Of all the horrific elements in Steven Spielberg's 2005 remake of The War of the Worlds, the one that people seem to remember most painfully is the poor behavior of Ray's (Tom Cruise's) child, Rachel (Dakota Fanning), who screams like a little brat throughout, hindering Ray's panicked efforts to protect her from Martian laser beams. Her outright refusal to believe she is in actual physical danger is indicative of a generation for whom death does not "exist" except as red splotches in a video game. To attempt to convince her otherwise is harder than trying to get her to clean her room. Ray's other kid is a sullen lout named Robbie (Justin Chatwin), who thinks the invasion is somehow all Ray's fault, just one more in a string of fuck-ups by their immature dead-beat dad (their mom has remarried a dependable yuppie), and worse, Ray is now using  the Martians as an excuse to boss everyone around.

Cruise has always embodied the sort of cocky man child whose charm and eye-hand coordination has enabled him to succeed in life without the bother of maturing into an adult. WOTW opens with him showing off his skills at moving big boxes around in a ship yard (every young boy's fantasy). He's so good at it the boss needs him to work overtime, but Ray is already late to receive his kids from his beautiful ex-wife, Mary Ann (Miranda Otto) so she and her new husband can go "upstate" for a nice, relaxing weekend. The four of them are waiting with barely concealed disdain in front of Ray's ratty Jersey house, refusing to even argue over this insufferable man child's lame excuses. Ray's smug Peter Pan-isms simply do not work in the grimy day to day maintenance of two needy, spoiled kids.

Within 24 hours of the parent's departure, Ray and his children have already reached the point where no one is talking to anyone else, and Robbie has run off with Ray's car. Ray is in a panic at the thought that Robbie might get an accident (he's not old enough to have a license), but the panic seems less over the kid's safety and more how Mary Ann's low opinion of him will be confirmed if he allows the kid to get hurt. While all this is happening, freak electrical storms have given rise to giant underground Martian machines which are gentrifying the area in a big hurry, knocking down the ratty old buildings of Ray's town and vaporizing the blue collar residents with a giant ray gun. Yeah, right, like Mary Ann will ever believe this! If the kids get vaporized, Ray has no doubt he'll be the one who gets blamed, and it's this intense fear, more than the lust for survival itself, that seems to propel Ray's quick thinking. In turn, his kids, having not seen the Martians, think his throwing them into a car and fleeing the state is all merely some dumb ass stunt to get attention.

So what the hell happened to the square-jawed hero of the original 1953 film, played by Gene Barry? What is Spielberg trying to say? The real war of the worlds being played out subtextually here is the war between generations, between Ray and his bratty kids, Ray and his ex-wife, Ray and his own notions of himself as an adult. Ray as the Spielberg man-child who suddenly just aint cute anymore. It's like throwing the Tom Hanks of Big into the Saving Private Ryan.

The recent partnering of Spielberg and Cruise makes sense when you realize that Spielberg's films are at least partly responsible for the championing of the man-child, which began, ironically enough, in his precursor to WOTW, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). As early as his previous film, Jaws (1974), we had portrayals of men and children where the line was very clearly defined. Chief Brody and Quint are both men's men, but the Matt Hooper (who was no "kid" in Peter Benchley's original novel, and even had an affair with Brody's wife) as played by Richard Dreyfuss becomes the original Spielberg stand-in; short, bearded-- the geeky rich kid with the neat toys.

I recently re-watched Close Encounters in order to try and trace the threads that led up to this collapse of the adult world so eloquently conveyed in WOTW. From childhood all I remembered was the end, and the scenes of the lunatic Dreyfuss making mountains out of mashed potatoes, throwing uprooted trees through the window, and generally carrying on in the man-child manner all kids adore. This time what I noticed was the stirring of my soul at the scenes of men working together, for a common, professional goal. Spielberg contrasts the "personal" scenes of abduction, close-ups of bewildered, mouth-agape wonder, with scenes of organized experts in the African desert, beholding the arrival of WW2 planes and a ship, or quietly lecturing on the basics of music theory.  The film is ruled over by noticeably short men, there are no less than three here: Dreyfuss's character Roy, French New Wave icon Francoise Truffaut as U.N.-sanctioned head of the UFO greeting committee, Claude Lacombe, and Lacombe's bearded, bespectacled translator.

The presence of French New Wave icon Truffaut is one of the great genius stunt castings in 1970's cinema. He brings an authentic film director gravitas that can only come from experience. When he marches across the platform wherein the aliens will land, to test the speakers and light show system that will communicate with the aliens, he has an authority that is free of ego, something uniquely French, the mix of shortness, smallness of figure, benevolent use of power. We assume this is how Spielberg must be on his own sets. We can't imagine him anything other than a benevolent but thoroughly professional man, and those who work with him attest to that. These are working men at the top of the food chain-- but not evil--not using the alien contact for personal power. As with WOTW there is no expository dialogue in these scenes such as, for example, "We will communicate to the aliens via music." / "Could you explain how, professor?" Spielberg obviously wants these adults to be a little awe inspiring and mysterious. He allows the audience to be baffled as to what they're up to until it all comes together in the big light show climax. These are real grown ups, and we watch them from the point of view of children for whom nothing is explained. All we know is that they seem to warrant our attention; they are not afraid, and who are not reacting hysterically to the idea of contact from outer space.

Note also, that these workplaces are run by men; there are no women around.

By contrast, the "personal" stories going on in Ohio, with Roy and four year-old Barry (Cary Guffey), are surrounded by fearful women who impede contact. Barry's mom, Jillian (Linda Dillon) tries to keep the spaceship and aliens from getting into her house by lowering the shades and locking all the doors. Roy's wife, Ronnie (Terri Garr), lets the close encounter experience of her husband turn her into a total bitch, viewing his disturbed behavior with resentment. This resentment towards the man child on the part of the wife who has to raise "real" kids is even further amplified in WOTW.. It is Ronnie's attitude towards Roy that Ray imagines Mary Ann will have towards him when she gets wind of this Martian business.

What is unbearable for these angry women is that in the face of an alien presence their men are unable to keep it together, unable to remain calm and act the role of the father. Instead, they act like children and go running around waving their hands and whooping and hollering. In Lacanian terminology, they have abandoned their connection with the absolute signifier; the "keeper of the law," or "He Who Pretends to Know."  In Close Encounters there still is such a signifier, Claude Lacombe, who slowly becomes a fine figure of a father to the audience. By granting us an all access pass to the top secret goings on of Lacombe we realize that at the very core of government, the only thing serving as an absolute signifier among the men (who constitute the absolute signifier for the masses) is their masculine work ethic, the sense of no-nonsense camaraderie which helps them stay cool in the presence of the unsignifiably "real" manifestations of alien intelligence. No one in the inner group surrounding Claude Lacombe stammers and yelps and runs bug-eyed around the room at the thought of what they are dealing with, though there is an unspoken feeling between them all that this is all pretty freaking HUGE. None of them have, of course, dealt with this situation before. I mean it's ALIENS, man, for REAL! They have no idea what they're doing, but they assume an air of professional resolve. They're just folks doing their job. Like Zizek's description of communism and the relation of the people to the "Big Other," they pretend to believe in their own authority even though they know, and they know each other knows, it doesn't exist! In short, they maintain their purpose, power and status as absolute signifier via their male work ethic bonding, a sort of "whistle in the dark while you work" approach. If there were women in the room, they would either respect this (as Margaret Sheridan in 1951's The Thing), or--perhaps, undermine it (Gillian Anderson in The X-Files).