Humanities Research Institute

Nicholas Ruddick
(Dept. of English, University of Regina)

[Paper presented at “H.G. Wells: From Kent to Cosmopolis” conference, University of Kent, Canterbury, England, 9-11 July 2010]

Since Orson Welles’s notorious radio dramatization of October 30, 1938, The War of the Worlds (1898), Wells’s most thrilling scientific romance, has been associated with American fears of invasion. And since September 11, 2001, when the United States was struck by an alien force descending from a blue untroubled sky, Wells’s novel has taken on a new relevance in both popular culture and academic discourse. For example, Steven Spielberg’s 2005 blockbuster film adaptation was piggybacked by two direct-to-DVD low budget “knockbusters”: David Michael Latt’s, set in the contemporary southern USA; and Timothy Hines’s faithful travesty set in 1898 Surrey. And of the 87 scholarly essays on The War of the Worlds currently listed by the MLA, more than half were published after 9/11.

In direct film adaptations of a classic novel, i.e., when the production adopts the same title as the source text and draws directly upon its cultural prestige for publicity purposes, respect for the “original” is likelier to conduce to the film’s aesthetic success than close adherence to setting and plot (see Cardwell 193). With the science fiction film adaptation, respect typically might involve retaining some of the central thematic concerns of the source text, even if the mise-en-scène is relocated, updated, and thoroughly indigenized.

But in Wells’s novel, setting and theme have an unusually close relationship. A “topographical romance” by Patrick Parrinder’s definition (61), it is chiefly set in “real” localities in London and the Home Counties. The narrative is a first-person quasi-documentary account of the invasion by an advanced alien species of Earth’s greatest imperial capital “early in the twentieth century” (41). As the plot involves protagonists and populations in almost continuous motion, their normal routines utterly disrupted by the Martian invasion, dozens of places are mentioned. Book I, chapter I (I:i), beginning with a reminder of the vastness of the cosmos, quickly descends to earth at Ottershaw (44), a village not far from the primary narrator’s home at Maybury Hill (51) on the eastern edge of Woking, Surrey.

Before the invasion, the unnamed narrator, a speculative social scientist (187-88), enjoyed an elevated prospect from his house on Maybury Hill. Both his French windows and his upstairs study faced northward toward the sandpits on Horsell Common (47, 79) where the first Martian cylinder lands, and beyond to Ottershaw, where his friend the astronomer Oglivy had an observatory (44-45). Also visible to the northwest were the towers of the Oriental College (an Islamic Institute), soon to be obliterated by the Martian heat-ray (71, 79).

Thereafter the narrator travels twelve miles (73) east to Leatherhead to drop his wife with her cousins, then returns to Maybury. Forcibly evacuated, he embarks on a fugitive’s journey that takes him to the River Thames at Shepperton Lock, Middlesex (88), then eastward into central London, and finally to the vantage point of Primrose Hill (180-81) north of Regent’s Park. The narrator also includes a report of the experiences of his brother, a medical student, caught in a chaotic mass exodus of Londoners to the north. In I:xvi the narrator describes how his brother, who lived near Regent’s Park, gradually learned of the Martian invasion as he moved about the West End; then in I:xvi-xvii he recounts his brother’s adventures from Chalk Farm station via Edgware, Middlesex (116) to the North Sea near Tillingham, Essex (129), and thence by paddle-steamer to Ostend, Belgium.

The Martians apparently deemed Horsell Common (midway between Ottershaw and Maybury) a suitable landing site for their first cylinder (see 43). And from the slightly surreal narrative juxtaposition of Mars and Maybury emerges one of Wells’s chief themes. Before the debacle, the narrator expected to live a quiet, comfortable life on Maybury Hill contemplating man’s upward progress (46, 187), as theorized for example by the Victorian progressionist philosopher Herbert Spencer. Domiciled in peaceful semi-rural Surrey, he undoubtedly felt certain that Britannia would always remain inviolate, protected by her splendid isolation, the might of the Royal Navy, and Providence.

In retrospect, the narrator sees that he and his fellow-citizens failed to understand the nature of the vast arena in which humanity lives; in his case ignorance was surely wilful, as he was “a professed and recognized writer on philosophical themes” (171) with “a certain amount of scientific education” (51). The evolutionary logic behind the Martian invasion has since become clearer to him. When an intelligent species develops on a planet older than the Earth (Mars), it will have had more time than Victorians to perfect its technology. Should its existence be threatened by secular planetary cooling, then it will perforce migrate to the most convenient hospitable environment (Earth), driven by the universal Darwinian imperative to adapt or die (42). Aware of his own imperial context, Wells’s primary narrator makes a forceful analogy: Englishmen, crowded on their little island, deploy ironclads and maxim guns to gain territory and natural resources at the expense of “inferior races” armed with sticks and stones (43).

The real place-names cited in Wells’s novel serve to elaborate this Darwinian-colonial theme in three main ways. First, the catalogue of London districts emphasizes the size of the imperial metropolis and hence the magnitude of its capitulation. Second, tying extraordinary events to a familiar mundane location makes them more plausible: e.g., a falling tripod, its controlling Martian killed by a lucky shell, demolishes the tower of Shepperton church (91). Third, and most important, the obscurer toponyms assist in the novel’s satirical, admonitory agenda.

According to the Christian world picture, not even the fall of a sparrow escapes God’s attention (Matthew 10:29); in contrast, in the Darwinian cosmos, no species, however obscure its niche, is immune from usurpation by a more aggressive interloper. Horsell Common did not escape the scrutiny of the Martian astronomers. The narrator’s contempt for the curate is partly that of a Huxleyan agnostic for a disillusioned believer (see 183); but mainly it is a reaction to the infantile parochialism of the curate’s theology: “Be a man. . . . What good is religion if it collapses at calamity? Did you think God had exempted Weybridge?” (97)

The notable remediations of The War of the Worlds have involved indigenization and contemporization. Orson Welles set the precedent, exploiting American anxieties on the eve of the Second World War. Inevitably, New York, the great twentieth-century American world city, supplants London as the target of his Martian invasion. However, Orson Welles followed H.G. Wells’s lead by specifying a first landing site in an obscure but real location: the unincorporated township of Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, about fifty miles from Manhattan. Evidently Orson Welles intended to deceive his less alert listeners into thinking that an invasion was really happening: a landing in Central Park would quickly have been dismissed as fictional. But while Orson Welles effectively demonstrated that Americans in 1938 felt insecure about their country’s defences, he had little interest in developing the admonitory-satirical evolutionary theme that flowed from H.G. Wells’s use of obscure toponyms. The same might be said of the two main novel-to-film adaptations, though in its use of locations one shows more respect for the Wellsian source text than the other.

Byron Haskin’s 1953 film begins with newsreel footage contemporizing his adaptation to the Cold War present. Haskin then gestures back to the novel with a second prologue in which a voice-over narrator tours the solar system, explaining why Earth is the preferred Martian target. As in the novel, the action then comes quickly down to earth. The townspeople of cosy “Linda Rosa,” nestling in the San Gabriel Hills of southern California, are the first to spot the falling star. They live on the periphery of the USA’s western metropolis, Los Angeles, which by 1953 could credibly serve as a city representing American imperial power.

Haskin’s screenplay refers to several obscure places in the Los Angeles area in a way that seems to mimic the novel. However, because realism is the default mode of the cinematic image, Haskin’s names have a recuperatory, not intensificatory, function vis-à-vis plausibility. To clarify: most of the places shown on screen are not real exteriors, as budgetary constraints largely confined the film’s exterior locations to the Paramount backlot in Hollywood. The names attributed to places in the screenplay are mentioned to make us think that the locations shown are real.

However, “Linda Rosa” is a fictional small American town based on Corona, California. “Pine Summit” is a simulated fire lookout with photographs of mountain scenery in the windows. “Pomona” and “El Toro” (a Marine base) are mentioned but not shown, while the fictional “Pacific Institute of Science and Technology” suggests the real California Institute of Technology (Caltech) at Pasadena. Only a few actual exteriors in downtown Los Angeles later in the film promote plausibility directly: for example, the intersection of 7th Avenue West and Broadway, and later, the deserted intersection of 8th and Hill Streets. However, the street scenes of looting were staged in the studio and the destruction of City Hall tower was meted out to a scale model.

Haskin’s adaptation, though a fine film judged on its own terms, pays only lip service to the main satirical-admonitory thematics of the Wellsian source text. Haskin’s aim was totally different: to offer a balm for American fears of invasion by godless communists. Wells’s wretched curate, representing traditional religion, is his novel’s most contemptible character. Wells’s primary narrator offers up atavistic “fetich [sic] prayers” in extremis on Putney Hill (164), and later a prayer of thanks on Primrose Hill (183-84), but in retrospect he dismisses the significance of these utterances; bacilli, not God, put paid to the Martians. Meanwhile, the toll upon religious buildings in the novel is heavy: both mosque and church at the Oriental College are destroyed with careless impunity; Shepperton church tower is accidentally demolished; even the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral is damaged (183).

In Haskin’s film, by contrast, Linda Rosa’s Pastor Matthew Collins is heroic in his doomed attempt to appeal to the Martians. His statement, “if they are more advanced than us, they should be nearer the Creator for that reason,” is not as naïve as it seems: ultimately these Martians cannot be more advanced morally, for their invasion receives no divine approval. Moreover, all three Los Angeles churches that Forrester (Gene Barry) visits in search of Sylvia (Ann Robinson) serve as miraculously intact refuges for “lost sheep.” As the lovers are finally reunited in the third church and a stained glass window is violated by the Martians, the congregation’s prayers for divine intervention are immediately heeded: the Martians die, their machines are disabled. As Thomas C. Renzi notes, Haskin literalizes “the deus ex machina . . . manifested through faith and trust in the protective power of God” (122).

Wells’s narrator notes that the Martians were “slain . . . by the humblest things that God, in His wisdom, has put upon this earth” (181). But he immediately makes it clear that natural selection, not God, is responsible for our resistance to terrestrial bacteria, adding that man has bought his birthright to Earth “by the toll of a billion deaths” (181-82). Haskin’s voice-over narrator uses almost the same words to reemphasize that the Martian hand was stayed by miraculous intervention; his film ends with mass hymn singing in the San Gabriel Hills. From a Wellsian perspective, Haskin’s conclusion is delusional, a mad curate’s fantasy; certainly Haskin shows little respect to the thematics of the Wellsian source text when it comes to the Huxleyan question of man’s place in nature.

Spielberg’s War of the Worlds’s early twenty-first century setting is (chiefly) metropolitan New York City, where no sane person believes any longer in intelligent life on Mars. After the Cold War, after 9/11, American paranoia is evoked by the danger of internally fomented terrorism rather than by ideological conflict with a rival superpower. Spielberg’s aliens are of obscure provenance; what really matters about them is expressed in his movie’s tagline, “They’re Already Here.” The voice-over prologue hints that they have been drawing up their plans against the Earth for millennia. Apparently they have hidden their war machines in frozen suspension underground. When ready, they ride in capsules down from clouds on lightning-like electrical discharges, activating in a Frankensteinian manner their monstrous tripods.

Spielberg’s prologue shows great respect for Wells’s evolutionary perspective through a series of phase transitions: microcosmic to cosmic to local. In a bravura series of replacement shots, a cell nucleus transforms into a water drop, the Earth, a quasi-Martian red planet, and finally a red traffic light on a busy American street. The lower Manhattan skyline, shorn of its Twin Towers, is shown from Brooklyn, where the protagonist works as a stevedore.

Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) prepares to take temporary custody of his two children; his ex-wife Mary Ann is pregnant by her new yuppie husband Tim. The traumatic events that follow will see slacker Ray belatedly earn his fatherhood as he strives to protect teenaged Robbie and ten-year-old Rachel from the aliens and convey them to the grandparental home in Boston, while the kids also quickly learn to survive. Spielberg’s theme of supercharged growth to emotional maturity under traumatic external conditions is not emphasized in the source text—Wells’s narrator merely alludes to his own changed worldview transformation and hints at a transformed post-invasion social dispensation. But Spielberg’s focus gives his film strength, the three protagonists offering great scope for close identification on the part of a wide audience.

The early scenes that exploit recognizable, mundane settings to intensify plausibility are outstanding. Spielberg brilliantly conveys the bewildering descent of a force past human understanding on a representative urban community. The most spectacular scene involves the houses of Ray and his neighbours on J.F. Kennedy Boulevard, Bayonne, New Jersey. Nestling almost beneath the gigantic piers of the Bayonne Bridge, the domestic places of refuge become horrifically endangered as the bridge, signifying the massive human energies expended in binding together the metropolis, buckles and collapses under greater and more destructive alien forces. By contrast, the scene in which Tim’s and Mary Ann’s large suburban house is destroyed by a falling airliner is less effective. Because this house is not located in what feels like a community, the scene seems staged.

Spielberg’s most outstanding exterior sequence takes place at Five Corners in the Ironbound, a working-class area of Newark, New Jersey. Visible signs denoting streets (“Wilson Ave.” Merchant Street”) and businesses (“Fisher Insurance Agency” “Santos Florist”) are genuine, as Google Street View will confirm. Repeated lightning strikes have made a hole in the road, now surrounded by a small crowd. St. Stephen’s Lutheran Church dominates, but cannot sanctify, what happens at this crossroads: its nave is wrenched into two, the forepart lurches ominously forward, then the steeple topples; the church has become a plaything of chthonic forces. This scene in very much in the Wellsian spirit, and the contrast between it and the ones in Haskin’s film portraying miraculously undamaged Los Angeles churches could hardly be more striking.

Then a car is flung heavenward by a giant unseen hand; the onlookers are stunned into disbelieving stasis. The absolute alienness of the giant emerging from underground is conveyed by the appalled expressions of the crowd, in shots reminiscent of the amateur eye-level footage of witnesses of the 9/11 attack in lower Manhattan. A dropped videocamera records mass flight down a narrow suburban street; random individuals, fleeing in panic, are blasted into non-existence from behind by the heat ray.

Spielberg elsewhere depicts specific localities, such as when a tripod capsizes the Hudson ferry at Athens, New York. But though his huge budget allows him to reproduce the novel’s war machines in all their massive horror, no more than Haskin does he rehearse Wells’s agenda of revising humanity’s place in a Darwinian cosmos, or his indirect theme of the horror of colonialism. Spielberg’s aim is to exploit topical American anxieties about a destructive enemy lying in wait in spite of “Homeland Security” and the strictly policed borders of the USA. It is significant that the title of Spielberg’s film lacks the novel’s first definite article; the greatest popular film-maker of our time is respectful enough of his literary source text to suggest that his adaptation is not The definitive one.

Spielberg’s film pays due respect to his significant remediating predecessors. Orson Welles is remembered via the New Jersey setting. Haskin is paid full homage: for example, there are cameos by Ann Robinson and Gene Barry as the Ferrier kids’ grandparents; and there is a reprise of the famous scene in which a dying alien arm protrudes from a hatch. Yet thematically Spielberg shows more respect for the Wellsian source text than Haskin did. While the City of Angels receives divine protection, Bayonne and Newark, as morally unexceptional as Weybridge, are not exempt from destruction.

Works Cited

Cardwell, Sarah. “Literature on the Small Screen: Television Adaptations.” The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen. Eds. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 181-95.

H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. Dir. David Michael Latt. DVD, 93 mins. The Asylum, 2005.

H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. Dir. Timothy Hines. DVD, 180 mins. Pendragon, 2005.

Parrinder, Patrick. “From Mary Shelley to The War of the Worlds: The Thames Valley Catastrophe.” Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and Its Precursors. Ed. David Seed. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995. 58-74.

Renzi, Thomas C., H.G. Wells: Six Scientific Romances Adapted for Film. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2004.

War of the Worlds. Dir. Steven Spielberg. DVD, 117 mins. DreamWorks, 2005.

War of the Worlds, The. Dir. Byron Haskin. 1953. DVD, 85 mins. Paramount, 2005.

War of the Worlds, The. Dir. Orson Welles. Radio Broadcast, 60 mins. Mercury Theater on the Air (30 October 1938).

Wells, H.G. The War of the Worlds. 1898. Ed. Martin A. Danahay. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2003.