a load of crap from the belly of the shark in Jaws, slime covered objects in Poltergeist, and in War of the Worlds, we get not the bounty of the gods, but all hell breaking lose as the machines of murder rise up from the ground to begin world conquest. Of course, it may well be noted that the bounty eventually does come in each instance, including in War of the Worlds, but there is a kind of inside mythological irony taking place in each of these films.
According to Campbell, the tree of life is rooted at the world navel, held in darkness with golden light pouring through its leaves, birds perched on its branches, and an inexhaustible spring bubbling at its feet – and in equally ironic terms, each of these things can be found in the Newark scenes from the church as the tree of god to the spouting water gushing from the broken fire hydrants. You even have the birds flying here and there attracted to the aliens.
The Newark scene also provides some of other needed elements to fit Campbell’s world navel such as the alter, the circular pattern of the meeting of streets and such.
Although the action seems to be taking place in the real world, most of the real right of passage takes place inside Ray. Campbell points out that the passage of the hero is mainly inward where he encounters obscure resistance and overcomes them to recover long lost powers. In myth, there are a certain number of possible goals for the hero, and these include a fall from innocence, a task, a journey and quest, the search for the father, death and rebirth and initiation.
In some ways, Ray and his two kids seem to encompass nearly all of these. Ray’s daughter, who everyone seems to protect from real world dangers, suddenly is plunged into the middle of the worst things a human can experience. She sees the aliens laying waste to Newark. She sees the humbled masses along the New Jersey Turnpike as her father weaves the van through them. While she does not get a chance to see the airliner crash and its aftermath, she sees the bodies floating in the river, the masses of people on the way to the ferry, the fight and eventual shooting of the people over the van, the leaving behind of people when the ferry takes off, the aliens snatching up of humans out of the water and the hunting of them down, the hiding in the basement where aliens hover them, the drinking of blood, and the eventual snatching up into the belly of the beast. Each of these experiences helps her fall from innocence.
Meanwhile Ray’s son is clearly searching for a father he cannot find in Ray or even in Ray’s substitute.
While all three are on a journey and all three face death and rebirth, Ray seems to do so again and again, becoming stronger and more like a mythological hero with each.
In describing the ideal mythological hero, Campbell says it is often a person of great gifts, a person greatly honored or hated by society or a person who lacks something that he and the world needs and the myth becomes his means of obtaining it for himself and thereby bequeathing it to the world as well. This is Ray, someone for whom the myth quest is a means of making himself over and thus the world.
Call to adventure
Spielberg’s opening of War of the Worlds nearly fits exactly what Campbell called “The call to Adventure.” In this, the adventure can begin with a blunder which reveals an unsuspected world that draw the hero into a relationship with forces he does not rightly understand. These forces are heralded by or foreshadowed by what appears to be insignificant events such as the bolts of lightning or the reports from other parts of the world on TV and the eventual appearance of magical creatures as if by a miracle.
In mythological terms, the aliens in War of the Worlds – as said before – are not the real villains of this film, the people are. The aliens are the heralds that draw Ray into the quest. Campbell described a herald as “a dark figure, loathsome and terrifying and judged evil by the world. It may be a beast or a mysterious figure.”
The hero gets help along the way, guides who give him information necessary for the journey through the underworld. In War of the Worlds we get numerous such characters in minor roles, such as the ferryman whose role it is to conduct souls to the other world – in this case, the aliens upset his plans and grab up the souls before they reach hell, leaving only Ray and his two kids to make the transition successfully.
Crossing into the other world is often a challenge, says Campbell, who notes that mythological monsters guard the threshold leaving the hero to figure out a way to get through – this fitting very much the description of the ferry crossing disaster scene in War of the Worlds.
The character Tim Robbins plays may also be a kind of helper, although Campbell said there are darker and more dangerous types of helpers, some that would lure innocent souls. These are often protective and dangerous at the same time – a plausible description for the character that lusts after Ray’s daughter yet provides father and daughter with shelter and protection from the aliens.
A myth also presents us with a specific kind of conflict that is central to the tale. This can be a battle between brothers, a battle against a dragon, a night sea journal, a wonder journey, abduction, transport through the belly of a whale, dismemberment, crucifixion, or the hero might bribe his way through the barriers with some form of offering or use his charm to sneak through.
Again Spielberg’s War of the Worlds meets many of these. Father and son battle as if brothers – in fact, the son calls his father ray, not father, until the very end. The dragon battle is very obvious so need not be mentioned much. The night sea journey we got with the ferry crossing and we see signs of the wonder journey again and again during the lead up to the ferry, scenes of horror that spring out from nowhere. Ray’s daughter is nearly abducted once and then finally abducted by the aliens. Ray uses his skills to sneak aboard the ferry when others could not, proving his craftiness. I’m certain we might also find examples of crucifixion and clear dismemberment scenes if we look closely. Although tempted to say that the capture by the aliens is the whales belly scenario, the real whales belly scenes are those in the basement with Tim Robbins after which Ray and his daughter emerge into a world Campbell calls “a world of curiously fluid and ambiguous forms” – in other words, the world of red weed. Here, the hero faces his toughest test facing ogres that are often a reflection of his own inabilities, fears and prejudices and those things he needs to most over come.
When the aliens take his daughter, the previously irresponsible Ray glances around until he finds a weapon he can use in one of the stranded military vehicles then goes after his daughter to get her back, bringing down the monster as a result.
In its concluding scenes, War of the Worlds once more meets the pattern for myth that Campbell set out. Campbell claimed there were a handful of resolutions to myth: sacred marriage (or sexual union with the goddess), father atonement (reconciliation with the father), Apotheosis (an understanding of self), and elixir theft (bringing back the secret that will save the world).
While Ray does not reunite with his ex-wife as her husband, his return brings him her respect – reuniting them in an important way.
In the concluding scenes, Ray’s son greets him and calls him father.
And it is clear from this scene that Ray has a better understanding of himself.
For the surface plot, Ray also brings back the knowledge that the aliens are dying from disease.