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TwitThisDark, Ominous, and Very Loud
Our monsters tell us a lot about ourselves. We dream them up for books, TV and movies, saying they're just entertainment, quickie thrills. The most memorable monsters are much more, though -- they embody our personal nightmares, public fears, and national anxieties. In the '50s, when knowing the way to the nearest fallout shelter was as important as knowing your way home, atomic mutants like Godzilla fit our collective uneasiness. The relentless pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers scared moviegoers, but they were also the alter egos for our Cold War enemies.If monsters and their meaning fascinate you -- or if you just like being really scared -- get ready for a lesson from the master. On June 29, director Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds, starring Tom Cruise, opens in theaters nationwide. When Orson Welles broadcast his realistic adaptation of War of the Worlds from a New York radio station in 1938, it became the story that shocked America. Hundreds of East Coast residents fled their homes. Back then, Americans recognized the invaders as stand-ins for the Nazis. In Spielberg's hands, the classic invaders-from-space story, based on H. G. Wells's 1898 novel, will no doubt make millions think about crawling under their Cineplex seats to hide from terrorists.
Cruise plays a deadbeat dad whose daughter arrives for a weekend visit, when what looks like the end of the world begins -- dark, ominous and very loud. In earlier films like E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Spielberg's aliens were benign, even cuddly, and they ultimately inspired optimism, not fear. Times have changed. In this film, it's hard to see the destruction and initial despair the invaders cause, and not think: 9/11. Of course, his aliens are fantasy, but Spielberg says the threat they represent is all too real: "They are a wake-up call to face our fears as we confront a force intent on destroying our way of life."
There's that theme again: monster as metaphor. In his groundbreaking novel, H. G. Wells channeled British worries about the still-new theory of Darwinism (Does "the survival of the fittest" mean us?) and growing German militarism (Or does it mean the Huns?). Myth and real events also merged in space-invaders blockbusters like Star Wars and Alien, Independence Day and Signs.
We keep revisiting the space invaders theme, even though we haven't found anything out there -- certainly not on Mars. When the NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity touched down last year, the Red Planet began giving up her secrets, but so far the mission has found nothing even remotely alive. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium, says, "It would be inexcusably egocentric to suggest that we are alone" in the universe. But after thousands of years of searching, there's no proof there's intelligent life anywhere but Earth.
Maybe we keep looking because we're fascinated by the idea that someone's watching. The notion of an alien encounter, even the fictional kind, "allows us to measure ourselves against forces that we may not understand," says George Slusser, a professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Riverside, and curator of the J. Lloyd Eaton Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Utopian Literature. "It tells us what we are, what we might be, what we shouldn't be" -- in Spielberg's version, merciless creatures with high-tech weaponry and ice-cold souls.
Three years ago, Spielberg and Cruise were putting the finishing touches on Minority Report, their thriller about life and crime in 2054. They looked at projects for a second collaboration, and picked War of the Worlds. Spielberg loves to wrestle artistically with the good vs. evil theme, so it was probably only a matter of time until he got around to the big evil of terrorism. It's fertile ground for storytelling, says Slusser. "We got hit on 9/11, and suddenly the alien is in our midst. The average person doesn't understand why anyone would want to do this to us. America was this kind of fortress -- we couldn't imagine anyone invading. And then, boom!"
And after the boom? It's back to the question of what the monsters tell us about us. America, 2005, has formidable weapons and technology we can deploy to protect the country from terrorists. But it's not just buildings and borders we need to safeguard; it's our humanity too. In Wells's novel, Martian death rays and war machines lay waste to civilization -- but the bad guys get wiped out by a virus to which humans are immune. Their traits as people give the Earthlings the strength and resilience their enemies lack.
That's the real theme of Spielberg's War of the Worlds: When all hell breaks loose, Cruise's character, Ray Ferrier, overcomes his shortcomings as a dad and a human being. He's one man, struggling against evil for the sake of his family. It's not an entirely happy ending -- the title is War of the Worlds, after all. But don't discount the hidden strength Ferrier has inside -- the strength of his humanity.
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