You can't win, so run

War of the Worlds
This originally appeared in the Sandpoint Reader a few weeks ago.

Steven Spielberg is the supreme master of many things, but the subtleties and vagaries of human emotion are not among them. Oh he’s not bad. Yes yes, there’s Schindler’s List, Jaws et cetera and furthermore: E.T.

He’s certainly made emotionally resonant movies in the past, but not with any kind of regularity. And even those, like the above mentioned, owe their impact more to good acting and the situation’s enormity than to directing. In Schindler’s List you’ve got Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes and 6 million dead Jews, for example. When Neeson and Fiennes are off-screen, the considerable emotion doesn’t come from the screen so much as it wells up within the audience, as Spielberg presents the carnage unblinking and unabridged. What I mean is: a Nazi newsreel of the slaughter would be just as troubling as the view from Spielberg’s lens.

Creating emotion is something different. He’s never been better at creating emotion than in the quiet moments between father and son, at the dinner table, in Jaws.

You know, 30 years ago.

Since then, he’s proven to be at his best when squeaking by on just enough to give his spectacles gravity. When he goes for more emotion than that—or God forbid when he makes a feel-good movie—the result is something like The Terminal.

I thought he understood that about himself. That is, until The Terminal.

What he does well—what he does perhaps better than anyone—is something that often gets mistaken for emotion: behavioral response. I’m sure this will lead to gasps from psychology students—and if so, you know my email, jerks—but there’s a difference between the experiences of sadness and joy and the experiences of terror, wonder and panic. The latter being less like strong feeling and more like instinct. Of course, language is stupidly inept at explaining these differences, but there is a profound difference.

It’s not wailing in fear and it’s not rushing headlong into battle. It’s cold and fueled by endorphins. It’s doing what is necessary to survive. It’s icy realization. Roy Schieder, on that beach, realizing there’s a shark in the water, camera zooming in on his eyes as the rest of the scene drops away. It’s dumb and emotionless scrambling up Omaha beach. You’re either paralyzed or spurred into action.
Or dead.

There are no blood-curdling screams until after the Tyrannosaurus bites you in half.
The screams are emotion. They come after you get hunted down.

Likewise, Spielberg never tries to hamstring wonder with philosophy. He allows it to be what it is, awe and curiosity. As the aliens of E.T. and Close Encounters touch down, Spielberg is Zen like Phil Jackson. Likewise, as lightning strikes the same spot 26 times in War of the Worlds, and some intersection in the Bronx opens up like a gaping maw, no one talks, but everyone moves in for a closer look, like they all had the same idea. In the moment, there are no words for the experience. The emotional reaction comes later.

These things lack the irrationality of emotion because rationality doesn’t even come into play.

War of the Worlds is an entire movie built around instinctual responses, perhaps Spielberg’s first, further distancing himself from the blockbuster crowd he created. Unlike the Michael Bays, those glorified pyrotechnicians, and the George Lucases, those soap opera writers, Spielberg has the patience to let his shots and situations stand. No one-liners, no ominous string section, no “it’s quiet, too quiet.”

Nobody, after 30 years, understands better than Spielberg that nothingness isn’t dead air; it isn’t down time. Nothingness is potential. Nothingness is pregnant with the specter of menace, which is why nothing builds tension like silence.
Not even an ex-marine with nerve gas filled missiles. Not even the two-note shark’s theme in Jaws. Certainly not Vader’s Imperial March.

Silence is where all those intangible things live: Terror. Wonder. Panic. The survival instinct.

War of the Worlds, in its best moments, is blanketed in silence and those moments become Spielberg’s canvas. Against an undefeatable foe, the screamers die. The revenge-seekers die. The thinkers, they die first. Those that use their terror, though, who live in their instinct, occasionally give in to panic—most of them die too—but only they get blessed by the law of averages. They alone are aided by the fact that these massive, three-legged death-machines can’t catch everybody.
To a species so married to its dogma—the holy trinity of dominance, certainty and logic—what is more frightening or counter-intuitive than living by instinct and hoping for a lucky break?

It’s a fear greater than the fear of the unknown. It’s the fear of realizing that thinking is too slow, that knowing doesn’t help.

In War of the Worlds, Spielberg conveys this fear to the audience the way he always has: an uncanny sense of perspective. Sometimes the camera stays close to the character, just over the shoulder, peeking from behind a corner. It is claustrophobia and obscured vision.

It’s the hopelessly imperfect human machine.

Just as often though, he explodes the perspective. He’ll show hills full of strong points and enemy soldiers or gaping fissures or buzzing, mechanical human cities. Or in this case, massive tripods silhouetted on the horizon, dwarfing the people scrambling below.

It’s the hopelessly small human individual.

Like H.G. Wells and Orson Wells before him, Spielberg shows us an enemy that can’t be stopped, gives us a weak, indefensible and slow body, then tells us to run.
He’s made a career out of documenting fear and human resilience and you’ll see situations in War of the Worlds that you saw in Jurassic Park, Jaws, Catch Me If You Can, Saving Private Ryan and even Schindler’s List.

Here, though, a key element is missing: the possibility of winning. You can outthink dinosaurs. You can leave the water. You can throw off a federal manhunt. You can kill an enemy soldier. You can be spared the gas chamber through altruism and money.
War of the Worlds, though, is a zero sum game. Against countless tenacious enemies, you can’t hide for long, you can’t stall, you can’t wait for reinforcements, you can’t buy them off. The best you can hope for is survival.

So run.