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Like most film adaptations of classic works, Steven Spielberg's The War of the Worlds functions as a gloss on its source, a gloss that not only retells but also interprets the original text according to the values of its adapters. It puts me in mind of the gloss Samuel Taylor Coleridge added to his most famous poem. When "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" was first published in 1798, it told the story of a sailor who, after capriciously killing an albatross, was forced to hang the sea bird around his neck until he responded to nature with love rather than violence.
Filled with creepy incidents aboard the mariner's ship, Coleridge's poem was not considered "great literature" in its own day. In fact, Coleridge's friend and collaborator, William Wordsworth, denounced "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" as having "done injury to the volume" in which it appeared. Hence, when Coleridge republished "The Rime" nearly two decades later, he added a prose commentary—a gloss—to the side of his original verse stanzas. Only after the appearance of the gloss in 1817 did readers start to regard Coleridge's poem as high art.
Similarly, Wells' science fiction was snubbed not only by contemporary literati as too "popularistic" but also by fellow science fiction writer Jules Verne, who condescendingly wrote, "[T]here is no rapport between his work and mine. I make use of physics. He invents." Only after the 1938 broadcast and the 1953 film did The War of Worlds attain the status of "classic" text.
What Coleridge did in his gloss to "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" anticipated what any film adaptation of a novel must do. Due to the constraints of both time and the medium of film, it is impossible to include every incident or mental reflection that appears in the original source. Just as Coleridge would gloss 12 lines of poetry with only two lines of summarizing prose, film adaptations often telescope several source incidents into one brief summarizing scene. On the other hand, like a film adaptation that adds scenes not in the original text, Coleridge would occasionally gloss an enigmatic incident with more lines of prose than in the original 1798 verse.
Spielberg's adaptation of The War of the Worlds demonstrates both kinds of gloss. Whereas Wells has his Martians build and operate several different forms of technology, Spielberg telescopes all into the ferocious tripods that ravage humankind. However, while Wells' protagonist recounts his loneliness as he wanders from adventure to adventure alone, Spielberg (my abbreviation for both director and writers) gives his protagonist a son and daughter, expanding the script with their quirks and obsessions.
Like any adaptation, Spielberg's film reflects the spirit of its time. Mirroring the rampant divorce and "blended" families of our day, he presents a protagonist quite unlike Wells' highly educated, happily married gentleman whose servant brings him tea. Tom Cruise's Ray is a macho dockworker so out of touch with his children that he is oblivious to their allergies and interests. Though the children live in comfort with their mother and her affluent second husband, the daughter, Rachel, struggles with claustrophobia and the son, Robbie, disrespects authority. When their mother drops them off for a planned weekend with Ray, the children discover that their deadbeat dad has made no preparation, his kitchen table boasting a partially assembled car engine but no food in the cupboards. Into this context aliens make their attack.
In 2005, any attack on city-dwelling civilians elicits fears of terrorism. The War of the Worlds, however, is not so much concerned with terrorism as it is with the human response to what Coleridge called "motiveless malignity." Though many of the filmed responses are similar to those in the novel, they serve a different end, reflecting the different times in which they appear. In essence, Spielberg's film becomes a postmodernist gloss to a modernist story.
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