Ghost in Spielberg’s War of the Worlds machine
If you found it strange that when the alien killing machines made their eventual appearance in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and they had an eye that looked like a car headlight, a bellow that sounded like the horn of a tug boat, a wind up that sounded like a jet engine, and expelled water and steam like a 19th Century steam locomotive, you are not alone.
These shell shaped machines do not come preassembled, with legs that look something like the foundation to a high voltage tower hop out of the ground first, with the body leaping on top for a final attachment. This device has several keen features you won’t find on cars, such as tentacle like arms with eyes at the end that are good for snatching up delicious human creatures for lunch or spying out the secret holes into which human’s sometimes crawl in order to get away.
When seen from a distance – as you do later in the film after the frustrated ferry crossing, they look very much like amusement rides, all blinking lights and will lots of screams around them. That scene in particular would instantly bring back visions of Palisades Park as seen from the Manhattan side of the Hudson River or Uncle Milty’s Amusement Park in Bayonne as seen from Staten Island – except for one small detail, the screams are for real. Ray in talking to Rachel compared the bolts of lightning that eventually set these machines to life as fireworks or more appropriately for his inside joke at Independence Day – just like the Fourth of July (even the clouds look the same as the clouds from the previous invasion film).
Spielberg’s alien machines seem to be a composite of 19th and 20th Century human machines, which ought to tell you something about what this tale is really about: our machines are killing us.
This is in many ways yet another Frankenstein retelling and a kind of testimony to the folly of 19th Century thinking that had thought mankind was in control of our machines, when at some point these machines were bound to take over.
Spielberg seems to have touched again upon what my wife calls the big brain/little brain theory and how little control we have over that part of our primitive mind that causes flight, fight and other savage responses.
Is this the symbolic meaning behind having these machines seeded in our landscape, waiting for some trigger in our savage mind to set them on their destructive path? Are we deluded into thinking that we can control what we create, an evolutionary self-deception that that lies when telling us that we no longer have to worry about the savage small brain, and that we have evolved out of that savage, cannibalistic beast that once crawled out of the swamp?
In the 19th Century, most philosophers and social scientists believed that we could learn our way out of savagery that the more we expanded our brains, the more civilized we became.
Freud’s theories, although also flawed, provided more or less scientific evidence to show that civilized behavior was a function of the big brain and that when push came to shove, we reverted to savagery, and or expressed our savagery in ways that seemed civilized.
There was, of course, plenty of evidence to show Freud correct such as American Slavery and the empire-building machines that often contended colonized countries into virtual slave markets for our economy, cheap labor sources that we still use today.
But the most revealing evidence to prove just how little we had evolved as the human race was World War I where the most civilized nations on the planet reverted to some of the most savage practices imaginable – based on the need to control colonies, wealth and access to cheap labor.
Although forced labor through overt colonization began to end with the conclusion of World War I, the practice continued through covert ways – as Ray’s son Robbie might have noticed had he actually completed his paper on the French occupation of Algeria would have noted. If a race proved too resistant to slavery such as the American Native American Indian, we did our best to obliterate them. In modern times, nations who did not dedicate their labor to feed the Western economic engine often suffered high rates of poverty and starvation, another slower and more tortuous means of racial extinction.
Yet for the most part, this racial slaughter was a relatively unconscious thing. Even during the height of the Great War (as World War I is sometimes called), most people believed they were fighting for some noble cause and the slaughter was the price we needed to pay in this war to end all wars.
The rise of Fascism following Germany’s defeat proved that our small brains could use our large brains for the deliberate eradication of other human beings, and that the machines we thought served as proof of our great nobility could be turned for a savage use. The push for racial purity and how to get rid of unwanted genetic elements became a conscious act by a so-called civilized nation, using tools that were previously believed to have elevated us out of savagery.
Since genetic elements are at the core of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, we must assume – at least in part – this is the message of the film. We get further evidence in the conversation between Ray and his daughter, Rachel, when discussing out to deal with the splinter she has received. He wants to cut it out to prevent infection; she believes her body will expel it naturally when ready. While this is also a foreshadowing of what will later take place when our most basic bacteria destroys the alien invaders, it is also a symbol of appropriate method of handling these situations.
Fascism didn’t merely create a public sentiment against the Jews, gypsies and other so called undesirables (allowing the Nazis to unleash their deadly machines upon them) first the Jews were systematically stripped of their ability to defend themselves against attack – the Nazis taking away their legal rights, their financial means and any thing they might use as a weapon – in much the way the aliens did to humans when arriving, stopping cars, extinguishing electrical communications, even stealing away time with the halting of watches. Man and Jew were stripped of those elements that we normally considered signs of civilization just as the way countries in the South Pacific were stripped of their culture in order to seem more savage and no more worthy than the lives of maggots.
Machines from the opening scenes dominate War of the Worlds, acting to set an important theme from the very first sequence where Ray (in yet one more symbol of birth as depicted in previous essays) manipulates a crane that not merely looks like one of the alien machines, but has many of the similar sounds we later hear when the Tripods are on the move.
Ray’s boss pleads with Ray to come back early because Ray’s skill with the crane is unequalled and with “half of Korea” coming in later, the boss needs to keep production moving. Trucks roll passed in their own procession.
Ray lives and breathes machines. And though not every inch of his world or the sets built to depict his consumption with machines was shown, every aspect of his life is dominated by their operation, building or repair. His dedication to bringing dead machines back to life gives him a kind of status as a minor Dr. Frankenstein.
And while he believes he can control the machines -- driving his Mustang recklessly into his driveway and mocking his near twin (his ex-wife’s new husband) about how safe a vehicle Tim had purchased – as if machines shouldn’t be too safe. Any man so cocky about controlling the machine world is bound to find his machines turning on him and mankind, just as Frankenstein’s monster did.
Misuse of technology is repeated over and over again in War of the Worlds from refrigerators that have no food to a media that fails to inform – such as the radio broadcast of the Emergency network repeats a recording, but never actually gives necessary advice.
Savages kill each other in order to possess a van, even though the van really can’t help them get away, humans killing humans with savagery as heated as the alien savagery is cold (i.e. the cold stone at the landing site).
When technology isn’t misused in this film, it appears to break down, making it unreliable at the moment when it is needed most: cell phones, regular phones, TV sets and cars all useless, leaving people unable to communicate or flee, standing around like sheep when the alien wolves come to collect their blood. Even the ferry which is supposed to take them to safety become a death trap instead, cars become coffins, as do tanks, airplanes, hummers and even the flame riddle train rushing though the Athens scenes.
Even the mighty machines of the aliens – which clank and hiss, bellow and blow smoke, cannot protect themselves from the simplest of beasts, the most primitive part of our world. In then end their machines become their coffins just as our machines became ours.
One point that Spielberg seems to make in War of the Worlds is that machine by themselves do not guarantee a civilized being, that along with physical evolution, there must be a moral evolution that keeps in step with the progress – otherwise, we wind up with machines run by savage small brain, using machines they way they might tooth and nail, but with the effect of killing and maiming millions. This is a theme that was played out significantly in the Science Fiction classic Forbidden Planet where the most advanced race in the universe allowed its small brain access to the most advanced killing machines possible, and in Spielberg film we find the beast of our own mythology in control of powerful technology to satisfy its most primitive urges.
In the end, a machine based society is seen as something unnatural, bound to fail for numerous reasons and spiritually devoid. Machine will take whatever assignment they are given, whether this is to unload cargo ships and drive people to safety (such as Tim’s or the one Ray steals) or they can become the instruments of slaughter, turning people to dust or drinking their blood.
Spielberg seems to take the message one step beyond what H.G. Wells intended. Wells wanted Colonizing Europe of his day to know what it feels like to be colonized or obliterated by a more advanced society the way people in Asia, Africa and Central America were feeling. But Spielberg seems to say that we need to control our most basic urges before we can ever hope to control machines, and that we cannot rely on machines to protect us from ourselves or more importantly, let machines do our thinking for us or make our moral choices. Machines can’t be moral, only humans can.