It’s about time (Part Two)
Ray as Master of the Universe
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As pointed out earlier, time reference abound in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds.
While I have goofed with film time as a speculation as to whether it holds up as a time line or was it a reflection of dream, time in several other senses plays an important structural role in the film that may not be at first obvious.
To begin with, each character has a special relationship with time that helps in character delineation. How the characters relate to time gives us a sneak peak as to their character traits.
Secondly, Spielberg uses time references as a means of connecting the scenes and drawing the characters along as a plot device.
Let’s look at time as a means of characterization.
Ray’s boss – who has “half of Korea coming in” on the next ship needs Ray who can handle 40 containers an hour pleads with Ray Ferrier to come in at 4 instead of 12 in order to unload the ship as quickly as possible. This defines the boss, but also defines Ray as someone extremely efficient when he wants to be.
Ray appears to represent the average American apparently seeks to free himself from the constraints of time. Like many working class people, he punches the clock and does his job well within the boundaries of working hours. But his time is his and he seems to covet it jealously – raising some fundamental questions about our ability own time.
Returning home a half hour late while knowing that his wife has a long drive to Boston ahead of her, Ray shows his disregard for other people’s time.
Ray appears to use time for his own selfish purposes. When his ex-wife’s questioning becomes too bothersome, he reminds her that she ought to be leaving so as to get on the road.
Ray is particularly selfish about other people’s Tim – such as when he tells his son Robbie to play baseball: “five minutes, it’s not going to kill you.” What would be in other cases a cause for bonding – spending some quality time together – becomes a means of further separation, partly because Ray is forcing his son into the situation and partly because the five minutes is far too little and much too late.
Robbie, too, has a complex relationship to time. He puts off writing his paper for school to the last possible minute, a matter his mother hopes to rectify by encouraging the boy to work on it while she is away in Boston. Robbie makes promises to have it done, but like Ray (who promises to remove the engine parts from the kitchen by next week); we know the paper will not likely get done without – as Maryann puts it – Robbie staying up all Sunday night to have it ready for Monday.
Ray’s wife, Maryann, is also concerned about time. She is worried about leaving the kids with Ray over the weekend and about Ray’s lack of punctuality.
The film gives a few clues to Ray’s daughter Rachel’s relationship to time early in the film – though she seems to be the most patient. She does her homework on time, even without the fancy electronic television recording device that will allow her to catch up on her favorite shows. She is also the one who is willing to wait for her body to reject the splinter rather than force it out.
As pointed out in a previous essay, time seems to change once Ray goes to sleep. So does each character’s relationship to time.
Ray seems to develop a mastery over time – when prior to his going to sleep, he treated time carelessly.
This mastery is a gradual process that seems to correspond to the changing landscape as the film moves from realistic to surreal. These changes might well be the result of the natural change that occurs when character traits of each are put under the intense pressure of the alien invasion.
But since I believe that the horror elements of the film are the product of Ray’s dreaming, these time relationships must then be viewed as satisfying some wish in Ray – and these segments of the film become Ray’s wishes acted out on a dreamscape in which he reverses roles from irresponsible scamp to hero.
Since I also believe the film in part represents the chronos myth which deals with a father and son relationship we can assume that Ray symbolically and psychologically plays the role of Chronos the Greek god that devours his own children in order to keep them from becoming better than he is. Thus Robbie becomes young Zeus. And Rachel most likely Gaia or mother earth.
It is important to note that we are not talking analogy – an exact scene by scene representation of the myth, but symbolic representations. Robbie and Ray eventually work through their conflict by acting it out on the dreamscape.
We can see War of the Worlds as a modern day Oedipus play cycle in which the son seeks to replace the father in the affections of his mother and that the father lives in the fear of his son rising up to overthrow him – as Chronos himself overthrew his father Heaven at the bequest of mother earth.
In the myth, mother earth saves Zeus from being eaten by feeding Chronos stones bundled like a baby. This appears to be played out in two significant scenes early in the dreamscape where Ray eats humus (i.e. human) and Rachel deals with the splinter. These scenes are followed immediately by Ray’s learning about Robbie stealing Ray’s car (the realization of his worst fears).
At this exact point, the film becomes surreal.
As he goes to seek his son, the clouds gather in the sky and bolts of lightning (symbolic of Zeus) strike the earth. Since Spielberg appears to have weaved several myths into the symbolism, you might suspect he may have given each character a particular myth from which to draw symbolic elements and to highlight various relationships between each of the characters – this is only a guess.
Time references, however, seem most closely associated with Ray – adding evidence to the theory that he represents Chronos.
Ray is constantly projecting into the future, making predictions about coming events. But time ticks on around him or fails to as when his watch stops.
In fact, the film makes as few references to the past as possible, and is constantly projecting ahead as to what will happen. A ship bringing goods from Korea is coming. Ray assures Maryann all will be well and that he is capable of taking care of the kids. But once he wakes up inside the dream sequence, these projections come again and again. Ray is constantly predicting what will happen next, allowing the audience to look ahead in time, and thus create a level of suspense and expectation that the film would lack without them.
These are the glue that connects the scenes and the engine that helps drive the movie.
“We’re going to leave this house in sixty seconds,” Ray says in one scene as he gathers the kids after returning from downtown. Then, when on the way to the van, Ray says, “We have about one minute more.”
Ray’s knowledge of future events seems uncanny. While he does not get everything right, the key pieces seem to fall into place. On his way downtown, he told Manny, the gas station mechanic to change the solenoid – one of the components of an auto engine that allows for timed upgrade of power from the motor in order to start the car. Later, Ray gambles that his prediction is right when he rushes with the kids to steal the van.
Ray pleads with the puzzled Manny to get into the van, predicting the death that comes a few moments later.
Scene by scene the plot is propelled ahead by these predictions – most of which come true after a fashion. From going to Tim’s house somewhere up the New Jersey Turnpike to predicting that Tim and Maryann continued their trip straight to Boston, we wait for the outcome to see if he is right. But as the film goes along, his predictions seem to grow more accurate, such as telling his daughter not to go out of sight and when she does, she seems bodies floating in the river.
While Robbie claims Ray can’t make “the big decision,” Ray in the dream sequence is constantly making educated guesses about the future and acting upon them, a modern day Moses leading his people to the promised land of Boston, predicting their road to salvation.
For the most part, it is other people’s predictions that fail to come true. Manny looks ahead to a busy day he never lives to see. The ferryman predicts the ferry can handle more people and will take people to safety, and neither occurs. The Tim Robbins character predicts an uprising of humans that will take the world back, then begins to dig a deeper hole when he discovers what the aliens eat.
Ray – through whose eyes this film is told -- alone seems to have a purpose, a fact that Rachael asks about during the ride, and something that the Tim Robbins character mentions: those that keep their heads survive.