Humor me: War of the Worlds as a barrel of laughs
William Shakespeare, ancient Greek playwrights and some of the most emotionally intense Jewish writers understood that to make a person cry profusely; make him or her laugh first.
By contrasting an emotion with its opposite, the second emotional reaction is magnified.
This lesson in craft is acutely evident in War of the Worlds, where humor – sometimes ironic even bitter humor – precedes nearly every heavily-laden emotional scene.
Humor in War of the Worlds runs the full gambit from mildly sarcastic to ironic and from slapstick to emotionally moving. In nearly every case, the humor serves as a foreshadowing of a significant emotional conflict – with the humor often acting like a mirror, reflecting the same general meaning as the horrific and tragic events that follow.
So when the film opens with the somewhat comic interchange between Ray and his boss at the docks with Ray’s snide reference about his relationship to women, we are immediately plunged into the conflict with his ex-wife.
Ray’s bitter joke when greeting his son about a hug, handshake or kick in the teeth is followed by a series of bitter exchanges over Ray’s parenting ability. Ray’s joke about him and his brother knowing it all leads directly his smashing of the window when Robbie snaps back.
We go from joke to crisis continually, serving as one of the many threads that pull the film together – and often each joke or comic moment has relevance to the various themes at play in the film.
Ray’s reaction to the humus (a word very close to human, eh?) from the local heath food store, while humorous, also contributes to the themes of psychological cannibalism the film seems to portray. This food image launches us into the fantasy portion of the film in which the aliens arrive, first as an odd cloud formation, then as bolts of lightning. Although terrible, the lightning inspires several humorous moments when Ray compares them to fireworks on the Fourth of July and begin pitifully (sorry Tom) to sing the national anthem. And in a bit of slapstick, Ray concedes the point of getting into the house and away from the lightning, through stumbles over a chair when seeking to execute the move.
Inside the house, Ray attempts to give his daughter comfort through a bit of folklore when he tells her lightning dozen strike the same place twice, then leaps under the table with her when it strikes the same place again.
Manny at the gas station and Ray’s two street urchins also serve as comic relief. Manny, something of a buffoon lightens the mood with his questions about the starter just after Ray’s confrontation with Robbie over the stolen car. The two urchins in downtown leave us chuckling slightly, not merely over the outlandish theory of sunspots causing the stalled cars but by the reaction of the other urchin in an exchange many of us from New Jersey cities have heard at one time or another. This sets us up for the horror that will soon transpire as the evil machines rise out of the ground and begin to kill everyone in sight.
This humor about machines is very important towards the theme of the movie, which seems to center on machines and technology – at least to some degree.
The film remains serious for Ray’s flight from Newark, but again lightens up when they reach Tim’s house somewhere along the Turnpike in New Jersey or New York where we get into the scene with the peanut butter – when Ray does not know of his daughter’s allergic reaction. As with the humus scene earlier, the humor reflects another important theme, but also serves as a frame around the 9/11-like scenes in the basement which concludes with another sequence of darker humor when Ray comes out and finds a news reporter picking through the wreckage in search of food.
Here Spielberg uses humor for several purposes, but particularly to pick on the pathetic press. At first, Ray mistakes the camera man as a survivor of the crash, but a woman reporter soon appears to set him straight.
The camera man is deaf after an alien ray struck his camera which was on his shoulder at the time.
“The stupid camera saved his life,” the woman said, then addressing the deaf cameraman, “You hear that, Max? The stupid camera saved your stupid life.”
This is a brilliant mock of a media that is out of touch with its audience and made even more satirical (to reflect need for the media to glorify disaster in an endless pursuit of cheap thrills) when the women reporter – the midst of the end of the human race – asks Ray if he was a passenger on the plane.
“Too bad,” she says as she closes the van door in his face, “it would have made a good story.”
As if the end of humanity was not enough.
The most powerful use of humor – prefacing the most powerful use of horror – comes while Ray and the kids are on the road north through New York State.
Here, the film manages to achieve a contrast of humor and horror as potent as anything you might find on the Shakespearian stage – aided, of course, by John Williams’ magnificent musical score.
Ray just lambasted Robbie for not calling him “dad” when Rachel says, “Dad,” followed by a long pause, “I have to go to the bathroom.”
Ray looks over puzzled and says, “Really?”
When he pulls the car to the road, he warns his children against calling attention to themselves, fearing someone might want to steal their car (a foreshadowing of things to come).
Finally, the frustrated Rachel says, “I got to go,” and gets out of the van.
“Rachel! Rachel!” Ray yells when she has gone a few dozen yards. “It’s good right there.”
“I’m not going in front of you guys,” she shouts back.
“Just go where I can see you,” Ray says.
“Are you crazy? Don’t look.”
“I’m not going to look. Just say in sight.”
“That’s looking!”
Then, as her father promises to make a list for their mother about the children’s infractions, Rachel plunges through the under brush to the shore of the Hudson River.
Chimes sound and then we hear escalating violins as the first body floats passed her in the water, with increased intensity of violins as hundreds more bodies appear.
After this the humor becomes darker and more ironic, such as the taped broadcast of the Emergency notification network that is only a test: “Had this been a real emergency this would have been followed with instructions.”
This is soon followed by mob scenes and human on human violence in which Ray and the kids lose their van but keep their lives.
Then, we see the crowds approaching the ferry as a Tony Bennett song plays over loud speakers:
If I ruled the world,
Ev'ry day would be the first day of spring,
Ev'ry heart would have a new voice to sing,
And we'd sing of the joy ev'ry morning would bring.
If I ruled the world,
Ev'ry man would be as free as a bird,
Ev'ry voice would be a voice to be heard -
Take my word, we would treasure each day that occurred.
My world would be a beautiful place,
Where we would weave such wonderful dreams;
My world would wear a smile on its face,
Like the man in the moon when the moon beams.
If I ruled the world,
Ev'ry man would say the world was his friend,
There'd be happiness that no man could end;
No, my friend, not if I ruled the world.
Ev'ry head would be held up high,
There'd be sunshine in ev'ryone's sky,
If the day ever dawned when I ruled the world
Not only do we hear this immediately after people killed people to get Ray’s stolen van, we are inundated with scenes of misery, of humbled humans moving along the road towards the ferry, of walls of 9/11-like posters of missing people, of blood collectors saying (ironically) that they have more than enough blood except for certain types. This bit of ironic humor is immediately followed by massive human carnage as the aliens attack the ferry.
We see no humor for a significant time period again as the horror is notched up and the military is defeated in their effort to stall the alien advance, and Ray is forced choose between keeping his son or rescuing his daughter.
The next humor we encounter comes in the scenes in which Tim Robbins character appears. But this is among the darkest or most tender humor of the film. Robbins offers Ray a drink of Peach schnapps in yet another inappropriate food reference. “I know its disgusting but I’ve got a case of it.”
The Robbins character also laughs at his own unintended pun about being “dead set on staying alive.”
Even the aliens are good for a laugh when they wander into the basement accidentally knock down a bicycle in yet another reference to machines. The aliens seeking eye also gives us a laugh when it confronts its own image in a mirror.
But these scenes present us with the most moving piece of humor the film, when Ray – who does not know any of Rachel’s usual lullabies – goes into a rendition of the Beach Boy’s “Little Duce Coup.”
No one in the shows I attended laughed; many of them cried.
After the basement, the film offers no more laughs as it falls into violence, then despair and finally hope unlooked for.
War of the Worlds brings us one Spielberg’s best films in balancing humor, horror and tragedy, equal to the other great film of this sort: ET.