cruising the state of exception

Music: Gilian Welch: Soul Journey Perhaps one can file today's entry under "invention," meaning that I wanted to jot down a few unfocused notes in the hope that they may eventually coalesce into an article. I have to be either excited or bothered by an idea to pursue it, and I'm both about this latest film of Speilberg's, which I saw yesterday afternoon after dropping Michael and Ruth off for their playtime adventures in Europe. In light of Benjamin's theses in "On the Concept of History," War of the Worlds is truly a masterpiece if only because it helps to explain the uneasy relation between the rule of law and the state of exception detailed in the eighth: "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of exception' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of exception, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism." To Speilberg's credit, the function of the state/sovereign is somewhat ambiguous (if not helpless) in the film, and more than one soldier is made to appear insensitive (if not moronic). Yet no other film that I have seen in recent memory creates the desire for the State and the oxymoronic "ecstasy of belonging" than this film. Many viewers, I suspect, yearn for a strong military force to come into town to save the day. Instead, they get Tom Cruise learning how to be a father, and the drama shifts us from a global perspective to the psychological drama or micro-makings of a sovereign-as-father (the lawgiver). Perhaps no other film in recent memory lays bare the onto-theological underpinnings of the U.S. foreign policy forged by our resident Sith Lord, Richard Perle (detailed in his roadmap to Endless Evil).

What is the "real state of exception" that Benjamin talks about, and how does this conception relate to War of the Worlds? Perhaps the answer is best explained by Giorgio Agambin, an Italian philosopher that Michael Bowman has got me hooked on. Of course, most would isolate the concept to Carl Schmitt's work, principally Political Theology, in which Schmitt argues that that the sovereign is the one who gets to herald a state of exception, a moment when the law is suspended for the sake of the state or its citizenry. The so-called "Bush doctrine" of preemptive war is essentially a proclamation of exception (drafted, of course, by Perle and his ilk) brought about by real or fictional (about to arrive) atrocity. Although the argument is complex and I cannot do it justice in this space, as I understand it Schmitt argues that the sovereign is therefore paradoxically a legal entity propped by the un-legal, what used to be called the "state of nature" but now, perhaps, best described at the "state of anomy," exogenous, uncontainable violence. Its assertion is a fiction while nevertheless very real. Agamben suggests that Schmitt's theory attempts to "contain" the exogenous Real, as it were, within the legal, such that we have an essentially onto-theological conception of the sovereign. The state of exception is therefore "a space devoid of law" that appears "so essential to the legal order itself" that the normative order "makes every possible attempt to assure a relation to the former, as if the law in order to guarantee its functioning would necessarily have to entertain a relation to an anomy." Agamben argues, however, that Benjamin's observation that the state of exception "is the rule" throws Schmitt's theory out the window. What we have, instead, is a situation in which one can no longer distinguish the exception and the rule within a space of undifferentiated, desirous violence (or naked force—not necessarily deathly force). This is what War of the Worlds illustrates so well, an inability to distinguish, understand, and act upon the rule of law submersed in an exceptional state. War of the Worlds is a good film because it is complex and reflective, despite its best efforts to dumb itself down (e.g., the choice of Tom Cruise as the lead).

The "turns" in the otherwise straight corridor of the film's plot are especially telling. The story unfolds simply as a man trying to keep his children alive as they flee aliens. The moral is paternity, alternately that sometimes you must sacrifice for your children, and that you must also "let them go." The moral is that love will see them through, and that love is the ultimate protectorate. The moral is that even bad parents can become good ones, especially if aliens attack your hometown. Yet as Cruise's character gradually begins to understand the role of the sovereign and how to mete "the law of the father," as he begins to realize that the solider and the policeman are just mere others, the entire social edifice that made reality meaningful crumbles in "pure" violence. There are two key scenes: the first is when the father realizes that he must let his teenage son go, as he is powerless to resist his son's efforts to become a soldier. The second is when, having holed up with a man who has gone insane in a farmhouse cellar, the father realizes that he must kill the man to protect his daughter. In both scenes, "exceptional" deeds are done, for this is an exceptional time in which the ecstasy of belonging yields to ecstasy pure and simple. By the end of the film, of course, order is restored (the son presumed dead returns), and the father has earned his status as a sovereign. But this status, Cruise's newly realized fatherhood, is only established in relation to the state of anomy.

I recognize this is a facile reading, but what is astonishing to me is how well the current political climate is packed into War of the Worlds, and far beyond the obvious analogies to September 11, 2001. Of course, on numerous occasions characters compare the aliens to "terrorists." The superficial pedagogy of the film, that we want a strong, militaristic state to protect us from pure evil, is troublesome. And while the film ultimately collapses the answer in the saving love of the nuclear family (a hegemony to which most are prone), it also seems to underscore the force of law as the "mystical foundation of authority," an argument that Derrida proposed some years ago (and that Agamben mentions in this article). This is the true reason for the reviews of the film that describe it as Speilburg's "darkest." Perhaps in some sense we can say that War of the Worlds helps to illustrate one of Agamben's chilling conclusions:

The Western political system thus seems to be a double apparatus, founded in a dialectic between two heterogeneous and, as it were, antithetical elements; nomos and anomy, legal right and pure violence, the law and the forms of life whose articulation is to be guaranteed by the state of exception. As long as these elements remain separated, their dialectic works, but when they tend toward a reciprocal indetermination and to a fusion into a unique power with two sides, when the state of exception becomes the rule, the political system transforms into an apparatus of death.

War of the Worlds is the United States as a death machine, a mirror image of what we tell ourselves (protect our children) and what we have done to the Other now that the state of exception became the rule. Insofar as the horrible delight of watching the film is reducible to the aestheticization of the political (Joshua Tyler of cinemablend.comdescribes it as "a piece of perfectly realized, pure entertainment," which is the stupidest thing I've read about the film yet), War of the Worlds is an excellent exercise in the uncanny. I'm not saying I liked the movie, of course; it's pretty bad and, well, what I expected. But it is a useful film worth writing about; whether or not audiences realize it, it can teach us that aliens are us.