War of the Worlds
A Review by John David Ebert

In 1898, H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds featured the first ever description of an attack on the megalopolis by monstrous beings from another world. This is, of course, another way of saying “an attack by monsters from the realm of ancient myth,” since the Martians of Wells’s novel were really transformed beings out of classic myth and legend disguised by the language of modern science fiction. In the Medieval romances, towns, villages and castles used to be attacked by dragons and giants, but in the transformation of our picture of the cosmos by the end of the nineteenth century, the various continents and dark corners of the earth had been thoroughly explored, while the hinterlands once demarcated on ancient maps with the phrase “Here Be Dragons!” had been relegated to the icy remotenesses of outer space. Monsters, dragons and demons have vanished from the realm of plausible science, but they have resurfaced in the form of our science fiction narratives where they are pictured as invaders from the heavens.

In Wells’s novel, the aliens were shot from Mars by cannons and landed on the earth in huge, smoking cylinders from which they emerged to construct their giant mechanical conveyances: three-legged machines which Wells’s narrator called “tripods” that went stalking about the countryside vaporizing everything in their paths with “heat rays.” That tripods were once an ancient symbol associated with divination is an association that probably did not occur consciously to Wells, but in fact, the Delphic oracle normally sat upon a tripod that was perched near the edge of an abyss from out of which vapors emerged which the oracle inhaled, thereby deriving the power to enter a trance state and prophesy strange utterances. In Wells’s novel, the abyss has become the craters made by the impact of the cylinders, and the Pythia’s tripod has resurfaced in the form of huge mechanical giants that emerge from those abysses in order to do battle with civilization.

In Steven Spielberg’s updating of War of the Worlds, the derivation of the aliens from ancient myth becomes even more clear, for in this version, the huge mechanical tripods have already been buried in the earth, where they have lain dormant like sleeping gods out of an H.P. Lovecraft story, awaiting the day of their awakening by huge bolts of lighting, down which the aliens descend in order to enter into these machines. Thus, the machines are animated by heavenly powers which, as it were, inseminate the earth, which then gives birth to them like the Titans out of Hesiod’s Theogony, who are also born from out of the earth. When the sky god Ouranos mated with Gaia—in Wells’s narrative, the father of the aliens would have been Mars–she gave birth not only to the Titans, but also to the Cyclopes and the Hundred-Handed Ones, which emerged from the ground—i.e. her body—to become warriors who would fight the Titans. The Cyclops were supposed to have manufactured the thunderbolts which enabled Zeus to fight against the Titans, while the Hundred-Handed Ones became his official police force. We note that in Spielberg’s film, the giant walking tripods have a huge single eye which functions as a central lamp, while scores of tentacles dangle down to sweep the ground for humans.

In the film’s opening sequence, a terrifying thunderstorm announces the approach of the aliens, and indeed, as Vico in his New Science pointed out, the experience of terror before the thunderclap was one of humanity’s earliest experiences of the wrath of the gods. And that the aliens are really a disguised form of the progeny of the gods, angry with modern humanity’s hubris and impiety in denying their existence, is confirmed for us by the aforesaid tripod symbolism: tripods are the vehicles–that is, the mouthpieces –which the spirits of the abyss used to make their will known through the voice of the oracle. And in War of the Worlds, the cities of man are assaulted by an army of tripods because it is the very realm of the gods—all roads of communication with which are blocked by contemporary humanity—that modern megalopolitan man thinks he has dismissed and rid himself of without further ado.

But in the mythological law of lex talionis, the larger and more defiant are the creations of humanity, the greater and more monstrous will be the opposing forces that it will attract. The sinking of the Titanic is a classic instance of this, for the gods will not tolerate “unsinkable” anythings. Modern man thinks he has done away with the gods, but in this very denial lies his undoing, for it automatically evokes their wrath and brings down a rain of fire upon his head. The gods will not be denied their due and will take it one way or another.

On the other hand, Wells’s novel as a work of art is a complex metaphor that cannot just be boiled down to one system of interpretation and done away with, for it is significant also that the form the gods have taken is of giant walking machines. In Wells’s novel, the giant tripods which go stomping around London are strikingly contrasted with the largely rural setting of the novel: the aliens land, not in the midst of the city, but in the farmlands, from which they work their way in towards the center of the city. The characters of the novel are depicted as fleeing in carriages and other such horse-drawn conveyances, while the military are mostly horse-mounted cavalry, vestiges that is, from the agrarian world of ancient man. But it was precisely during the nineteenth century that mechanization took command of civilization, displacing the agrarian world through an artificial environment produced by factory standardization. With the coming of mass production, the hand slowly lost touch with its products, and was replaced by machines that did the work for it. The industrially produced articles, by contrast to their hand-crafted predecessors, were shoddy and inferior pieces of garbage, at first regarded as trendy and fun, but then later derided by the likes of John Ruskin and William Morris. This steady assault upon culture by the machine continued throughout the nineteenth century, and indeed, Wells’s image of giant mechanical monsters destroying agrarian England, and then London itself—one of the great old capitals of European culture—is a wonderful metaphor of exactly what industrialization was doing to culture. So, Wells’s novel was a synopsis of the conflict between industrialization and the old agrarian world with its careful, patient regard for handmade products of culture.

In Orson Welles’s radio play, broadcast in 1938, the power of the new medium of radio to collectivize millions through fear and hysteria was demonstrated, for radio would be used in precisely this manner during World War II by both Hitler and Roosevelt: the former with his screaming cataracts of hatred pouring through the ether to galvanize the German tribal masses, while Roosevelt’s pleasant and quiet “fireside chats” broadcast via the radio did the same thing on the side of the Allies. In Orson Welles’s broadcast, the medium truly was the message.

In George Pal’s 1953 celluloid version of War of the Worlds, the new invasive technological environment was just then being created by the advent of television, and so in Pal’s version we are not surprised to find that Wells’s tripods are done away with in favor of alien ships that resemble floating television sets: the deathray that shoots out radiation becomes a metaphor of the cathode ray tube which bathes its watchers in streams of electrons. The eerie greenish glow of the alien ships in this version invites a comparison to the blue glow that fills modern living rooms at night.

In M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs—a reworking of War of the Worlds—the aliens descend from the heavens in armies of nearly invisible spacecraft which never land, but only hover. The protagonists, like those of the original Wells novel, are farmers whose children detect the presence of these aliens through holding transmitters up to the sky, whereby they pick up the aliens’ eerie white noise. Shyamalan’s version may have been about the 1990s invasion of our society by cell phones and satellites, a form of technology in which the user’s head is “attacked” from above by invisible fields of low frequency radiation beamed by satellites. And just as cell phones are destroyed the moment they come in contact with water, so too, are the aliens.

Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds is a hugely entertaining film in which the aliens are depicted as they were in Wells’s novel as replacing the human made environment with one made entirely by machines. Mechanization has indeed taken command, Spielberg seems to be saying, for the aliens drain human blood to feed their ruby red plants which they are attempting to weave like a rug all over the world, replacing the earth’s natural vegetation. In reality, this metaphor of the human attempt to hijack the biosphere is rejected by the earth’s immune system—composed out of its bacteria—which then attack this invading mechanical virus with its own antibodies which, as in Wells’s novel, save humanity just before it is wiped out. Spielberg’s version has returned back to the original sense of Wells’s novel, since it is still relevant: not just this or that mechanical contrivance is the problem, but the entire technosphere with which humanity is attempting to wrap like a metallic cocoon around the earth, thereby transforming it into the world’s first work of global art. Gaia, the earth, will not allow herself to be cocooned by machines, and so she rejects the invasion with her own immune system.

Artists are the distant early warning systems of a society: the reason these narratives become metaphoric of invasive technologies is because artists are subliminally sensitive to changes in the environment of a society like the two-headed or three-legged frogs that are born whenever an ecosystem goes out of balance, since frogs are particularly sensitive to such environmental changes. Artists are able to make visible for us what is normally invisible: new environments that are created as side effects of new technologies which the conscious mind is usually unaware of, but which the body’s “mind” with its subliminal form of perception, isn’t. Ask any of these artists what their “narratives” are about and they will normally give forth contrived, superficial or artificial explanations that do not ring true, for the artist is normally the person who is least conscious of what his “narratives” are about. He or she is more like a receiver set transmitting images and messages from another Intelligence which is like the mind that spoke through the Delphic oracle in cryptic utterances the meaning of which were not actually known to the oracle but had to be transcribed by “translators” in poetic form to be read to the oracle’s questioners.

So, from one of point of view, War of the Worlds is about the invasion of our cities by ancient beings out of mythology, sent by the gods to dismantle our prideful constructions. But from another point of view, these god-like beings incarnate themselves in the form of whatever technology seems most threatening to the human psyche at the time the story is constructed. So the narrative is complex and polysemantic, as all myths truly are. Steven Spielberg’s film is a masterly handling of Wells’s narrative, and its thematic material — contrary to the superficial readings that are normally given this narrative by the critics who insist that it is always literally about war — is quite rich in mythological imagery. While this is not one of Spielberg’s best films — its action sequences are curiously short and are few and far between, while much of the narrative is preoccupied with secondary character sketches of only peripheral interest to the main line of the story — it is thoroughly entertaining and will not disappoint. His alien ships are truly frightening, as they were intended to be in the original Wells narrative, and some of his imagery is arrestingly sublime. The opening sequence, in which the first alien ship emerges from beneath the concrete in the middle of a New Jersey suburb, does tend to suggest post traumatic 9/11 processing, but the aliens are far more frightening than any mere terrorist attack. Spielberg puts the viewer on the ground in the middle of Sodom and Gomorrah just as the divine wrath gathers in the heavens above and prepares to wipe it out of existence. It is not an experience that he will easily forget.