Playing on Our Fears

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In his New York Times review of Spielberg's movie, A.O. Scott divides alien-invasion fantasies into two categories. On one side are those like "War of the Worlds" as Wells and Welles envisioned it, where Martians serve as "allegorical crystallizations" of real threats; on the other side are eye-candy entertainments like "Men in Black" and "Independence Day," where aliens are "temporary diversions from our true fears."

I think there's also a third category: stories that manifest actual anxieties, cloaking them in distortions and disguises less difficult to decode than those of the average dream. Spielberg's picture fits that category well, sometimes bringing its 9/11 subtext right into the open. "Is it the terrorists?" wails the hero's ten-year-old daughter as they first take flight from the monsters.

Numerous pundits have already chastised Spielberg for using "unspeakable things just to add some extra spice to a sci-fi movie," as a New Jersey reviewer put it. Similar criticism was leveled at his Holocaust drama, "Schindler's List," which tackles the 20th century's most abominable crime via suspense-movie devices aimed more at stirring viewers' emotions than prompting thought about history and morality. I think melodramas like "Schindler's List" and "War of the Worlds" have legitimate value as reminders--if near-subliminal ones--of very real evils in the very real world. What's different in the new movie is its eagerness to churn up inchoate fears of an enemy that's mostly undefined except for its sheer genocidal otherness.

In exploring the ethics of movies rooted in real-life horror, it's useful to compare films with 9/11 connections to the long history of movies about the Holocaust, especially those not interested in the "entertainment" angles that made "Schindler's List" controversial. These very different works raise similar philosophical questions in my mind: Can motion pictures capture the essence of events more vast and horrifying than anything encountered in the so-called normal world? And is it decent, or even morally permissible, to try?

Implicitly addressing these questions, Claude Lanzmann uses no archival or "atrocity" footage in his nine-hour Holocaust documentary "Shoah," suggesting that while the Holocaust must always be investigated and interpreted afresh, oral testimony does this more reliably than images, which may carry an inadvertent aesthetic power, especially when projected on the screen.

The same goes for Holocaust filmmaker Marcel Ophuls, who feels audiences have become desensitized to overused atrocity images--they "don't get the job done anymore," he once told me--and who doesn't use narrators in films like "The Sorrow and the Pity" and "Hotel Terminus," since this might turn them into mere "editorials."

Spielberg doesn't mind editorializing, but he's far more eager to entertain. I have defended "Schindler's List" as a worthwhile educational tool, given the alarming lack of Holocaust awareness among young people. Although it has far less artistic ambition, "War of the Worlds" also serves as an indirect reminder of a trauma we can't allow ourselves to repress or minimize.

It's a sign of the times that while films about the Holocaust have tended toward increasingly rigorous approaches, commercial movies evoking 9/11 appear to be molded--so far, at least--by Hollywood's investment in spectacle and histrionics. This certainly goes for Spielberg's thinly veiled fable, which is often closer to the horror-flick genre than to science fiction in its more speculative, imaginative forms. If its hysterical, Other-hating vision has any value beyond roller-coaster thrills, it's because this is the closest popular culture has come to giving 9/11 the urgent attention it demands.

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