Seeing War of the Worlds
Naeem Inayatullah
1. Show DVD War of the Worlds: 24:00 – 27:48
If no clips then talk them through it:
- Tom Cruise leaves his two children in the house to check out a large disturbance in the neighborhood.
Ten story tall walking machines with aliens piloting them emerge out of the ground and begin to destroy buildings and vaporize humans with their laser guns.
He is shell-shocked and runs home to his children who cannot figure out what is wrong with him.
As they head out of town in the only car that works – the aliens have short-circuited all machinery and electrical devices – his children want to know what’s wrong.
One of them asks if what is happening to the city is the result of terrorism. Cruise says, no; that the attackers are from some place else.
The son asks: like Europe? Cruise: “No, not like Europe.” Somewhere else.
Questions:
So, where are the aliens from?
What is this movie about?
Why is it so scary?
The obvious answers are: that is a science fiction movie about aliens attacking earth.
But we might want to think more about these question before we answer them so quickly.
We will come back to these questions.
Iraq and Colonialism
Material Argument:
Many people say that the war on Iraq is an effort to control the vast reserves of oil in the Middle East. I have read many books and articles that make that argument.
I think to get a good understanding of why the US invaded Iraq, it would be foolish to disregard the economic argument.
In many ways colonialism and neo-colonialism is largely about making sure that the powerful have easy and consistent access to the resources that produce wealth. In this case, its oil.
Problem with the material argument:
But there is a problem with the economic argument. It is not the only logic at work.
Most people will not risk their lives or kill others merely for things. To get people to risk death and kill others you have to provide them with a project, a mission, an ideal. Something that will speak to their sense of duty, honor, and sacrifice. You have to appeal to what they think is best in them.
This is what novelist Joseph Conrad captures in following quote in one the great books in the Western tradition, Heart of Darkness:
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea--something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to…"
In sum, to get people to sacrifice themselves and others, its best to appeal to their belief in goodness. And that is why the film “Serenity” depicts “believers” as the most dangerous people.
But believers and missionaries appear not only as characters in movies and as soldiers in wars, but also as teachers in schools and colleges. I should know, I am one.
In fact, teachers and teaching goes on everyday and everywhere – within our circle of friends, within our families, within schools and colleges, within and across nations and states.
Teaching is one of the very best ideas we have. To teach others is to do good. Is this not what we are always told?
Consider Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” – a poem that I think is really about the responsibility and goodness of teaching. In Conrad’s language, teaching is that “unselfish idea;” that something that “we can bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to…”
Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.
Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.
Take up the White Man's burden--
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.
Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"
Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.
Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!
Here is my Interpretation of this poem:
As you try to do good for others, to teach them what is good for them, they are going to:
blame you
hate you.
They are going to act sullen, devilish, childish, and they are going cast their judgments on you.
No one is going to give you laurels and praise. What you are going to get is scorn, ridicule, and thanklessness. And you are going to get all this for years and decades.
The real challenge, the challenge that takes a real man’s courage is to do what is right for others despite all that. It is easy to do the right thing when the right thing is easy to do. The real challenge is to do the right thing in the face of blame and hate and judgment.
This is the challenge that Kipling was posing to the USA in 1899 when this country was debating whether to colonize the Philippines.
But it is also the motive that drives us to try to teach our friends, our families, our colleagues, and our citizens.
It takes real courage to teach others when they do not want to learn, yes?
Going to See War of the Worlds
Last summer I asked my son what might do together. He wanted to go see War of the Worlds. It wasn’t my first choice of a good time or even a good movie, but we went. I didn’t expect much out of the movie – only for us to spend some time together.
It was the scariest movie I have ever seen. And my son confirmed that it was the scariest movie he had ever seen. When I asked him a week later if he wanted to see it again, he said “No.”
Scary because it forced you to confront mortality. Not just one’s own death but the death of human species.
The movie asked the question: what would you do if you knew that an alien species wished to exterminate you along with the entire human collective, but you had no defense against its attack.
The movie asked you to imagine the planet without human beings; it wanted you to imagine a future not only without your own biological life but one in which there would also be no humans to remember you.
Scary.
H.G. Wells
As I was watching the movie, I had an idea to teach a course. The title of which would be the same as the title of this talk, “Seeing War of the Worlds.” But first I had some work to do.
As soon as I got home, I pulled out my copy of Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate the Brutes. I recalled that in Lindqvist’s book I had read 5 pages on H.G. Wells’s novel War of the Worlds – on which the movie is based.
Wells wrote 3 novels in the 1890s – each a commentary on British colonialism. When he was asked by the press whether he felt bad about having aliens destroy the city of London, he responded with the following:
What the aliens do to London in my book is little different from what we British are doing in Africa.
And reading that response confirmed my suspicion about Spielberg’s movie.
Return of the Repressed
If you go back to the television coverage of the first war on Iraq you will notice that there isn’t much footage on the actual carnage that takes place. What we were shown were smart bombs hitting non-human targets such as bridges.
The same is more or less true for the video footage we were shown from the bombing of Afghanistan and then from the bombing of the second war on Iraq.
Its hard to film all that destruction of material structures and human life. Its difficult to show it because we want to believe that we are really doing is following Kipling’s advice – teaching others:
Teaching them to stand up to dictatorship
Teaching them to establish democracy
Teaching them how to live in a modern and civilized world.
A bit of bombing should not deter us from offering something so valuable.
But as we try to teach them and in the process fail to film, show, or see the devastation we are causing others, this does not mean that the devastation does not register in us.
Or, to say it differently, we know that this devastation is actually occurring. But we repress that knowledge. We know but we repress what we know.
According to certain types of psychologists and social psychologists, repressing something only makes it re-appear in a different part of our life.
Perhaps this is what nightmares are all about. Dreams might be a screen where we can face those things we cannot allow ourselves to face when we are awake.
But collectivities -- like the people of culture or country -- don’t have collective dreams, do they?
Well, I am not so sure that they don’t. Perhaps they do.
Nevertheless, we might be able to say that films give us a screen where we can begin to see the costs of teaching others. Films are a screen that allows us to see what we sensor from the news and from ourselves.
Back to our questions
What is Spielberg’s version of the War of the Worlds all about?
It’s about colonialism, it’s about teaching others how to acquire the gifts of our knowledge, its about teaching others even as they resist that teaching, it’s about Kipling’s Colonial burden. It’s about Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s about letting ourselves see on the big screen what we cannot afford to see at home, at school, and in the public arena. Maybe.
Why is it so scary?
Because it lets us see what we can do to each other in the name of teaching, in the service of the good, in name of helping others, in the name of responsibility, morality, and ideals.
Coda
Rudyard Kipling who argued for colonialism and Joseph Conrad and H.G. Wells who both argued against it -- all lived and published in the 1890s. In their novels and poems they waged battles about the ethics of colonialism.
They could each see the appeal of colonialism – it’s the idea of teaching. They could also see how closely teaching is tied up with forcing others to learn.
What we are witnessing today, I submit, is a kind of war of the worlds in which one side is saying: “We are trying to teach you for your own good despite the fact that you hate us for it.” And the other side is saying: “We might prefer to die and kill rather than to submit to your so called teaching, because we have to learn in our own time, and in our own ways.
Seeing this war of the worlds is to see that this war is both outside and inside us. Outside us in battlefields oceans away; battlefields others call their home. Inside because we are each of us teachers engaged in using force to do what is best for others. But we are also, each of us, resisting that force so that we can learn in our own time and in our own way.
[Seeing War of the Worlds requires us not only to sit in front of a screen but also to use that screen as a mirror.]
Talk presented at the 2006 David Nosanchuk Memorial Lecture Series, “Iraq: Culture, Politics, & History in Conflict,” with assistance from Joey Gaskins and Nethra Samarawickrema, Ithaca High School, Ithaca, NY, March 29, 2006.