Pre-Note: Hey Vrooman, I changed my project from over JoJo's Bizarre Adventure to War of The Worlds. I'll make sure to go back and get an annotated Bibliography set up for it. I did this because I realized that while I could do a report over the original, it'd be incredibly hard as it's basically a one to one adaptation except with some things cut for time. I don't know when exactly I'll get it posted, but it'll for sure be before I present on this.
The Beginning:
The Major Paradigmatic Difference: The most immediate and notable difference between the War of the Worlds Radioplay (1938, Orson Wells) and the original novel (1898, H.G. Wells) is that the medium of delivary is different. Books and Radio are completely different in every way, shape, and form -who could've guessed- and because of that the story is told in completely different ways.
In the original novel the story is framed as a journal written in retrospect, that all of these events did happen and this is the Narrator's recollection of them afterwards. Whereas in the radioplay, the events are unfolding quickly and before the listener's own ears. Making it so that the audience knows just as much about what's going on as the characters. This change immediately rackets up the tension, because the novel is in past tense as the reader you know that everything is okay in the end. But the radioplay steals that certainty from you, it takes it from you and shoves you in front of your radio, hanging onto the rollercoaster of a story, where you know that at any moment things can go horribly wrong and the world may be invaded.
What This Change Signifies: So there's the obvious reason we could go with of "There's new technology! Let's tell a story with it" because while that could be the case, it almost definitely isn't. The choice to make War of The Worlds into a live piece like a radioplay was a very deliberate one. Meant to reflect the changes in how the world viewed war after World War 1.
War of the Worlds was always an anti-war story. The original piece can be read as the story of a soldier forced into a war and then having to struggle through enemy lines and having to make their way back home to freedom and safety. But after World War 1 ended in 1918, cultures had a completely different view of war. Before whilst war was a scary thing it was traditionally not the most intense thing in the world, sure there were skirmishes and fights. But without the ease of transportation that the 20th century brought making supplylines easier and fighting more hellish, battles were far less common. World War 1 took a look at that, said fuck it, and made everyone fight 24/7 in trenches and other hellish terrain. After World War 1, people realized how scary and expensive war was, everyone knew what the costs were going to be if the entire world ended up in a war of this scale again. And it wouldn't be pretty.
So that was all a long tangent to basically say, the change to framing the story as a live event told over the radio reflects the world's fears at that time of another large-scale war breaking out and seeing that scale of death once more.
A well done look at the difference between the two adaptations. I think that with something as symbolically heavy as War of The Worlds you should definitely focus on how the world perceived war differently between the two iterations. Focus on apparatus and social history overall, and when focusing on genre, you should try and focus on how war movies in general had shifted over time. This topic definitely has the ability to go over all the main ideas and subtopics with a lot of good points
ReplyDeleteI really like how your topic makes you break down what happened and how that affected people's perceptions of war. Whether some of us have seen War of the Worlds or not, everyone wants to hear about War, so I think the concept will grab everyone in the audiences attention as well as give you solid context for your points.
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