"War of the Worlds" as a Social Barometer
"Skirts are getting longer. Movies are getting darker. The country seems a bit on edge, as if it waiting for another shoe to drop, after 9/11. Stories abound of a real estate bubble. Bush's polls are much below where Reagan or Clinton were at this point, down to the abysmal levels of Nixon's second term. Support for Iraq is where it was for Vietnam in 1968 when the country turned against the war. Even that icon of the bull market, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is at such low poll numbers it is doubtful if he will run for re-election. Into this comes a very different type of Spielberg sci-fi movie. A dark one, a pessimistic one. One in which the aliens come out of the blue, from beneath the ground (from China, perhaps?). What does this say about the social mood of the US?
No where is this movies-as-a social-barometer captured better than in the history of the "War of the Worlds." The book came out in 1898, at the peak of European Civilization, and told a cautionary tale not to fall in love with all of our marvelous machines. The aliens in science fiction movies are of course not truly aliens, but metaphors for whomever are our enemies. In the case of H. G. Well's book, the enemy was us. His book presages WWI, where we turned our terrible toys on ourselves, and ripped apart society. The Orson Welles famed radio broadcast came out in 1938, as we in the US watched in horror as Europe seemed on the brink of war again. Given we were then in a terrible bear market, it was a dark and frightening treatment of the book. The aliens suddenly invading New Jersey were the Nazi's, of course, with their new weapons of war. Ironic then that this radio broadcast presaged Pearl Harbor, and the invaders turned out to come from a different direction. The first movie version of the book came out in 1953 when the US was wrapped up in an inordinate fear of communism; the aliens were the Red Scare. We had created the first super weapon, the atomic bomb; but the Russians had not only caught up, they had built even bigger ones. Could their science suddenly bring them to our shores with technical breakthroughs we could not defeat? The hero of that treatment was a scientist, and we were ever hopeful our science could keep us safe. That movie presaged Sputnik, where the Russian trumped the US and created the ICBM, which could bring these terrible weapons to our shores. The Space Race was on. It culminated with the moon landing in 1969, and brought is a great bull market movie, "2001: A Space Odyssey," where the spaceships were antiseptic and the aliens our own creations, artificial intelligent computers.
Spielberg has done science fiction before, with a paradigmatic bull market movie in 1982: "E.T.," where the alien was misunderstood, and friendly, and our government was the enemy. Now he brings us a dark and different type of "War of the Worlds." The hero is an ordinary man, divorced, self-centered, angry, and dismissive of his kids. He does not want to save the world, just his family; and he argues with his son, who wishes to join the fight. The treatment is all about his personal battle, not the larger war with the aliens. A very different approach than the 1953 movie. All of our weapons and science fail us. As a people we do not act heroically, but as a mob, or as unbalanced. In the end, one of God's creations saves humanity.
The aliens in this movie are of course terrorists, the enemy du jour. In the opening sequence, the initial alien destruction rains dust on our hero, reminding us of the vast dust which covered NYC after the collapse of the twin towers. The clothes of the dead often flutter from the sky, as we saw the paper debris drifting down after the collapse of the towers. The people fleeing the aliens put up bulletin boards looking for missing ones, as also happened in NYC after 9/11. The movie refers to events post 9/11, in particular the invasion of Iraq. References abound to continued resistance against the alien invaders despite their technical advantage - and thus by implication to the resistance the Iraqi insurgents against us. Even the son's forgotten homework assignment is topical - the failure of the French occupation in Algeria.
The aliens themselves look like the invaders in a bull market sci-fi movie, "Independence Day." Is this simply a paean to an earlier blockbuster? In that movie, the aliens are interplanetary locusts, who come and strip a planet, and move on. Perhaps there is more to this, given our war with Islamism. It was once asked of a 14th Century Muslim Philosopher, why do Muslims prefer deserts? His answer was that Muslims create deserts. Hence an allusion to locust-like aliens is somehow fitting, if not very politically correct. (But then, political correctness is a bull market phenomenon. In a bear market, ethnic humor will re-emerge, from below ground, as it were.)
But there is more to these aliens than a reflection of 9/11. They are an event or enemy yet undefined - something that is about to happen. In the movie, the aliens emerge inexplicably from underground, from where they lay in wait for millennia. Perhaps presaging another terrorist attack, but perhaps something else."