Father trouble:: Staging sovereignty in Spielberg's War of the Worlds

This essay argues that Spielberg's War of the Worlds, constitutive of anxieties generated by Nine-eleven, tacitly cultivates an affective response of desperation in order to promulgate an ideology of paternal sovereignty. To this end I first claim that the film is about sovereignty because it re-stages a state of nature as a "state of emergency." Second, drawing on the work of Jacques Lacan and Giorgio Agamben, I argue that the father figure of the film doubles as the figure of a sovereign insofar as both represent the authority of the law, both are charged with protecting their people, and both have the power to assert a state of exception. Finally, the essay concludes by describing the parallels between the film's plot vis-a-vis the father and the narrative arc of the presidency of George W. Bush.