Glass crystals in the street:
War of the Worlds and Kristallnacht
For a few days after Steven Spielberg finished shooting War of the Worlds in the Iron Bound section of Newark, I heard complaints from a handful of residents and business owners about how much broken glass had been left behind unswept.
While the annoyance eventually evaporated with the after glow of having played a part in the new Spielberg production, the complaint and the remnants of glass remain one of those remarkable coincidences that sometimes emerge when we delve into universal archetypes the way Spielberg did. Somehow, we all managed to tap into the collective unconscious in a way that might even have surprised the film maker. By delving into concepts such as fascism, the Holocaust and 9/11 in his newest movie, Spielberg could not have left behind a more appropriate visible manifestation of the psychological ground over which his film traveled.
War of the Worlds is all about glass – about its reflective quality, about its transparency, but most of all about how fragile it is and how easily shattered. And in making his movie, Spielberg spreads shards of glass across the landscape, each cutting us with its sharp edge as we struggle to follow the characters through their story – each also a powerful reminder of significant events, one such as 9/11, which we consider recent history, but of an older, perhaps more significant event more than 60 years old that Spielberg apparently hopes to keep us from forgetting, an event that occurred during the overnight period starting on Nov. 9, 1938 and which some historians claim was the actual start on what we now know as The Holocaust.
Kristallnacht – translated at The Night of Crystal – was a mocking term the Nazis gave to the overnight period in which the German government allowed, an in fact, orchestrated riots again Jewish communities throughout the Third Reich. Jews were beaten and killed, Jewish women were raped, synagogues burned, stores were ravaged and looted, in a supposed spontaneous action by the German people.
In truth, the riots that occurred were apparently part of a long term plan that waited – as the invasion of earth did by the aliens in War of the Worlds – for some trigger to set it off. The situation for Jews in Germany had begun to deteriorate from the moment Hitler became German chancellor in 1933, but worsened significantly in 1938 as the government stripped Jews of more and more rights. The coordinated attacks were apparently part of some well-laid plan that became possible only after a 17-year old Jewish boy named Herschel Grynszpan assassinated a German diploma in Paris a few days earlier. Oddly enough the German official the boy killed was considered anti-Nazi but his death gave the Nazi government the excuse it needed to begin its campaign to exterminate the Jewish people.
Herschel’s was not an act of unjustified terrorism, but came as a reaction to the escalating assault on Jewish rights. While the Night of Crystal or better known as The Night of Broken Glass for the carnage it caused to Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues marked the Nazis’ most overt attack on the Jewish community, Hitler and his henchmen had systematically targeted Jews for some time, and the murder of the German diplomat had come in retaliation for the forced removal of Polish Jews out of Germany – including Herschel’s parents. The Jews were transported to the Polish border, but not let in, so were forced to live in camps where they suffered cold, hunger and other indignities. Herschel, who was living in Paris at the time, thought he could call world attention to the Jewish plight by assassinating the German ambassador in Paris. Failing to reach the ambassador, Herschel assassinated the first diplomat he could. The Nazis waited until the death was confirmed then unleashed the riots that led shortly to the transport of Jews to concentration camps and the start of the mass murder.
Ray’s son’s character in War of the Worlds appears to be a manifestation of Herschel, a Jewish boy frustrated with the world, his father and his people’s inability to confront evil, and explains through this symbolism his need to seek out the enemy and do something when the surface plot of the movie tends to be rather vague in this regard.
The alien invasion of earth as with the assault on the Jews was long in the making. The Nazis used the murder as an excuse to motivate the German people and alienate the Jews, a kind of misguided version of the patriotic war cry that followed 9/11. But instead of merely hanging flags out side their doors the way many Americans did, people took to the streets and began attacks on the Jews that did not stop until World War ended the abuses and the concentration camps were liberated. But like the aliens who slipped into their war machines in War of the Worlds, the Nazis were always at the controls, operating to their own ends, making it seem as if this was a spontaneous uprising when in reality they had long planned something of this sort and merely waited for the right moment to make it happen.
Of course, in painting Ray’s son as Herschel it is impossible to say just how allegorical Spielberg intended to be in shaping his War of the Worlds to reflect that particular moment in time. You could interpret the son’s overdue term paper on some vaguely French piece of history as a connection with Herschel and his attack in Paris.
In extending this a little further, you might also see Ray’s infuriated pitch of the baseball through the window as full of equally symbolic meaning, painting himself as part of the establishment against which his son is rebelling, but also as the symbolic start of the horrific events that are soon to follow with the rising of the alien war machine from under ground.
There need not be a direct one to one allegory. We might see this in a different light, with Ray’s song rebelling against the uncaring recklessness that have made his two children feel like the Jewish refugees, denied a place with either their new father or their old. They may be seen as caught between two worlds belonging to neither.
Ray’s breaking of the window may also be seen as the start of the psychological holocaust that take place later, although I think it is possible to take the allegory too far.
Yet undeniably, the film uses images of the Night of Broken Glass to enhance the horror of the alien invasion. We get image after historic image from that moment in 1938 – and even get a clue from Ray’s son saying baseball season is over as to the time of year. From the destruction of the church to the opening sequences in Newark and the glass shattering there to the floating bodies in the river (who might be seen as the Jews rioters would not allow out of the water and later drowned), we see a near non-stop reference to the beginning of a holocaust and clearly a metaphor Spielberg consciously intended.
Rather than providing us with a direct one to one allegory, Spielberg appears to use the images from the 1938 to evoke the same sense, creating a metaphor in which aliens equate to Nazis and humanity to the persecuted Jews. The repeated use of glass, mirrors, window framing add to the emotional impact and defines this fictional moment more powerfully than a documentary, building up a complex body of symbolic references and history to allusion to paint this new scene of human carnage. And while we see aliens from another world attacking us on the screen, the images paints a sub textual message that reminds us on a deeper emotional level that humans have done and continue to do these kinds of things to other humans such as The Holocaust 60 years ago and more recently the attacks of 9/11.
In many cases in War of the Worlds, Spielberg appears to overlay these images giving them double or even triple duty as they serve the metaphor of 9/11, the Holocaust or myth. As pointed on in a previous essay, Ray starts out this movie in a glass cage that strongly resembles the machines which the aliens operate. So in some way we are meant to associate him with the aliens (i.e. the Nazi) and it is Ray that throws the baseball through the glass.
I won’t pretend to understand what each and every reference to breaking glass means or the massive use of windows, glass and mirrors. But their use fits into many patterns of myth and clearly points towards that 1938 event.
Ray in the opening sequence is boxes in by glass as he and others are throughout the film, inside buildings in Newark, inside vans, inside houses, or a café in Athens. Spielberg more than in most of his other films makes frequent use of the framing technique, using window frames to isolate or group characters – such as when he has Dakota staring out the screen door waiting for Ray to get back from downtown or when he frames the gas station owner in a rear window. While framing focuses attention on a specific area, it also allows you to create associations, inside groups and outside groups.
Characters in this film are constantly looking out windows at the approach of violence. Dakota looks out the screen porch for Ray. Ray looks out from the porch at the bolts of lightning. The characters in Newark stare out a window as the alien machines are reflected in the glass. Even Ray when he flees these machines in Newark stares back at them through the windows of open car doors.
The Newark scene is particularly rich with images that recall Kristallnacht as glass is shattered everywhere – even to the point where hail falls on the heads of the people. The ash that covers people is a mixture of incinerated people, shards of shattered glass and other debris, serving dual purpose for the ash of those cremated in Nazi ovens and those poor souls incinerated in the Twin Towers on 9/11.
But glass serves as a continuing metaphor throughout the film as does the use of windows. From the baseball and the shattered windows in Newark to the assault of the peanut butter sandwich in the kitchen of Ray’s wife in Central Jersey we are inundated with these reference. When the rioters in the ferry scene seek to stop Ray and steal his van, they smash the windows to get at them, the impact made greater because of the continued pattern of shattered glass references we have tinkling through our subconscious since the movie’s beginning.
In some ways, we are being dragged through those hours in 1938, and being allowed to feel how the Jews must have felt when they Holocaust began their final assault on this friendless and homeless people who are yanked up if not by the snaked arms of alien machines than by the strong arm of Nazi SS who put them on cattle cars and send them to extinction, thinking even less about their worth than the aliens did humans. At least, the aliens saw us as source of nourishment.
Glass and the use of windows become such and overriding visual theme, you cannot easily overlook them, even if you choose not to adopt the meaning I have ascribed to them here. These “windows on the world” show us again and again the approach of horror in much the same way people in the World Trade Center must have seen the approaching airplanes that spelled their doom. In each case, we look out through the window to see some new horror, whether it is the approach of the alien machines, the murder of van hijackers from the café in Athens or the sucking of blood through the basement windows in the red weed portion. We see people’s bodies exploding as we peer into rear view mirrors, and see bridges and buildings vanish. But as often as we see reflections of these things, we see the more sympathetic characters of Ray and his children reflected in these mirrors as well.
We move in and out of the windows of the van as Ray races down what is supposed to be the New Jersey Turnpike. We see stranded humanity standing around their crippled machines as Ray steers around them. In the basement of Ray’s wife house, we see the exploding glass and the race of jet fuel pouring through the glass just as the victims of the World Trade Center must have witness them on 9/11. When crossing by ferry, it is the captain who looks out through the window of his bridge to see the whirlpool that will consume the boat and its passengers. And in some cases, we see people trapped in sinking cars through the windows as well.
I use the term “windows on the world” intentionally, because – for those that do not know it was the name of the restaurant situation on top of one of the Twin Towers, and this film is also so heavily laden with 9/11 images that we can assume the comparison between 9/11 and Kristallnacht is also intentional.
Yet in any study of this film, you must understand that Spielberg gives us a bias picture. We are not getting an objective historical documentary that will allow us to decide who are good guys and who are bad. Spielberg is giving us a slice of history that serves to convey the horror Jews and the victims of 9/11 must have felt.
As one friend pointed out, Spielberg left off the last chapter of Schindler’s List when making his film, a chapter that showed the Jewish survivors rising up to kill one of the prison guards after the camp was liberated. In War of the Worlds, we get no mention of Herschel’s crime unless symbolically when Ray’s son steals the car.
For me, these two events would overly serve to cast a shadow over an otherwise clear moral outrage the Nazis orchestrated. Yet to critics looking back through the cracked lens of sixty odd years, it is easy to make such minor crimes seem relevant – such critics missing the lesson history and both films are making, that monumental horrors as depicted here not only can happen again, but most certainly continue to happen, and often, we are forced to stare out our windows and serve as witness to these monstrosities.