The War of the Worlds · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The bomb goes off in daylight.

Not at night, not offscreen, not in a stock insert with a general nodding grimly. The flying wing comes over, the blast fills the frame in Technicolor, and when the column of dust thins the machines come out of it with the green shimmer of their shields still wobbling, unmarked. General Mann has done everything right. Forrester has been right about everything. Nothing has happened.

Hold that shot. Everything worth saying about this film runs through it.

Hollywood in 1953 ran on a contract Deleuze called the movement-image: someone perceives a situation, the situation presses on him, he acts, and the act changes the situation. Its grandest version he called the large form. A whole encompassing world bears down first (his word for that encompassing milieu is the synsign, and you get it in every low-angle wide of a machine with people small along the bottom of the frame), and then one decisive act turns it. Westerns are built this way. So are war pictures.

Barré Lyndon's script builds the large form with real care and then knocks the top off it. The escalation is by institution: curious townspeople, local police, National Guard, regular Army, Air Force with an atomic weapon, then nothing. Every rung gets its scene of preparation and its scene of failure. A descending staircase, and the suspense comes not from whether the response will work but from watching competent people exhaust their competence.

Deleuze called that break the crisis of the action-image: the moment characters can still perceive perfectly well but can no longer do anything with what they perceive. He found it in Rossellini's rubble and in Antonioni's dead time. He was not looking at Paramount's summer science fiction. But it is here, unmistakably, in a picture whose human leads are functionaries whose job is to be present at the right places while the world is dismantled around them. And it got here not through art-cinema ambition but through history. The ultimate weapon turned out not to be ultimate, and the film says so out loud, in color, in a genre usually accused of cheerleading for the Army.

The farmhouse is where the film finds out what it is. Forrester and Sylvia are trapped in a half-collapsed house while a probe on a stalk, an electronic eye, searches the rooms. George Barnes lights it in fragments: the beam sweeping debris, a face caught in a sliver, deep shadow holding most of the frame. Leith Stevens's score stands down and lets the sound effects carry it. There is no action available. They can only look and listen. Deleuze's term for this is the pure optical and sound situation, the opsign and sonsign: the image stops being a cue for movement and becomes something you simply have to take in. The space stops being a place to act in and becomes disconnected fragments of feeling, an any-space-whatever. Sylvia's scream is the best piece of acting in the film because it is the one reaction the script lets go nowhere. The only sequence where the humans are helpless is the only one that builds dread by withholding instead of displaying. That is not an accident of budget.

Notice how much of this film is looking. Humans see through telescopes, binoculars, periscopes. The Martians see through the probe. Deleuze has a name for an image in which we watch someone watching and feel the camera's own presence in the arrangement: the dicisign. War of the Worlds is largely made of them, and its scariest beat is one that fails, a hand on a shoulder that turns out not to be human. Vision here is always instrumented and never sufficient. Nobody gets a clean look at what is killing them.

Haskin and Barnes's real contribution is a rhythm rather than an image. Wide low-angle: the machine, tiny figures beneath. Cut to eye level: the machine entirely out of frame, present only as light on faces and as what people do next. See the object, then see only its effect. That second shot is what Deleuze calls an index, a gesture that discloses a situation you are not being shown. It came out of poverty. The miniatures hung on wires that would not stay invisible, and the unit fought them with black backing, careful lighting, and optical work, so machine shots were expensive and reaction shots were free. The economy became a style, and it is why the invasion plays bigger than the money. Nozaki's design has the same origin: walking tripods were tried and could not be made to work, so the machines became manta hulls floating on nothing with a gooseneck emitter behind, the copper support legs registering mostly as scorch marks on the ground. The most copied silhouette in the genre is a promoted engineering failure.

Color is doing work too, not just prestige. The human world is dusty tan, khaki, asphalt gray. The invaders arrive saturated: green-white beam, orange bloom of ignition, the sick green of the blisters, the wounded Martian's blood arriving as pure color information. Deleuze's colour-image is color that absorbs a scene and its feeling instead of describing an object. Science fiction in 1953 was a black-and-white second-feature genre. Pal spent three-strip Technicolor on it and used the palette to separate two orders of being.

The Los Angeles evacuation is cut from short overlapping fragments, crowds and vehicles and collapsing façades and machine POVs, with almost no continuity of individual action. Everett Douglas is working from Slavko Vorkapich's destruction montage in San Francisco (1936), cutting on impact rather than on continuity. What that yields is not a set of characters but what Deleuze calls a dividual: a crowd rendered as a single affective body, which can then only be shown coming apart. It plays like a civil-defense film that decided to tell the truth. The orderly plan becomes panic, looting, and the smashing of the very scientific equipment that might have saved everyone.

The other debts are just as practical. The prologue lifts its grammar wholesale from Prelude to War (1942): omniscient narration over globes and marching maps spliced to combat footage, certifying the invasion as reportage before a frame of fiction appears. That is the documentary contract Bazin theorized, the persuasive force of an image made automatically by a machine rather than by a hand, and Pal borrows its credibility, along with Chesley Bonestell's astronomical paintings, and spends it on mattes and wires. Orson Welles had already proved in 1938 that this story lives in the reportage register. Destination Moon and When Worlds Collide supplied the production template and the same procedural staircase, re-timed. Things to Come put design and score above drama; Hawks's The Thing from Another World turned scientist-versus-military argument into work talk, which is the register of the Pacific Tech scenes.

Then the ending people still argue about. Forrester searches the ruins for Sylvia and finds her in a church. The machines drop as congregations pray. Hardwicke hands the bacteria to God, "in His wisdom." Wells's biological irony survives; the causality is reassigned. Take the theology or leave it. The structural fact stands either way: after eighty minutes of proving that nothing inside the frame can act, the film resolves from somewhere that cannot be located in the frame at all. Deleuze separates the relative out-of-field, the next room you could cut to, from the absolute out-of-field, an elsewhere that is nowhere in space and opens the film onto a whole it cannot show. Microbes are ideal for it. Invisible, unplanned, undeployed, too small to photograph. The deliverance is not an act. It is an opening.

What this did to the movies is on the record. It set the invasion template beat for beat: the object that lands, the failed emissaries, the escalating military response, the useless superweapon, the mass evacuation, the deus-ex-microbe. Independence Day (1996) is that structure with the ending's agency handed back to humans, which is precisely a restoration of the action-image, and you can measure the 1953 film's nerve by how badly 1996 needed to undo it. Spielberg's 2005 version returns to the novel's ground-level terror and pays the debt directly, casting Gene Barry and Ann Robinson in it. Nozaki's silhouette and the Paramount sound effects have been recycled for seventy years. The Registry took the film in 2011. Authorship, meanwhile, sits below the line: a producer with a clear idea, an effects unit, a designer, a cutter. Gordon Jennings won the Oscar and died before the ceremony.

The open question is the one the film hands you. A movie whose heroes accomplish nothing was received then, and often still is, as a failure of screenwriting. What if it is simply accurate? Watch it again with 1953 around it, hydrogen bomb, duck-and-cover, evacuation drills, and the thin characters start to look like an argument rather than a shortcut. Forrester is right about everything and it saves no one. The film knows something its own genre spent the next fifty years trying to forget. So watch the reaction shots. Watch who is looking, and through what.