what is a father?
Music: Harold Budd: The White Arcades
I managed (finally) to get back to writing and have had a couple of productive days. If things move along as I hope, I should have a draft of this puppy by the end of the month; my goal is to finish up and ship out before I begin composing my responses to NCA panels.
Back on the docket is my never-ending, years-long attempt to write about Spielberg's War of the Worlds remake. I was telling "b" that I needed to finish it because the film is getting too old, and I wanted it to come out before the 2008 election. Not that I think this essay will have any impact whatsoever on politics; the reason is simply that Bushie II is a fascist and, because fascism is traumatic, once he is replaced people may forget (or repress) what it felt like to have him as "our leader."
Ok, so, I'll paste in what I have thus far, starting from the beginning because I've re-arranged the essay significantly. I think it flows better the way I have it now. Also, this is the first time I have written an essay like this. Instead of doing the "introduction, theoretical thing-a-ma-bob (TAMB), apply TAMB to text, conclusion" structure typical of NCA-style rhetorical studies, I'm referencing the film as I go. My hope is that this approach will inspire readers to actually want to go and see the film (again) to see if I'm right. That is, I'm trying to cultivate a curious reader. We'll see if it works.
Oh, and one more thing: where to send this? I've got manuscripts in review at all the national rhetoric outlets except RSQ, but I expect to have a revised rejected thing to them in a month. Where to send? I may just sit on this until my thing in review at QJS is rejected (say, by December 1).
Staging the Sovereign in Spielberg's War of the Worlds
Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.
--Psalms 8:2
After learning that Manhattan has been besieged by large, Tripod-driving invaders from another world, Ray Ferrier, a single divorcee and presumably a rotten father, loads his two visiting children into a stolen mini-van and races toward Boston to escape life-zapping heat rays. As the final draft of the shooting script of Stephen Spielberg's War of the Worlds details, approximately 31 minutes into the film the not-so-subtle subtext comes out of the mouth of a babe:
. . . the kids begin SCREAMING, but it's hard to hear over the racing engine, the SCREECHING tires. Ray leans forward, trying like hell to see through the windshield, through the smoke that's now blanketing the block. THROUGH THE WINDSHEILD, we see he's reaching the end of the block, which is a T intersection. Directly ahead of him is a bank of row houses. As we [the spectators] look at them-their second floors burst into flames . . . . BACK IN THE CAR, Ray cuts the wheel to the left. Robbie turns and looks out the back window, gets just a glimpse of the top of the Tripod as it rises up over the rooftops behind them. ROBBIE [the teenage son played by Justin Chatwin]: WHAT IS IT? RACHEL [the eleven-year-old daughter played by Dakota Fanning]: "Is it the terrorists?!"[1]
The decision to explicitly reference the events of September 11, 2001 was Spielberg's. Because the film opens with scenes of Manhattan, because the inaugural violence of filmic action takes place in Newark, and because the characters of the film explicitly reference Nine-eleven, Spielberg's remake of (the) War of the Worlds is unquestionably positioned as a commentary on the most traumatic event of our time.[2]
In an interview with one of the two script writers, David Koepp justifies the references to Nine-eleven by underscoring the ubiquity of invasion themes in Western culture. All iterations of the H.G. Well's story, Koepp explains, have "vast political implications": "In the late 1890s, it was about British imperialism; in the late 1930s, it was about the fear of Fascism; in the early 1950s, it was the Commies are coming to get us . . . ." Because spectators and critics would inevitably yoke the destruction of the film to the destruction of the World Trade Center, suggests Koepp, "we just decided not to censor ourselves, because that's not realistic, that's not the world we live in." He continues:
As for specific 9/11 references-like Dakota's character [Rachel] saying, "Is it the terrorists?" or when Tom [Cruise] is covered in ash-those weren't put in because of 9/11; they were put in because we all lived through 9/11. . . . In the first draft Dakota didn't have that line, but Steven said, "Wouldn't she think it's the terrorists?" And I said, "Well, yeah, but do we really want to evoke that, do we want to come out and say it?" And he said, "But she would, she's 11." And it's true, she would. So she did.[3]
Spielberg's insistence that an innocent yet precocious child explicitly establish the relation between that bloodthirsty, exogenous evil from beyond and the staple enemy of our current contemporary, political discourse confounds the often printed sentiment that War of the Worlds is a "piece of perfectly realized, pure entertainment."[4] The evocation of theodicy or the problem of evil (e.g., how can someone or something kill an "innocent" human being?) is a political gesture that extends beyond the screen. As Barbara Biesecker has persuasively argued of Saving Private Ryan, for Spielberg this gesture bespeaks a nostalgic reclamation and resignification of World War II in contemporary discourse, a trend continued by the deliberate if awkwardly anachronistic, 1950s aesthetic of War of the Worlds.[5] Biesecker argues that Spielberg's spectacles over the past decade have buttressed a well-worn "American" identity, forwarding a patriarchical, civil pedagogy of complacency as the answer to the anomie and chaos signified by "meticulously chronicled mass slaughter."[6] Insofar as the "civic lesson" intoned by Saving Private Ryan assists in the "reconsolidation and naturalization of traditional logics . . . of privilege," we should expect a similar, violence-then-teaching pattern in War of the Worlds.[7] In Spielberg's films, the event of filmic violence usually heralds a tutorial in civic virtue.
In this essay I advance an ideological critique of War of the Worlds by arguing that the "vast political implications" of Spielberg's film concern the concept of sovereignty and its relation to what political philosophers term the "state of nature." More specifically, I argue that the civil pedagogy of War of the Worlds is 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 of a public besieged by "terrorists" less than six years ago.8 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 parent's attempts to shepherd his children to safety, rising to the challenge of fatherhood and realizing the importance of family, even a "broken" one. Because of the subtextual references to Nine-eleven, however, I argue that War of the Worlds actually 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 argue 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 film's pacing and special effects, War of the Worlds unwittingly teaches us how to love a dictator.
Staging States of Nature
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"[9]
Along with The Blob, Invaders from Mars, and the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, War of the Worlds is part of the "alien invasion" genre of American filmmaking. The basic plot of Spielberg's film, however, 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.[10] U.S. moviegoers are probably more familiar with this scenario in so-called disaster films: after some natural calamity, crash, or invasion, a given community is reduced to a "state of nature," forced to confront the absence of the State and to get along for their mutual survival.[11] 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 marks of entitlement or protection, what do humans do?
Traditionally, both Hollywood filmmakers and political philosophers have answered that in the state of nature humans tend to pick or follow a leader, which is why the concepts of sovereignty and the state of nature are inextricably wed. Indeed, the concept of sovereignty descends from assumptions concerning how human beings would "naturally" behave in the absence of governance. 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.[12]
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, in one way or another, a kind of Hobbesian pessimism. For example, in both 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.[13]
In the century after Hobbes, however, Jean-Jacques Rousseau based 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 . . . ."[14] 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 (a message particularly to Disney films in general). 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.
Like most disaster films, Spielberg's War of the Worlds re-stages the scene of sovereignty as the "state of nature," albeit in a manner that slowly builds into a gruesome massacre. Many critics have noted that film stands from other disaster films because the intensity of the film's violence is realistic and unrelenting for most of the film. War of the Worlds is also unique because of ingeniously indirect way in which it builds toward the yearning for a powerful, protective leader though the repeat failures of the State to protect the polis; by the end of the film the best protectorate humanity has developed is the family, not government. The film opens as Ray Ferrier returns home from his work at a Newark dock as a crane operator to receive his two children, Rachel and Robbie, from his ex-wife Mary Anne, who is en route to Boston to visit with her parents. After the children are taken in and the mother leaves, a massive, swirling storm cloud forms in the sky behind the row house where Ray lives. Intermittent shots of television news reveals that mysterious storm clouds have been forming worldwide; lightening from these clouds has been disabling electronic machinery and causing massive power outages. After a series of lighting bolts repeatedly strikes the ground in a downtown intersection, all machinery, including battery powered wristwatches and clocks, stops working. Ray leaves his children and heads downtown to investigate. Cars and trucks litter the road as stunned people walk toward a crater that has formed where the lightening struck.
That this scene is a prelude to the state of nature is signaled by the prominence of policemen in the script, whose impotence and gradual disappearance from the screen represent the failure of State power and the arrival of a state of nature:
There are maybe a HUNDRED PEOPLE there looking at [the crater], most huddled in small groups, comparing stories. Nobody seems to have been hurt, and their initial fear is starting to ease. There are half a dozen COPS, but without cars or radios, they're reduced to old-fashioned crowd control, which is not much.15
In the film the imminent helplessness of the police is foreshadowed by the unheeded dialogue of their commands and orders. As people more toward the crater a policeman is heard to say, "let us through, let us through here," and at the crater scene a stunned cop looks to the sky and then back to the crater: "I've never seen anything like this before. That many strikes of lightening in one spot?" A shot of the confused look on the face of the policeman is then framed with increasingly demanding orders from off-screen officers: "Back up people! . . . Move back!" Two policemen stand at the center of the screen, immediately in front of the crater, with bemused faces, debating whether the rumbling under their feet is a broken water main or subway car. This dialog is important because no one on screen leaves the scene of the crater despite the repeated demands of the police: Even before the violence begins, the State is helpless to control the curiosity of the masses. People do begin to respond, however, to the quickly radiating cracks coming from the crater. As the street begins to split, causing building foundations to crumble and windows to shatter, a gray-haired policemen with a moustache screams a superfluous command, "Move! Everyone clear the intersection! Get out of the way!"
The crowd disperses, running in all directions away from the widening crater. A prominent church facing the intersection splits into two pieces, its steeple crashing to the street, a visual reinforcement of the symbolic castration of traditional authority. By the time a large, tripod ship emerges from the crater, the previously pronounced policemen are "reduced" to the shot of a single, slack-jawed, uniformed figure on the periphery of a group of awed onlookers. By the time the tripod ship begins firing weapons that vaporize fleeing "victims," the police are conspicuously absent, shot after shot. Over the course of ten minutes the police are first rendered impotent and then completely absented from the screen.
Representatives of State power do not return to the screen until a half hour later when the military appears. In the thirty minutes between the disappearance of the police and the arrival of the military, the film establishes a Hobbsian vision of the state of nature in a manner that deliberately recalls scenes of New York after the attacks on September 11, 2001. For example, as seemingly hundreds of people flee the heat-ray weapons of the attacking tripod, the camera tracks Cruise as he runs through an urban setting, weaving among abandoned cars as person after person is vaporized and their clothes float to the ground. Approximately three minutes after the Tripod emerges from the crater, there is an abrupt, close-up shot of the face of a middle-aged woman with blonde hair and a multi-colored scarf around her neck. The electrified sound of the heat-ray is heard, and gradually but quickly the woman's face turns to a cloudy gray mass that seems to be caving into her mouth. As the woman's face and body disappear into a thick, gray smoke, Cruise's character literally runs though her ashen remains. Covered in gray dust, he races home to his children:
BANG! Ray, covered in ash, SLAMS through the front door and staggers into the kitchen. He gets there and turns in a half circle, traumatized . . . . Robbie and Rachel are visible though the open back door, staring over the tree line at the mayhem in the distance. They hear him and come into the house.
ROBBIE: What happened?
He doesn't answer.
RACHEL: Are you okay?
Still no answer.
RACHEL: Dad, what's the matter?
ROBBIE: What's that stuff all over you?
Ray gets up and turns to the sink, catches sight of himself in a mirror hanging there. His face is covered in gray ash.[16]
Unlike the shooting script, in the film the children watch Ray enter the home and sit on the floor in a trance. Rachel asks demandingly after Robbie, "what's all this stuff?" while nudging her father. Startled, Ray moves abruptly and conspicuous wafts of ash float into the air. Recalling the much discussed ash that rained from the felled twin towers on Nine-eleven, the ashen remains of a former human being serves as ghastly signifier of death, betokening a state in which life for many people has become "nasty, brutish, and short."
Until the very end of the film, scene after scene reminds the viewer of the inability of State power to stop the violence and establish a sense of order and protection, which parallels Ray's struggle to protect his own family. For example, during the inaugural extermination in the city, Ray discovers the only working vehicle and attempts to speed his children away to safety. After driving many miles away from the city, they stop in a rural area so that Rachel can use the bathroom. In a scene that recalls James Whale's chilling depiction of Frankenstein's monster drowning a young girl, Rachel makes her way past a grove of trees to the side of a river, where she is terrified by seeing dozens upon dozens of dead bodies floating downstream. Ray startles her from behind by covering her eyes as she screams, carrying her back toward the road where a caravan of military trucks with armed soldiers is racing by. Robbie runs after the trucks, screaming that he wants to go with them and, after they pass, gets into an argument with Ray about his ability to parent, accusing him of trying to abandon them again. Rachel, upset that Robbie considered leaving, screams "whose gonna take care of me if you go?" The hideous mass of floating corpses, followed by scenes of military might and then an argument about fatherhood, frames the conflict of the film in terms as one of authority in a state of crisis. By the first hour of the film, War of the Words explicitly announces itself as a drama about fatherhood, or rather, as an attempt to answer Jacques Lacan's famous question, "what is a father?"
What is a Father?
We would be mistaken if we though that the Freudian Oedipus myth puts an end to theology on the matter [of desire]. For the myth does not confine itself to working the puppet of sexual rivalry. It would be better to read in it what Freud requires us to contemplate using his coordinates; for they boil down to the question with which he himself began: "What is a Father?"
--Jacques Lacan[17]
The rivalry between Robbie and Ray over the care of the ten-year-old Rachel implicates the familial conflict is classically Oedipal, but, insofar as Ray is divorced, not in terms that Freud would find familiar. Perhaps the most famous of Freud's teachings, the Oedipal myth helped to explain the sexual dynamics of the Victorian family from the son's point of view: the son was jealous of his father and resentful of the fact that the father prohibits him from loving the mother in a romantic way. For Freud, father/son rivalry was an overdetermined conflict that resolved itself when the son learned to identify and emulate the father, seeking a substitute for his mother via courtship or dating. In his refiguring of the Oedipal myth, Jacques Lacan tempered the psychosexual aspect by underscoring the function of the father figure as "the original representative of the Law's authority."18 For Lacan, what is important about the cultural figure of the father is not whom he is entitled to enjoy (that is, the mother), but that, to the child, there is no higher authority than the father; he is the one who responds "because I say so" in answer to the "why?" question. He is the one with the power to punish transgressions, as well as suspend the rules and norms in times of emergency or need. Consequently, the father is the original representative of the Law as such; it was he who first uttered the word "no!" or, as Moses put it, "thou shalt not!"
Lacan argued that the Oedipus myth teaches us that the father figure represented two conflicting functions. On the one hand, the father concerns a protective function and is called upon from time to time to transgress social rules and laws to keep his family from harm. On the other hand, however, the father concerns a prohibitive and legislative function and is responsible for teaching social rules in laws. Any one "real" father (that is, a flesh and blood human being that is not necessarily male) is typically asked to navigate the figure of the father both symbolically and imaginarily. Symbolically, in his prohibitive function the father intervenes in the mother/infant dyad so that the subject is introduced to the social world outside of that bond; in this respect, the father represents a fundamental signifier, or "the-Name-of-the-Father" that introduces social reality, thereby putting an end to an individual state of nature. Understood symbolically, the father's prohibition of the infant's romantic love for the mother actually represents the demand that the child become a social subject and civic being. Imaginarily, of course, a real father must also contend with social representations of "good" and "bad" fathers, and these tend to orbit fantasies of protection. Hollywood film and American television (especially shows like Father Knows Best) has been primary locus of the imaginary father in Western culture.
When we understand the figure of the father symbolically as an agent of law and prohibition charged nevertheless with the task of protection, then War of the Worlds can be read as an imaginary negotiation of the anxieties of symbolic fatherhood. The film opens by establishing Ray as the typical "bad father" who has failed to emerge from adolescence: he is a half-hour late to receive his children in the opening of the film; he drives a "hot rod," and he is re-building a car engine on the kitchen table; he has no food in the house for his children to eat; when the lightening begins to strike outside, he begs for his daughter to watch it with him; and so on. In addition to his inability to protect and provide, Ray's status as a representative of the law's authority is also repeatedly questioned: while throwing a baseball with Robbie in the backyard Ray orders his son to finish his homework: "Your mom says you got a report due Monday. You're gonna work on it when we're done here." Robbie says that it's almost finished, to which Ray responds "bullshit." "Just do the report," continues Ray, "we don't send you to school so you can flunk out." Robbie then evokes the "good father" of the film, his step-father: "You don't pay for it, Tim does." In this scene Ray is show to be a powerless enforcer; after Ray angrily throws the ball into a basement window, his impotence is further underscored when the ten-year-old Rachel counsels Ray on his parenting: "That's not how you're going to get to him. If you want him to listen you have to . . . ." Ray interrupts, "What are you, your mother? or mine?"
The gradual ascent of Ray from a "bad" father whose law goes unheeded to his ability to protect and command as a good father is complete by first hour of the film. Not coincidentally, this transformation occurs in scene in which a decidedly Hobbsian state of nature is recreated on screen: shortly after the conflict with Robbie in the rural setting, the family is ambushed by a mob who desperately wants their vehicle. A rock is thrown through the windshield. Angry and determined to escape, Ray floors the gas and speeds through the crowd, almost plowing into a woman holding a baby. He quickly turns the van away from the mother and child, only to crash into a telephone pole outside of a small, neighborhood bar and diner. The men of the crowd break the van's windows as women stand on the periphery calling for an end to the violence. One visibly panicked man tears through the broken windshield glass with his bare and bloody hands, signifying barbaric and primitive impulses. Ray is torn from the vehicle, and Robbie soon follows, leaving Rachel trapped as strangers pour into it. Abruptly, Ray pulls a gun from is pant waist and shoots into the air. The crowd is immediately silenced. "Get off the car! Move!" he screams, as the subdued mob accede to his authority as a father with the potential to kill. His authority is quickly challenged when another armed man approaches Ray unawares and takes the van at gunpoint. Nevertheless, in this violent, nasty, and brutish scene Ray establishes himself as the father who, however flawed, has the power to protect by means of transgression.
Shortly after the family escapes this mob scene, Ray's function as the representative of the authority of the Law is challenged in a manner that further underscores the legislative power of the father. Running away from another site of alien attack (a ferry dock on the Hudson river), the family suddenly find themselves in the midst of yet another battle in a country field. Dazzled by the bright lights and sound of explosions, irrationally, Robbie runs away from Ray and Rachel with the obvious intent of joining the military. At the top of a hill soldiers admit, with some frustration, that their weapons are have "no effect" on the alien ships. Leaving Rachel near a small tree, Ray runs toward the top of the hill and catches up with Robbie. They wrestle and Ray eventually wins, sitting on top of his son. Like the military's weapons, Ray's words have no effect on Robbie: "I want you to listen to me," screams Ray. Robbie responds "I want to see this, I need to see this," as Ray repeats over him, "no, you don't! You don't!" The spectator is then shown an apparently well-meaning couple trying to take Rachel and usher her to safety. As Rachel screams for Ray, he is forced to make a choice: either let his son go to his certain death, or rescue Rachel from the well-meaning couple. The son and father stand and face each other solemnly as Ray decides to violate his charge as a protector and let his son go. Robbie runs resolutely over the hill toward the battle scene, while Ray retrieves his daughter from the couple by repeating, "I'm her father, I'm her father." Insofar as the tacit expectation of a parent is to keep their children from harm, Ray's authority is not only defined in terms of his ability to assert the law, but also in terms of his ability to relax it. As I argue below, insofar as the ability to relax or transgress the law in an exceptional situation is the fundamental function of the sovereign, War of the Worlds is not just about "how a family finds its way home," but also about how a country finds its sense of security.[19]
What is a Sovereign?
Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception.
--Carl Schmitt[20]
War of the Worlds was almost universally criticized for the implausible and unsatisfying focus on fatherhood. After almost two hours of harrowing chase scenes, "numbing portrayals of social collapse," and "chilling references to 9/11," the story is resolved with a paean to passionate parenting: the film ends when Ray and Rachel are joyfully reunited with Robbie, the mother, and the new husband at the Boston home of the former in-laws. As one rather cloying review summarized, "when it's time to protect his kids, Ray is a great dad."[21] In part, this ending was panned because it is emotionally unfair: Spielberg asks audiences to open a would by surfacing the memories of the real trauma that concentrates U.S. political discourse, but fails to close it by deliberately keeping the narrative apolitical; the question of State authority and international political issues is deliberately backgrounded. As Stuart Klawans suggests, the rather mawkish conclusion in Thanksgiving-style homecoming, particularly after excruciating "eruptions of violence, which in length and intensity surpass all expectation," points to a blind spot in Spielberg's vision. The director's refusal to see himself as the source of ecstatic violence without reason, Klawans argues, "deserves our attention," because "this refusal of self-knowledge" is homologous to the refusal of other "daily silences-the newscasts that don't reckon up the war dead, for example, or the conversations where people won't call incipient fascism by its name."[22] The critic suggests that it is as if the filmmaker threw a violently spectacular temper tantrum with profound and "vast political implications" that are abruptly abandoned in favor of teaching us that father knows best.
This disjuncture between the narrative plot and the emotional experience of the spectator is the symptom of a deeper ideological labor that transcends any facile commentary on the successes and failures of the nuclear family. Insofar as War of the Worlds is a deliberate attempt to resurface and react to the trauma of September 11, 2001, the film is staging a drama in which Ray's ability to care for his children is compared to the State's ability to care for its people. An attention to the plot in terms of the formal, symbolic function of the father figure as a representative of the Law---indeed, the Symbolic itself---recharacterizes the focus on the imaginary father as an ideologically informed displacement of the questions about governance and the State, in effect disguising a soul-deep longing for an effective and forceful leader with the power to quickly destroy any threat to security. To better understand the ideological effect and consequence of this homology on the spectator, I underscore the fundamental parallels between Lacan's notion of the symbolic father and traditional notions of the sovereign.
More coming soon . . . with luck.
Notes
1 Josh Friedmann and David Koepp, War of the Worlds: The Shooting Script (New York: Newmarket Press, 2005), 37-38. The formatting of script has been altered here to conserve space.
2 I deliberately refer to the events of September 11, 2001 as "Nine-eleven" to underscore their fetishization and commodification.
3 Interview with Rob Feld, in Friedmann and Koepp, War of the Worlds, 143.
4 Joshua Tyler, "War of the Worlds," review of War of the Worlds (Paramount Pictures movie), Cinemablend.com, available http://www.cinemablend.com/review.php?id=1024 accessed 4 February 2006.
5 "With War of the Worlds he [Spielberg] has made what is arguably one of the best 1950s science fiction films ever, and that is not a backhanded compliment," argues Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times. See Kenneth Turan, "War of the Worlds," review of War of the Worlds (Paramount Pictures movie), The Los Angeles Times, 29 June 2005, available http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/turan/cl-et-world29jun29,0,1011790.story accessed 11 February 2006.
6 Barbara Biesecker, "Remembering World War II: The Rhetoric and Politics of National Commemoration at the Turn of the 21st Century." Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (November 2002): 394.
7 Biesecker, "Remembering," 406.
8 Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz, Projecting the Shadow: The Cyborg Hero in American Film (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995): 47.
9
10 John Rawls "original position" is the same concept; see Jan Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Revised edition (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard, 1999).
11 see Stephen Keane, Disaster Movies: The Cinema of Catastrophe (London: Wallflower, 2001).
12 Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan, chapter 13, available online at http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-c.html#CHAPTERXIII accessed 18 February 2006.
13 These are detailed . . .
14 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, translated by G.D.H. Cole (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988), 15.
15 Friedmann and Koepp, War of the Worlds, 25-26.
16 Friedmann and Koepp, War of the Worlds, 33.
17 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 298.
18 Lacan, Ecrits, 299.
19 Michael Wilmington, "War of the Worlds," review of War of the Worlds (Paramount Pictures movie), The Chicago Tribune/Metomix.com, available http://metromix.chicagotribune.com/movies/mmx-050629-moviewarofworlds,0,6768819.story accessed 6 February 2006.
20 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5.
21 John Wirt, "War of the Worlds a Summer Spectacular," review of War of the Worlds (Paramount Pictures movie), The Advocate, available http://www.2theadvocate.com/entertainment/movies/reviews/1787416.html accessed 2 February 2006.
22 Stuart Klawans, "Alien Nation," review of War of the Worlds (Paramount Pictures movie), Dark Water (Touchstone movie), and Land of the Dead (MCA movie), The Nation (8 August 2005): 42.