Parallel Lines by Guy Westwell

Author:Guy Westwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, PER004010, Performing Arts/Film & Video/Direction & Production
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-10-21T04:00:00+00:00

Fig. 12: Parental anxiety and the ‘father-protector’: War of the Worlds (2005)

In contrast, Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road (2006, released as a film three years later) takes the same figure/allegory of a father and child attempting to survive and provides an even bleaker view, showing ‘the young child’s awful vulnerability to the predations of the post-apocalypse (extreme cold, starvation, illness, rape, slavery, cannibalism) and the likely death of the father who protects him’ (Holloway 2008: 110). The novel and film also contain a dramatic scenario equivalent to the one faced by Ferrier, but instead of a regeneration through violence the son persuades his father that the threatening stranger should not be killed, thereby seeking an ethical course of action that resists the clear-cut through-line offered in War of the Worlds. Similarly, an equivalent scenario in Right at Your Door (2006) shows a struggling writer working from home, whose wife is caught in a chemical/biological terrorist attack as she travels to work. Following instructions from the authorities the writer seals himself and, unknowingly, a Mexican handyman working for a neighbour in his house. The wife survives the attack and manages to return home, and in the fraught scenes that follow, with the wife demanding entry, the husband reasons to her that because she is probably contaminated he must refuse her entry in order to protect the life of the stranger. Here the ethical stakes are finely poised, with no (morally) clear course of action available to any of the characters. This spare, difficult pitting of one person against another, and an insistence that every course of action will result in harm, stands in sharp contrast to War of the Worlds, and prefigures the kind of scenario that gives shape to the torture films discussed in chapter seven.

The film’s conclusion ties these different elements together. As noted, at the film’s start Ferrier is depicted as dysfunctional, with his family disintegrating as a consequence of his failure to adopt a suitably patriarchal blend of action, authority and maturity. Sheldon Hall notes that many of Spielberg’s films ‘revolve around incomplete, dysfunctional or disintegrating families and around weak, absent, abusive or irresponsible fathers or father figures’ (quoted in Williams and Hammond 2006: 167). However, where Spielberg’s earlier films, including Duel (1971), Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), remain relatively qualified in their redemption of the patriarchal status of their central characters, War of the Worlds is more affirmative. Through the violent defence of his daughter, Ferrier begins the process of reclaiming his position as head of the family. As the alien threat succumbs to the common cold virus, the film ends with Ferrier delivering his daughter to his mother, safe in a Boston brownstone, and discovering that his son has also reached safety. James Aston offers a persuasive reading that, as well as consolidating an overarching patriarchal logic, this fantasy of repatriation also taps into ‘media attention given to New Yorkers and the need of being with or finding loved ones in the aftermath of 9/11’ (2008).

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