back to war
Music: Piano Magic: Writers Without Homes (1998)
After a depressing bout of bill paying, I'm back into essay writing. Today my War of the Worlds essay is back in front, and my thoughts about how to arrange it have changed. Originally, I was going to have a long, theory-heavy section on Agamben on sovereignty, then show how the film pretty much lays it out. Now, the argument has shifted from a description to explanation: the feelings the film evokes explain how people get caught up in fascism. Or something like that that.
To this end I'll try to do a theory then film then theory approach, instead of the more chopped up approach. And Freud on group psychology will replace Agamben as my main man. Sorry Giorgio: you don't have an explanatory mechanism for me; you just show me the horror of the what, not the why or how. Freud's explanation of Hitler gets to the libidinal gravity of it all, so that's where I'm going to take us. Here's my re-written beginning. I worry it's too Mickey Mouse, as my mom would say, but it's just a draft:
In this essay I argue that the "vast political implications" of Spielberg's War of the Worlds concerns the concept of sovereignty and its relation to what is termed the "state of nature" in political philosophy. More specifically, I argue that the civil pedagogy of War of the Worlds is, in fact, that father knows best, but only insofar as the father is understood as the absent patriarchical sovereign—the strong, seemingly omnipotent political figure that fails to appear within the filmic frame. If films can be read as the collective dreaming of a people, then War of the Worlds is a nightmare registering the fears and longings of a public besieged by "terrorists" less than six years ago. Interpreting this "dream" from the vantage of ideology critique requires, however, that we regard the surface of the film as a puzzle that obscures its latent, ideological content. On the surface, it is clear that Spielberg intends an obvious lesson in paternal responsibility: War of the Worlds is about a father's attempts to shepherd his children to safety, rising to the challenge of fatherhood and realizing the importance of family, even if a given family is a "broken" one. Yet, because of the subtextual references to 9/11, I argue that War of the Worlds functions as a rhetorical inducement to yield to the figure of a strong leader or "sovereign" by deliberately creating feelings of helplessness and desperation. In this respect, I suggest that the father character played by Tom Cruise is synecdoche for an absent sovereign with the power to assert exceptions in times of crisis. Because of the overwhelming sense of dread created by the films pacing and special effects, War of the Worlds unwittingly teaches us how people become susceptible to dictatorship.
The Filmic Rhetoric of Exceptional States
If it's not love, then it's the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb that will bring us together.
---The Smiths, "Ask"
Disaster movies are . . . not so much about clinging onto dear life as making your way, out of the rubble, toward life with renewed perspective.
---Stephen Keane
Although War of the Worlds---along with The Blob, Invaders from Mars, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers---is party to the "alien invasion" genre of American filmmaking, the basic plot of Spielberg's yarn is not so much about aliens as it is the behavior of people when they are reduced to what political philosophers term the "state of nature." In the Western intellectual tradition, the state of nature refers to the mode of human existence in the absence of government, police, or the state. U.S. moviegoers are probably most familiar with this scenario in so-called disaster films: after some natural calamity, crash, or invasion, or in light of some impending catastrophe, a given community is forced to confront the absence of the State and to "get along" for survival. In the filmic versions of William Golding's Lord of the Flies, for example, a plane full of young schoolboys crashes on a tropical island and the children are forced to develop a system of government that, eventually, breaks down into two rival groups (one "savage" and the other, presumably, "civilized"). Analogously, survivors in the turned-upside down luxury liner in The Poseidon Adventure must band together under the leadership of a priest in order to escape their deaths. Whether the emphasis is on being stranded, lost, or trapped, disaster films usually concern what people do to protect themselves and each other when reduced to a basic human minimum: without the symbolic privileges of class, race, gender, and other socially significant markers, what do people do? Traditionally, social and political philosophers have answered that in the state of nature, humans pick or follow a leader, which is why the concepts of sovereignty and the state of nature tend to be inextricably wed. Indeed, the concept of sovereignty descends from assumptions concerning how human beings would "naturally" behave in the absence of governance or the "state of nature." If human nature was described as essentially other-oriented, empathetic, and "good," then a thinker tended to argue in favor of republicanism and limited sovereignty. If, however, human nature was described as essentially self-serving and narcissistic, then a thinker tended to argue in favor of strong or absolute sovereignty.
Perhaps among the most famous arguments made in favor an absolute sovereign were penned by Thomas Hobbes in 1660, who wrote in The Leviathan that in the state of nature humans would behave as if at war:
In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Hobbes argued that there are five fundamental "forces" of nature exemplified by humans most blatantly in war: egoism, competitiveness, distrust, and glory and power seeking. Only an absolute sovereign willed collectively by the people, he argued, could maintain justice and keep the peace. U.S. moviegoers are probably more familiar with Hobbes views on government than one would initially expect, insofar as Hollywood survival and disaster films frequently echo a Hobbesian pessimism. For example, in the Poseiden Adventure and Lord of the Flies, despite the fact that there is someone capable of nobility, most survivors are egoistic and distrustful and must be forced to obey a leader or suffer the perils of war.
In the century after Hobbes, however, Jean-Jacques Rousseau would base his social contract theory on the opposite view of human essence: human beings in the state of nature are noble savages, "born free" and inherently good but perverted by society. Such perversion results from the scarcity of resources that are a consequence of increasing populations, and to escape a progressively degenerate and deadly state of nature people must contract with one another to subsist under the rule of morality or law. For Rousseau, passage "from the state of nature to the civil state" occurs when a people recognizes itself as the "body politic" or capital-S "Sovereign," which he likened to a rather large family. This comparison was obvious to Rousseau, who said the family was "the first model of political societies: the ruler corresponds to the father, and the people to the children . . . ." For Rousseau, the Sovereign is the people, and government fulfills the father function.
Although Rousseau's more paternalistic and optimistic understanding of human nature is not as popular in Hollywood film, examples are not difficult to find. In Disney's Swiss Family Robinson, for example, a shipwrecked family lives largely harmoniously (despite a coconut cannon ball barrage from a group of naughty pirates) on a desolate island because of the stability of the nuclear family structure. In Deep Impact, an asteroid hurls toward earth threatening the survival of the planet, but the wise, African American president played by Morgan Freeman brings the polis together by announcing a plan to blow up the asteroid before it hits earth. Instead of reducing people to a state of competitive distrust, the film's characters band-together in maudlin displays of harmony in the face of imminent doom. Similarly, attacked by malevolent aliens from outer space, the world community bands together to fight the menace under the sovereign leadership of the United States air force in Independence Day.
Like most disaster films, Spielberg's War of the Worlds re-stages the question of sovereignty by establishing its scene of action as the "state of nature," but unlike its more simplistic siblings, the film is much more difficult to align on the side of an essential good or bad human nature. The film opens . . . .