Spielberg’s message: society must not defend itself

A reader finds in Stephen Spielberg’s previous movie, War of the Worlds, the whole liberal program on how to deal with alien invasions:

I’ve been reading some comments at VFR regarding Spielberg’s Munich. People have been surprised that the director of Schindler’s List could have come up with a “liberal” movie such as Munich. But it should not have been such a surprise.

This weekend I rented on DVD Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (which was the film he made prior to Munich). And War of the Worlds actually sets the tone for Munich.

War of the Worlds is not only a science fiction fantasy but a political statement. While on the surface it appears to be a movie about aliens invading the U.S. from outer space, consider the following scene.

The protagonist, portrayed by Tom Cruise, is being hunted by these alien “tripods.” He spots a house in an empty field and takes refuge in its basement along with his daughter. In this cellar he finds another human being running from the aliens. This other person has a rifle with him and he declares that the only way to beat back these aliens is to fire on them. Cruise is afraid that this person will make too much noise and give away their position, thus endangering his daughter. So he bludgeons this other person such that he cannot use his rifle any longer.

So how are these aliens finally defeated? They merely atrophy; their “bodies” decay because they cannot “adapt” to the environment on earth and Cruise goes free. The narrator (Morgan Freeman) says in the finale, “In the end their organisms just could not evolve and adapt to our atmosphere.” Those groups in the movie who used firearms, such as the U.S. army or free individuals with guns, could not defeat the alien. The aliens decomposed in and of themselves because their being was incompatible with the air, the seeds, the grass, and the water around them. In other words the climax is a passive ending.

It occurred to me that what Speilberg was doing in the film was not simply sci-fi. He was making a political and cultural statement. That any aliens (i.e. alien cultures) encroaching on the U.S. cannot be actively defended against. These cultures will self-destruct through decomposition BECAUSE our environment will not allow their developement and evolution. Notice it isn’t individual struggle and resistence to alien invasion that does the trick but passive waiting while the environment works its wonders.

Could this be Spielberg’s analogy or parable concerning alien cultures, such as the Muslim one, encroaching on American soil and society? Is he saying for example that an Islamic culture, while it may be able to invade the U.S., will not be able to sustain itself in our midst because our environment will cause it to implode? Therefore individual, active resistence is futile because “something” in our environment will take care of us (as long as we are in sync with this environment)?

Notice how this movie War of the Worlds sets the tone for Munich. Israel undertakes an individualistic, armed response to the terrorists, who belong to an “alien” culture, Very much at odds with the portrayal of passive resistence acted out by Tom Cruise.

Also note that in War of the Worlds Tom Cruise actively undertakes to render his armed neighbour passive and quiet. In essence the liberal shows passive resistance to alien cultures while muting those who actively resist them. Is not Spieberg making a statement about alien cultures, invasions, resistance (armed or passive), worlds in conflict… Is not War of the Worlds parabolic and a precursor to Munich?

A reader comes to the defense of Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds”:

From all descriptions I have read, “Munich” is a detestable distortion of the truth. However, “War of the Worlds” simply does not fall under the same category. Spielberg did not write the story, H. G. Wells did. And Spielberg does a fairly creditable job of more or less sticking to the story as Wells wrote it (unlike movie productions of “The Time Machine”). There are differences of course. In the original story, a deranged vicar will not stop talking loudly and will give away the hiding place and he was dispatched by the hero with a meat cleaver. And there are numerous other little quibbles about added Hollywoodisms of course. The mainframe of Wells still remains.

Now H. G. Wells was notably to the left, and perhaps that’s why Spielberg wanted to do this film, but please don’t speciously connect specific elements of the film to “Munich”. “Munich” was a film that was very much his personal statement, the way that “War of the Worlds” was not.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 11, 2006 01:40 AM | Send