52
Popular Culture Review
throughout the 20th century, the poison gases used in World Wars I and II were a
contained, limited phenomenon. The bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while
beginning in violence, ended in illness, spreading radiation sickness and elevated
cancer rates over large and unpredictable distances, inflicting emotional and
psychological devastation on a national scale, and fueling a worldwide Cold War
paranoia which produced the bitter fruits of McCarthyism and Stalinism and
forced a nuclear stockpiling that has hindered East-West international relations
ever since.3
This shift from violence to illness mirrors a linguistic phenomenon
observed as we consider the connection between illness and metaphor.4 Susan
Sontag has argued that metaphor is illness, a weakness of language and language
users we must work to overcome. Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s later study agrees
with Sontag’s, that metaphor—the “grotesque crushing together” of discordant
tenor and vehicle—is illness in language, but for Harpham it is a condition we,
who use and are trapped by language, will never recover from. Borrowing from
Roman Jakobson, Harpham distinguishes metonymy (literary “realism”) from
metaphor (literary “symbolism”) and posits the metonymic as the realm of
relative “health” in language. The separation between “us” and “them”
characterizing violence (above) resembles the separation of the realist
metonymic— where “boundaries are firm and objects are solid as they are in ‘the
world’” (Harpham 123)—while the blended fates of “us” and “them” defining
nuclear “infection” replicates the metaphoric in language. Thus our third and
final transition: from the metonymic status of separately discernible objects (guns
and butter, U.S. and U.S.S.R.) whose boundaries remain intact and thus spare
both from mutual destruction, to the metaphoric condition of blended, melting
images that almost hurt to imagine (bomb as phallus, bomb survivor as walking
dead). Yet the chaos of this unnatural dissolution can force a resolution into
successfully executed metaphor (Harpham 124), a recognition of shared
properties (the bomb is like a phallus, the Russians are a lot like us) which
completes the mechanism of the metaphoric device and, in the nuclear instance,
allows the aversion of catastrophe.
Paramount’s 1950s version of War o f the Worlds reflects these traumatic
world-felt transitions at the level of the political, the ontological, and the
linguistic; though as was the case with world events themselves at the time, this
cinematic transition is not smooth, singular, or complete at any stage throughout
the film. Instead the film lunges back and forth between the opposite poles of this
transitional space; though, more precisely, it ranges up and down a continuum on
which we may plot at least three points, three manifestations of this shifting
worldview—an ultra-metaphoric, an ultra-metonymic, and a middling, ambivalent
position which combines properties of each pole and where the film spends a
good bit of its time. The ttbr o f the Worlds stands out among the slithering
hordes of monster films created during the 1950s as being one of the few to have