It’s about time (part one)
Does anyone really know what time it is?
In Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, we see the concept of time used in several important ways.
We also find what appear to be inconsistencies in the time sequence – which may at first glance appear to be accidents – but are not.
Although there were significantly more scenes shot than actually appear in the final cut, these do not explain the distortion of time we find.
Although the film is inundated with time references, we have only a vague idea of when the film takes place and how long a time period transpires between beginning and end.
Taken literary, the time sequence of the movie seems like a jumble of contradictions. But as pointed out in an earlier essay, the most fantastic elements of the film appear to be part of a dream – as Ray points out when fleeing the house in Newark with the kids just prior to stealing the van – the dream an apparent allusion to another HG Wells novel, When the Sleeper Wakes (about a man who wakes up after two hundred years).
So taken in this view, time signatures can be trusted only up to the point where Ray goes to sleep, after which time like everything else becomes distorted – so that the film provides us with something akin to a Lost Weekend that begins with Ray’s getting off of a work and ends with his arrival in Boston.
The film opens with a time reference. Ray gets off of work. His boss asks him to come back at 4 o’clock instead of 12. But Ray refuses saying he is on a 12-hour-blow – and cites union regulations as he justification for not returning.
We do not know if this is morning or afternoon, Friday or Saturday.
And this matters if we are to follow a literal time frame from the movie’s beginning to end – but even then we find inconsistencies.
While I believe Ray gets off work Friday evening, not Saturday morning, let us assume for argument that Ray gets off work in the early morning hours of Saturday and races back to his house to meet his ex-wife and her new husband Tim, who are dropping off the kids before taking the long trip north to her parents house in Boston.
Mary Ann tells the Ray that she and her new husband will return on Sunday, at 9:30. She does not say “tomorrow” that would be more natural for someone traveling north She does not say AM or PM, but hints at the latter since she says Ray’s son Robbie had a report due on Monday which he has not yet started – and needs to work on or face an all night session when she arrives back. Tim when saying good bye to the kids confuses the Saturday time line by saying he’ll see them in several days – adding evidence that they are leaving Friday evening not Saturday.
Yet following a literal time line from beginning to end of the film, Tim and Mary Ann have to leave on Saturday morning to return on Sunday morning at 9:30, not in the evening.
Taking the time line literally, Ray after a brief attempt to play ball with his kids and telling his daughter to order food, goes to sleep. He goes to sleep while it is daylight and wakes up while it is still daylight, suggesting he went to sleep in the morning and woke up in the afternoon to find that his daughter has ordered health food, his son has stolen his car and invaders have come from god knows where to destroy all human kind.
Ray’s watch has stopped at 6:25 after the lightning strikes.
Setting aside any other issues of time, we follow Ray as he steals the van and flees, arriving after dark at Tim’s house.
At this point, he tells the kids that Mary Ann and Tim will be back in the morning. Since Mary Ann said earlier they would be back on Sunday at 9:30, we assume Ray and the kids arrived at Tim’s house on Saturday night, wake up to a jet crashing through the neighborhood. Now fully daylight, they make their way north by back roads which would allow them to arrive at nightfall at the Athens crossing on Sunday night. Following time after this gets tricky, since it already has a dream-like quality, but assuming the minimum, Ray and Robbie separate, leaving Ray and Rachel to spend one or more nights in the basement of the farm house with Ogilvy the ambulance driver. If they spend only one night there, they wake up to find the world on Monday morning turned into redweed, fight the aliens and make their way on foot to Boston – a chore that would have taken more than one day or so to accomplish and arrives in the morning hours on some unspecified day later in the week.
While you can generate a time line throughout the film, the inconsistencies tend to get in the way, and implies that Steven Spielberg and his staff got sloppy. Spielberg may be a lot of things, but he rarely careless.
Time references so fill the text and visuals of this film, it is perilous to discount them. But their meaning may reach far beyond the literal, and since his film Minority Report shows Spielberg’s willingness to incorporate other references from Philip K. Dick, we can assume that he did as much in bringing other works of H.G. Wells into this film as well.
I suspect time ceased having a literal meaning the moment Ray closed his eyes in his bed at home and that we do not see literal reality until he and Rachel walk up the street in Boston at the film’s end – and perhaps not even then.
While not nearly as paranoid as Philip K. Dike, Wells explored many similar themes as Dick in investigating what was then contemporary culture – including the concept of dreamscapes and other concepts that put him at odds with the machine-loving Futurists out of which the Nazis drew some of their aesthetics.
Closely aligned to dream was Wells' investigation of time as evidenced in his first book, The Time Machine. In his adaptation, Spielberg appears to play wit6h both Time and dream in a curious way and surreal way.
The surrealists, which represented another school of art that royally pissed off Adolph Hitler – delved into the distorted reality of the unconscious where time and image had alternative meanings an rarely could be taken literally, but frequently represented human kinds most beastly desires.
As suggested in one of my previous essays, most of War of the Worlds is actually a dream sequence that picks up from the point where Ray goes to sleep. Time along with everything else begin to stretch out and distort in curious but psychologically meaningful ways. The concept of night and day, passing hours, and future and past become tangled and condensed, so that Ray appears to live out the hour that in real time takes as long as a week, in the space of one night’s dreaming.
Most likely Time ceased to mean the same thing once Ray went to sleep, adopting its own relevance in the dream world. While time references can be trusted before he sleeps, they begin to distort the moment he wakes up.
But just as the dream sequence appears to be working out social aspects raised in the realistic waking portion in the film, time issues seem to be undergoing a similar fate. Time seems to play a role in several of the initial conflicts, as to when Ray will return to work, what time he is due back at the house to take charge of his kids, and how long he spends engaged with his kids.
Ray seems to want to bend time to his own convenience, such as refusing to come back early when he boss needs him, or coming back late leaving his ex-wife waiting an extra hour. Even his attempt to communicate with his kid seems at Ray’s convenience when he tells his son five minutes of ball won’t kill him.
Although many of the time issues in the dream sequence serve a more functional purpose – such as foreshadowing events to come – some seem part of the psychological war inside Ray’s head. He gets things wrong. The lightning does strike twice – in fact 26 times (how many letters are there in the English alphabet?) – in the same place, he confuses what time Mary Ann and Tim are due to return from Boston. Time grows less and less relevant as the film becomes more and more surreal.
While there is plenty of room for disagreement on these points, the structure of the film appears to resemble one very long journey into night, beginning with evening, traveling through the dark spaces of nightmare, to end on the hopeful note of a bright morning in Boston and reunion.
Time references also play an important role in pulling together the fabric of the story, but that’s a whole different essay.