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Popular Culture Review
Through this, the film concludes where the novel does—at the turn of the 20th
century in a premodem, pre-atomic, pre-Hiroshima sensibility which much more
innocently and ably divided the world into good and evil and conducted wars and
constructed political allegory along those solid lines. Although certain elements
in the film’s final moments suggest a reprisal of the horror influence (the Gothic
churches, the “premodem” sensibility), the film ultimately rejects the ethical
dilemmas of the classic Jekyll-Hydeian horror hero and falls back on (by falling
forward into) an optimistic science (biological supremacy) and a delirious fiction
(an “American” God) to create the happy ending this film felt bound to offer.
Ultimately, then, the film in its final scenes sacrifices its relevance to the
experience of postwar ontological transition, exhausted but als o cowed by the
careening and traumatic course such a transition was then forcing the warring
“worlds” into but which the film itself had also, if only initially, begun to explore
and define.
University of North Texas
Jacqueline Foertsch
Notes
1. Pal, George. The War of the Worlds. Paramount Pictures, 1953.
2. See Messmer 1988a and 1988b.
3. I describe this shift from violence to illness in greater detail in Enemies Within (chapter
one). I argue there that the illness-effects produced by atomic warfare have elicited
hysterical fears of contamination by invisible enemies, transforming political and
biological crises into plague-like disasters. Meanwhile, the contagiousness of life in the
postmodern era accelerates the search for cures-not only the medical and political
solutions to biological and sociological threats, but also the tolerance and understanding of
plague victims in these eras that may preserve and or even improve their situations until
successful treatments are found.
4. See Derrida (1981, 1982), Sontag (1989), and Harpham.
5. Several film critics have recognized ideological shadings of the 1950s creature feature,
reinforcing our private suspicions that Martians are the flimsiest of stand-ins for the
Soviets or Chinese; that, thanks to the bomb, we deserve every horde, mutation, and
invasion ever to inflict itself upon us; that big science is at its most dangerous when it is
rogue and indifferent to the constraints of government and the military. See Biskind,
Hardy, Murphy, and Sontag (1965).
6. The span of my argument does not permit full comparison with the two culturally
significant manifestations of this text to have preceded: Wells’s original novel, of course,
and Orson Welles’s October 30, 1938 radio drama which, so realistically presented, sent
thousands of Americans fleeing in panic from the Martian threat. Smith surveys
politicized readings of the novel (104) in brief but helpful form. Regarding the radio play,
we note that Welles sought to situate his “practical joke” at the ultra-metonymic (and thus
most politically irrelevant) pole of the continuum discussed here; his final remarks include
the reassurance “and if your doorbell rings and there’s nobody there, that was no
Martian...it’s Halloween.” Meanwhile, commentators have since pointed out this text’s