There is something that has been bothering me for about 6 months. It all started when I watched 2005’s Spielberg movie called Tom Cruise Runs around A Lot after an Annoying Screaming Brat which was released in Australia as War of The Worlds. A few months after viewing WotW I read Curtis White’s provocative book The Middle Mind.
With the movie now released on DVD I thought it was time to revisit the movie, find out what exactly in the movie bothers me (apart from Tom Cruise) and introduce the concept of The Middle Mind.
Curtis White’s thesis of The Middle Mind is delivered by example rather than precise definition. In fact the book does often come off as one long rant. Still it is interesting and thought provoking even if there is an obvious need for an editor at times. Curtis White never explicitly states what the Middle Mind is but he does offer the following explanation on p26
The Middle Mind is pragmatic, plainspoken, populist, contemptuous of the right’s narrowness, and incredulous before the left’s convolutions. It is adventuresome, eclectic, spiritual, and in general agreement with liberal political assumptions about race, gender, and class. The Middle Mind really rather liked Bill Clinton, thoroughly supported his policies, but wished that the children didn’t have to know so much about his personal life. The Middle Mind is liberal. It wants to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and has bought an SUV with the intent of visiting it. It even understands in some indistinct way that that very SUV spells the Arctic’s doom. Most important, the Middle Mind imagines that it honours the highest culture and that it lives through the arts. It supports the local public broadcasting station, supports the symphony, attends summer Shakespeare festivals, and writes letters to state representatives encouraging support for the state arts council. The Middle Mind’s take on culture is well intended, but it is also deeply deluded.
White\’s description is misleading as it tends to place White to the right of the Culture Wars. In fact he targets both sides, going after Cultural Studies in one section he then criticises the right\’s idea what should constitute the ‘Western Canon’ in literature and their ideas of what is a \’great\’ book. White\’s book is part of the Culture Wars but he sees objects for attack on both sides. And while the concept of the Middle Mind still seems a tad nebulous at time a concept does form through reading the book. The Middle Mind can simply be described as entertainment being confused with serious thought. A mainstream consensus that aims to please and support our pretensions but fails to actually engage or challenge anyone. A lack of imagination. White targets Spielberg as one of the perpetrators of The Middle Mind.
With expectations no greater than being entertaining, fun, and in¬teresting, a filmmaker like Steven Spielberg-a Middle Mind artist if ever there was one-can achieve and sustain a reputation that makes his work appear different from and bigger than the rote productions of the Hollywood system. He’s above that, it’s generally thought. His films are major national and international events. But the Middle Mind couldn’t survive, and Steven Spielberg couldn’t survive, reputation intact, if they were confronted by a populace that was capable of reading well.
Yes folks, it is all about the reading. And while I am not going to engage in an exhaustive deconstruction of WotW (unlike White\’s demolition job on Saving Private Ryan) the Middle Mind thesis is exemplified by WotW.
War of the Worlds may figure in the end of year critic polls but Spielberg has pulled off a massive con job with this movie. It simply is an atrocious movie. First off the plot holes were enormous. Usually you have to suspend belief for most sci-fi movies though usually there is an internal logic that makes sense. WotW jettisons all that for a lazy script that expects us to believe that the alien invaders have hidden tripods all over the world. Furthermore the tripods have lay hidden for millennia and just happen to be within major metropolitan areas. Stretching the incredulity a little further is that they haven\’t been detected in all that time when placing underground mains, subways etc. Sure it is fine to have spectacular scenes of tripods bursting from the ground in the cities to wreak death and destruction. There should be scenes of tripods emerging alone in the wilderness, befuddled, with the aliens huddled over a Gregory\’s trying to work out which direction they should go.
And then there is the biological impossibility of aliens needing human blood as fertilizer for the alien weed. In the original novel the aliens fed on human blood which while still biologically wrong was a better motive and made better horror.
But the main thing that is wrong with movie is Spielberg. Sure he made some great movies but it seems now that he is suffering under the weight of gravitas. His is making the mistake assuming that overt symbolism is equivalent to saying big important things. There are obvious references to The Holocaust and 9/11. But they are delivered in such a clumsy, heavy handed way that any effect is diluted.
However the meanings and layers are not presented in a way that allows the viewer to explore and uncover them at their own leisure. Spielberg telegraphs his ideology and, remaining within the Middle Mind, allows the viewer the luxury of hot having to think at all. Spielberg tells you what to think. For example Tom Cruise all covered in human ash after witnessing the tripod emerge references both 9/11 and the gas chambers but is just so obvious that it almost passes you by via inconsequence.
And in case you dare to think for yourself Spielberg relies on the big special effects event to try and distract you. But still there was a nasty aftertaste after watching WotW again and not just because of pathetic final scene. The Spielberg aesthetic is about holding the hand of the audience and directing them to certain specific readings. Long gone are the days when he was an effective story teller. He has a reputation to uphold now.
Spielberg’s next movie is Munich. Given the subject nature it already is a movie of interest and anticipation. With Spielberg’s name attached it becomes a greater event. It will be interesting to see if Spielberg can navigate the story line without submerging his craft as a story teller under the weight of the movie’s importance and his heavy handed directing.
For a good version of The War of The Worlds go and buy Jeff Wayne\’s musical version of The War of The Worlds as it still rocks and does the whole story much better even without visuals. And then wait for the CGI version due out in 2007.
This seems to be a period of truly dreadful Hollywood films. WoW was one such, a film I walked out of at about the 45 minute mark. I have walked out of very few films, but this one really is on a par with ‘Attack of the Killer Tomatoes’ (which at least looked like a film they spent all of $0.85c on, for the script). Cruise’s awful acting and the screaming brat were, as you described, among the lowlights of the film studded with newly plumbed depths.
Another sloppy lowlight: if the alien’s beams vapourised people (but left the clothes intact, a physical impossibility in view of the energies needed), how come the river was full of corpses during the ‘we all take a leak’ scene? And corpses in running fresh water skitter along the bottom until decomposition floats them, when they float face down, anyway…
I was not alone in walking out, which surprised me, and one other walker said the obvious, that people go to the movies to lose themselves in a story; that Wells wrote terrific stories, all you had to do was tell it! Hollywood seems to have lost the ability to tell a story without injecting unwanted, portentious and tedious commentary, and ‘just plain dumb’ mistakes.
My 16 year old liked it for the ‘cool CGI’, as 16 year old’s do. I told him I’d be in the Irish pub around the corner when it was done. Kilkenny on tap and T.S. Eliot’s selection of Rudyard Kipling is an excellent anodyne to a woeful film.
{BTW, like Eliot, I do not think I understand Kipling’s enigmatic poem ‘Gethsemane’; any opinions on it would be appreciated.}
Like you, I suspect, I am not surprised that Hollywood’s takings are down so far this year.
MarkL
Canberra
…and thus the book seems to live in a strange not-quite East Coast North American warp of some kind. This just isn’t right, and you might be able to explain it better, Shaun, but I don’t think anybody imagines themselves honouring the highest culture in a good way.
Though I suppose Barry McKenzie did say:
I rather liked Spiel of the Warburgs. It never tried to be anything more than what it was – a rip roaring sci-fi thriller chiller, and actually much more faithful to the book than previous versions (and let’s face it, Dorking and New Jersey probably should be twinned anyway). Mind you I could done with less of a gay Scienctology multimillionaire trying to show off his blue collar single dad acting chops.
“First off the plot holes were enormous.”
Duh. It’s a fantasy. Haven’t you heard of suspension of disbelief? Name me a film without plot holes? I couldn’t give a shit about the faulty strategic reasoning behind planting war machines underground for a million years, only to be activated when Steve was loitering around the hood with a digital movie camera. They looked fucking great anyway when they were activated and erupted. Besides when did anyone become an expert on alien terraforming techniques? Sometimes a movie is just a movie.
“but it seems now that he is suffering under the weight of gravitas.”
Yes he often is, and when he does his fillums always close with wide eyed people staring at clumsy metaphors. I suspect Munich will be no different here. But when he just goes ahead and tells a good yarn without trying to make a big point – like Duel, Jaws, Jurassic Park, Catch Me If You Can and WOTW – he’s as articulate with film grammar and syntax as Hitchcock, if not better in some ways. And he always finds the best sound designers too. The noise of the alien war machines and their ancillary tech in WOTW was brillant. Massive, revving up and humming with otherwordly power.
Oh yeah, that “middle mind” concept. Sounds about right. My parents and their parents and so forth backwards, and me and whatever so forth onwards, just call it common sense and decency. It’s about making things better whenever you can for everyone else and just keeping on muddling through trying to make things better for yourself the rest of the time. Big ideas, whether left, right or just out there, always backfire thanks to the infinite capacity of human nature to fuck things up. But we always bounce back thanks to our fortunate ability to improvise brillantly.
But the germs will get us in the end.
Sorry Shaun, but the allusion to S11 and the Holocaust that you dismissed? I emotionally got it. I found the movie frightening (and I’m not easily frightened by a mere movie) for precisely that reason – at a visceral level, the visuals really worked in creating exactly the effects Spielberg wanted. Just goes to show how subjective the viewing experience is. As for the rest, well duh, I agree with Nabs. Many of the plot absurdities are simply part of the book itself. The main plot absurdity I found galling was how conveniently all the children of the hero survived but I think you were thinking a bit too hard there about all that other stuff.
” if the alien’s beams vapourised people (but left the clothes intact, a physical impossibility in view of the energies needed), how come the river was full of corpses during the ‘we all take a leak’ scene? And corpses in running fresh water skitter along the bottom until decomposition floats them, when they float face down, anyway…”
See, this is exactly what I mean. It’s a bloody movie and that scene was a classic Spielberg freaking out the parents (not the kids) moment. A great white shark can’t sink a 28” sport fishing boat but I don’t hear anyone complaining about the last 15 minutes of Jaws. Next MarkL, you’ll be explaining why the black slab in 2001 breaks all known laws of physics.
Yes, I know. “28′ sport fishing boat”
Yes Jason. I just didn’t get an emotional hit with El Spielbergo’s allusions to S11 or the Holocaust. in WotW and wasn’t frightened at all. Though the second time around the extended sequence in the cellar with Tim Robbins seemed more effective. But ruined when that Operating Thetan then ran out onto an obvious sound stage only to hear Fanning’s bloody screaming again.
As I said, good sci-fi at least provides some internal logic by which plot holes are justified. WotW does not. Oh wow, change the solenoids and the effects of an EMP are negated? Give me a break. A 747 crashes and there are no bodies but a convenient path to drive a car out of the neighbourhood. Yeah, right.
With the book, you do have to read it on context of what was known at the time. To do otherwise ruins the story. As I said, see Jeff Wayne as it is a far more effective retelling (and with better music).
Now Nabs I do very much agree with you that Spielberg at his best is a masterful storyteller. But those days seem to be further and further behind. And yes, some of the special effects are spectacular. And I do agree that the sound of the alien war machines was effective (it was effective when OT, TRT and Screaming Brat were trapped in the cellar). I won’t deny that. I just found the whole plot let the effects down. Good effects do not make a movie. See George Lucas and his last few attempts.
Liam,
The book the Middle Mind runs just over 200 pages but I can’t do justice to White’s arguments as they are quite dense (though remain accessible). But the book is very US East Coastian as you do have to wade through media shows and people that are unfamiliar to us Aussies. It is a USAcentric book though the central thesis is applicable to Australian.
With The Middle Mind it is about pretensions. I think there is an extended argument with regards to people wanting to appear sophisticated but not wanting to put any actual time and effort into doing so. Having big moments in films allows the latte drinkers to pontificate at leisure on important themes without having to say anything worthwhile.
I do agree with Mark L that Hollywood has lost its ability to tell stories. Though Jason may appreciate that I found Batman Begins to be a great movie this year. Finally a Batman movie that got it right.
King Kong of course remains an interesting end of year excursion. From what I have seen so far looks great.
Mark L,
You mean this poem? I think it quite plain. A soldier simply does not want to die on the battlefield. Yet he does.
Yeah but Jaws was a better movie than WotW. No screaming brats.
Btw, Mythbusters did a good job on the Jaws myths.The Mythbusters never lie.
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!”
“…I found Batman Begins to be a great movie this year. ”
But Batman Begins was riddled wih plot holes and implausibities. You really think the Chinese authorities would let a secret doomsday ninja hideout in Tibet go unsupervisied? If a grenade goes off next to you, it’s a not a ball of fire you can roll away from, it’s a bunch of white hot metal fragments shredding your flesh. Who can properly service what must be the frequently stripped gear box of the Batcar while maintaining total secrecy. Alfred? And you cannot dive off a skyscraper and survive while wearing non-aerodynamic wings, even if Morgan Freeman says it’s OK. Believe me I know this. Also Gotham City doesn’t exist and Liam Neeson is going bald.
You get the point Shaun. They’re all bloody movies, making stuff up to win our money and appreciation.
Actually the fact you are quibbling about the believeability of WOTW is a testament to how real Spielberg made the vision of giant alien war machines thunderously loping through bog ordinary suburbs.
OK, Batman Begins was pretty good. But I still feel Michael Keaton had the genuine nasty but charming pyschopathic glint in his eye in Burton’s Batman. And Nicholson’s Joker was the best example of a 2D graphic character coming to 3D life until Sin City.
‘reading well’?!?!
i thought the leavisites were all dead? pffft…
part of the blockbuster status of speelburger’s films are given to them by the second-tier entertainment media (circulation of his ‘image’='name attached’).
sure, but is this enough for them to matter in any critical way?
a more important question is: are they even worthy of being ‘read’?
btw, the trend is moving away from textual interpretations of cultural ‘things’, and of this I am glad. need to shift the semiotics to greener pastures and away from the grip of once-were-english departments. therefore calls for better ‘reading’ practices are really just calls to participate in the cultural industry in an increased level of subsumption. “ooh nooo, you’re not reading it right! ooooh nooo, let me show you how to read it properly….” yes, become a more efficient spectator…
Damme Glen, give me an actual point and I will respond to it. In the meantime:
Ying tong ying tong, Ying tong ying tong, Ying tong iddle I po
Ying tong ying tong, Ying tong ying tong, Ying tong iddle I po
I like big-budget special effects extravaganzas, and eagerly took myself and the niblings to see Speilberg’s WOTW. The simplest (and perhaps, most manipulative) scenes (for me) are the ones that stick in the memory: the flaming train, the bodies floating down the river, the clothes falling from the sky after the attack on the ferry. The Martian extricating itself from underneath the road in The Bronx and vapourizing everything in site was also way cool, in the most superficial let’s-sit-back-and-enjoy-the-CGI kinda way.
The plot holes were gaping, and insulting, but most I can forgive if they originate from the book — huge machines under the ground for centuries, remaining undetected, seemed plausible in the 19th century (although this suggests that moving the story to the present day and remaining faithful to obsolete understanding of technology was a fundamentally flawed concept). Still, I can forgive that, just. I can even forgive some of the “WTF?” moments in the film, such as the jumbo jet crashing without any bodies bit.
But what I can’t forgive is the final scenes of this film. They were too rushed and excrable. There’s momentum in the narrative as Cruise fights his way to Boston, but then, suddenly, he’s there and the war is over, with a brief narration from Morgan Freeman explaining the deus ex machina. And how the f..k his son not only survived that massive explosion, but ended up safe and sound at the family home? Unforgivable, and it spoilt the whole movie for me.
Jethro,
In the original novel aliens arrive in cylinders fired from Mars not from underground. Note the proposed CGI version of WotW intends to have a prequel that explains the Martian’s motives.
The final scene is indeed pathetic.
Supristi yacka-backaras Nabs. BB had a good story which makes a difference in regads to plot holes. I agree that some of the special effects (with the tripods) were excellent. It is what surrounded the effects that I have problems with.
I’ve grown to dislike the Keaton version of Bats as well as Nicholson’s Joker. Burton did not understand the motives of Bats as in the comics and it ruined the movie.
nabakov,
pffft! I wasn’t responding to your comment! lol! why would I bother? perhaps you didn’t understand my brief comments?
what, you didn’t get the reference to the conservative literature program forwarded by the mid-20th century Cambridge scholar FR Leavis? can you not comprehend that this position about ‘better reading skills’ is merely an updated version of leavis’s position, that the ‘great English literary tradition’ needed to be sudied and supported, but for the global mass multi-media audience? that apparently what the audience needs to be able to figure out is what is canon and what is not, then, I assume, they can be better spectators. sorry for apparently being so oblique in my one liner…
then I introduce the notion that the popularity of blockbusters should not be located in some ‘block buster’ essence to be deciphered by switched-on spectators with superb ‘reading skills’ and should in fact be found in the material conditions of the film’s circulation and promotion. Don’t most big budget films actually have half of their budget for saturation advertising and the like? what, you can’t grasp this simple point about the cultural industries?
to respond to your last comment. I think you need to clarify that you are referring to hollywoodified ‘coming to life’ of 2d characters, because there are many Japanese manga to anime to ‘real life’ transformations that cetainly challenge your claim. Example that comes to mind (and would not be to eveyone’s taste) is the manga Initial D that became an anime tv series and now recently a live action film.
Somehow I doubt you’ve read much Leavis, Glen. It’s hard to imagine anyone who’d vomit bile onto Spielberg’s cinema more convulsively than he would. Leavisite literary criticism is just that, literary criticism; it can’t be “updated” for application to other media.
I quite liked TWotW (saw it twice in the cinema); in spite of vigorously agreeing with everything that’s been said about dwarfish gay Scientologists, the crapness of the ending, evil sprog Dakota Fanning etc. The long sequence about the first alien invasion I thought was genuinely scary.
Something that surprised me a bit was that it didn’t seem particularly dedicated to laying out an extended allegory of 9/11 or any other identifiable traumatic event. There were hints, sure, but I think you could still read your own favorite horror – war, genocide, colonisation, plague – into the movie without much external interference. What this suggests to me is perhaps not flattering to Spielberg; he’s more interested in getting his slimy paws into our imaginations, and playing our emotions like Phil Dickian mood mellotrons, than in engaging with real history in any genuine way.
The best thing about TWoTW belongs to Wells, and I’m willing to give Spielberg credit for not changing it too much. The aliens aren’t defeated by any heroic histrionics on the part of humankind. Although now I think of it, Cruise did get his contractual alien-slaughtering end away there.
And the best version of TWoTW is Orson Welles’s. You can hear it easy enough with a bit of Googling. Creepy stuff!
I sorta kinda liked it – yeah, there were bits that didn’t make sense even within the film’s own logic, which for my money is the key to a film “making sense”. Compare it with, say, ‘The Island’ — now that didn’t make sense at all, it had NO internal logic, and it was a shambles.
In other words, I get what you’re saying Nabs, but there should never be a jarring moment of “that doesn’t make sense!” in a film, even if it DOESN’T (in the real world) make sense. Take Star Wars: we all know space is silent ’cause there’s no air. But in the logic of the movie, it doesn’t matter. It’s not jarring, it doesn’t disrupt the film.
I do, however, get a bit sick of Speilberg’s Daddy Issues. (Take not, Steve: no more bonding with the kids moments, okay?)
As for the Middle Mind. Hmmn. Need to read the book to decide.
But certainly WOTW is not a top-flight movie, it’s a middle of the road, reasonably intelligent action thriller that, as others have pointed out, owes it’s debt to terrific source material.
Shaun
Yes, that one. What you say is certainly part of it, but the poem is very unlike the rest of his work and nobody seems to know why (certainly, Eliot did not, and people apparently asked. This was (according to a couple of things I’ve read over the years) a poem Kipling would not discuss. While it is impossible to fit all of Kipling’s work in to a distinct ranking of classes, this one stands alone, outside of the rest of his work. It is not hymn, like his beautiful and well-known ‘Recessional’, bears the subheading 1914-1918, yet he placed it very early in his collected edition. It seems very much a poem that alludes to something internal which he does not really want to bring out.
A bit mysterious all round. His ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’ and ‘The Mary Gloster’ are among my favourites, but he changed dramatically over his life, as we all do. The road between ‘The Ballad of the Bolivar’ and ‘The Storm Cones’, is a very long one.
MarkL
Canberra
Thanks for the background Mark. I’m not up on Kipling but you have sparked some interest now.
Laura, I agree that the specific content would not be the same. It was a cheap throw-away line! I confess! ALso that I haven’t read much of Laevis at all!! Only tidbits to understand Raymond Williams and the like.
What was my rational? the power relations involved would be very similar. In that Leavis’s problem was the identification and defence of an English canon. What was it being defended against? Its mass-dissemination (and therefore cultural subsumption) into the hands of an ignorant public. Again, here, it is the ignorance or ‘lack of reading skills’ that is to blame. However, as you point out, in this case it is not because of something ‘pure’ that is going to be polluted, but because something so polluted is not recognised (or ‘read’) as such. All we need are heroic critics! Or perhaps we need to start thinking about how the attraction is that perhaps they are not ‘read’ at all and experienced in quite a different way….
Middle Mind = Zeitgeist analogue…?