| | Andrew's response is interesting from a number of points of view, and is worth breaking down further.
He raises a two basic criticisms. The first is *aesthetic*: that Spielberg has made a nihilistic movie, that makes illegitmate use of horrific images and revels in bloodshed. The second criticism is *cultural*: what kind of director might produce such a monstrosity, and what kind of audience might appreciate it?
To answer the second question first, I thought about the reasons 'War of the Worlds' moved me personally. Primarily, it made me flashback to the tiny apocalypses of my own life, which, like the movie, came out of nowhere on a very ordinary day. Like coming home in the middle of the day to find my father lying dead on the floor, or seeing my 9 month old daughter beneath the wheel of a truck driven by a partly blind man (she survived, like the characters in the movie, rather miraculously). These experiences, as Spielberg seems to know, suddenly make reality seem unreal - you literally *cannot believe* they are happening. You are face to face with the unthinkable. And war is the ultimate unthinkable reality. By imaginative empathy, I could see how these small, reality-shredding horrors must translate into the unimaginable experiences of having your co-workers suddenly merged with the glass, steel, and aviation fuel of a burning jet airliner, or to having to clutch your family, confused, bleeding and dying, as a helicopter gunship that razed your dwelling circles impassively overhead. In other words, via his art, Spielberg is plugging me into a profound human experience, making me sympathise with what it was like to have been those other people, and making me thankful beyond measure I am not. In this sense, it is about as 'malevolent' in intent as a Holocaust museum, and we might therefore make the same reasonable assumptions about its audience. While I suppose there might be people who might get a perverse, unintended pleasure from visiting such a museum, most others are likely to find it, as I personally found this film, startling and deeply moving.
So much for the implied cultural criticism. Now to the aesthetic criticism: that the movie is nihilistic. The reason I thought Andrew's disclaimer important is not so much to do with the original Wells/Welles versions - although the fact Spielberg placed the film within Orson's elipses suggests that your active, empathic imagination will be as central to the film experience as it is to Welles' radio production - but it simply indicated the rather narrow aesthetic base he is attempting to build his offhand yet simultaneously large-scale critique on ('...horror movies are a sign of cultural decay' indeed! Fortunately others have saved me the trouble of debunking this notion). After all, one would not want to come across like the fresh faced young Adventist who stumbles out of Hooters believing he has discovered the first sign of the The End Times....;-). For if he does not know of the famous radio broadcast, or the original book (Wells being, incidentally, one of history's most famous optimists), it is only reasonable to assume he does not know many of literature's or the cinema's famous nihilists either. If he did, he would realise how unlikely we would be to find an ending like that of Spielberg's 'War of the Worlds' in their work. To recap, the film ends with the menace gone, the separated family reunited and intact, and in a long tracking shot above the ruined city that travels over a blasted, leafless tree, along one bare branch to find a single green shoot re-emerging - a classic symbol of hope re-emergent that Spielberg nicely reinvents. Now the very thought that we might find such an ending for say, Sam Peckinpah's 'The Killer Elite' or 'The Wild Bunch', or Roeg and Cammell's 'Performance', or more recently the unconscionable 'The Way Of The Gun' or their literary equivalents is enough to make me burst out laughing. So clearly, he either missed the end, or isn't familiar enough with the nihilistic genre in the first place. It's simply a mistaken categorisation.
The ending aside - which traditionally emphasises the maker's attitude to what has gone before - we can only wonder how, if Spielberg wishes to make a movie about the horrors of war for an innocent civilian population (to contrast with his 'Saving Private Ryan') he could do so *without* laying himself open to at least *some* charges of nihilism? After all, war is the ultimate nihilism, the ultimate destruction of human realities. An apocalypse where everyone survives? I don't really think so....;-) Perhaps he could have populated his film with more traditional Hollywood heroes, and made the moral dilemmas they face a lot more one-dimensional, just as he could have made his GIs in 'Private Ryan' walk magically unscathed through the blender of German lead instead of pissing their pants in the face of it. But frankly, given the comprehensive apocalypse the humans in both movies dwell in, mere survival is heroic enough - just like real people in a *real* war zone. And this is precisely the empathic understanding Spielberg is trying to achieve.
In sum, Andrew's reaction seems to have little actual basis, and his attempted cultural criticism even less. As he is usually a sharp kid, and newly installed as Editor of Solo, it's probably just a rush of blood to the head. I'd just hate to see the return of the critical levels typified by a certain G. Stolyarov, and his Herculean attempts to ascertain the Decline Of Western Civilisation in his own misunderstanding of a Beatles song. To me, if Solo is about anything, it is an attempt to confront just this sort of philistinism, both in the wider world and within Objectivism itself.
- Daniel
|
|
