War of the Worlds · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The dust on Ray Ferrier's jacket is other people. He runs from the first tripod through Bayonne, and the crowd around him flares and is gone — vaporized mid-stride, empty clothes sifting down through the air. He doesn't notice at first. He gets home, into the bathroom, and sees the grey film on his face in the mirror, and only then understands what he is wearing.

Start there, because Spielberg starts there. Not with a general at a map. Not with a scientist naming the threat. The film never once leaves Ray's eye-line — no command center, no president, no orienting overview. This refusal is the whole design, and it's worth naming exactly what it does.

In Deleuze's account of cinema, the classical Hollywood film runs on what he calls the action-image: a character perceives a situation and acts to change it. Situation, deed, transformed situation. The last-minute rescue; the hero whose act bends the world back into shape. Spielberg is one of the great living engineers of that circuit. War of the Worlds is built, on purpose, to break it. Deleuze had a name for the break too — the crisis of the action-image, the moment a character can no longer respond adequately to what he sees, when perceiving outruns acting and the sensory-motor link snaps.

Ray is a divorced dockworker and a bad father, and across two hours of catastrophe he accomplishes essentially nothing against the threat. He flees. He hides. He watches. The genre promises that the hero's competence will eventually answer the disaster; this film withholds that promise to the last frame and then keeps withholding it. The Martians aren't defeated by Ray, or by humanity, or by any act at all. They're killed by bacteria — Earth's microorganisms, a thing nobody does. Wells wrote it that way in 1898; Spielberg keeps it almost verbatim through the 1953 film. In Deleuzian terms it is the purest possible refusal of the action-image: the situation resolves, and not one human deed contributed.

What fills the space where action used to be? Deleuze calls it the pure optical and sound situation — the opsign and the sonsign. The character becomes a voyant, a seer, someone who can only look and listen because there is nothing to be done. The tripods arrive first as sound: that bone-deep foghorn bellow, doom before the machine is even visible. You hear it and, like Ray, you can only wait. Dakota Fanning's Rachel is the film's truest seer — a child whose role is mostly to witness terror she has no power to act on. The river carrying the dead, the downed jetliner strewn across a suburb, the walls papered with photographs of the missing: these aren't obstacles to overcome. They are things seen. Kamiński drains them to ash and sick grey — the desaturated palette he built on Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan — and keeps the camera low, handheld, embodied, locked inside Ray's physical space, denying us the god's-eye master shot that would make the catastrophe legible and therefore survivable.

Notice, too, where the war-machines come from. Not down from the sky, as in Wells and in 1953 — up, from beneath the streets, buried for millennia under the city. Deleuze, following Zola, calls this the originary world showing through the derived milieu: a savage, primal force erupting underneath the ordinary social surface. The familiar homeland turns out to have been sitting on top of the thing that devours it. In 2005, the image needs no caption.

And when the spectacle finally narrows to a cellar, the horror turns inward and human. Tim Robbins's Ogilvy is a man on a line of slope — the survivalist's appetite for resistance curdling into madness, while Ray's protection of his daughter collapses into something monstrous he has to do in the dark. This is Deleuze's impulse-image: a world of raw drives breaking through beneath the moral one. The chamber-piece hush of that cellar is more frightening than any tripod.

The famous 360-degree pass around the speeding minivan belongs to the same paradox. A continuous moving camera circling the family while society burns past the windows — it is bravura technique, the mobile shot built to express a change in the whole, turned to the opposite end. All that fluid mastery, and the people inside it can do nothing but be carried. The form flees; it never fights.

The craft debts are exact. The withheld monster comes from Jaws — terror through reaction shots and off-screen menace. The upturned suburban faces come straight out of Close Encounters, inverted from benediction into massacre. Koepp's fractured-family-in-peril, children hiding from an apex predator, carries over from Jurassic Park. What Spielberg added is the audacity of scale against purpose: he took the most expensive action-image apparatus on Earth and spent every dollar of it on helplessness. A summer blockbuster written in the grammar of the seer.

Ray's whole journey is a voyage that transforms nothing — Bayonne to the ferry to the cellar to Boston — and all it delivers is a son returned and a daughter kept alive. Survival, not victory. That is the film's quiet radicalism, and its bleakness. Watch it again for the sound before the sight, and for everything Ray sees and cannot answer.