Raining clothes

[draggedaway]

Only registered today, I dont think anyone has posted about this on here but apologies if I am creating an unnecessary thread. Has anyone got any idea why all the clothes were falling out of the sky when the tripod came past just after the ferry scene? I found it a very ominous piece of imagery, perhaps one of the most subtly disturbing things in the film, but I`m none the wiser about what was being implied...

[Poyks]

I think the "heat ray" was meant to destroy only organic material.

[draggedaway]

Yeah that occured to me, but how would it have been zapping people up in the air? Or were there people on some ground higher up? I think I missed a lot of details in this film.

[AlmicheV]

I don't know how it happened. But it could be another 9/11 reference. I remember sheets of paper falling after the towers collapsed.

[Lensman]

My thought was that captured people had had their clothes stripped off before being ground up for fertilizer, and that a Tripod had dumped a hopper full of clothes. Just a guess, but if they came from the level of a Tripod's baskets that would explain why they were raining down.

Just a guess, and frankly the Holocaust reference never occurred to me.

I still find the clothing whipping away from people after they were zapped to dust to be totally ridiculous. Even if somehow it affects only "organic" matter, plastic is an organic compound. So between that and cotten, linen, wool, and leather, very nearly *all* clothing is "organic" matter. And if it left metal objects, we should have seen things like buttons, zippers, snap fasteners and eyglass frames falling to the ground.

[BrutalDeluxe]

I thought the effect of the clothes being the only thing left behind a kind of reference to spontaneous human combustion. If you look at that (whether you believe it or not) all that is left is a pile of ashes and unburnt clothes. I think the theory is the body burns up so fast from the inside out that it doesn't have time ignite the clothes. I think Mythbusters disproved this theory, but anyway.
In terms of it "raining clothes" I think that was just to kind of give the impression that a whole crowd of people had just been vaporised and their clothes were floating on the hot air created by their demise. I dunno, I'm not Spielberg. Wait for the director's commentary.
I don't know if I missed it, but was there any indication in the film that people were shredded for fertilizer? I thought they were just drained and their blood expelled over the red weed. I could be wrong, which is why I am asking.

[Lensman]

brutaldeluxe said:

I don't know if I missed it, but was there any indication in the film that people were shredded for fertilizer? I thought they were just drained and their blood expelled over the red weed. I could be wrong, which is why I am asking.

Hard to say. I think the "bodies being ground up" thing was something I picked up from someone else's post; probably that's just speculation. We do explicitly see somone's blood being drained while they're on the ground. Later we see people from the Tripods' baskets sucked up into the machine, but don't see what happens to them. We see a red liquid spilling out of the Tripod at the end. It may very well be the Tripods only drain blood from their victims.

[RickyB]

Spontaneous human combustion burns the clothes too. Check below for a photo of the effect.



The theory is that the tissue burns the fat with the clothes on the outside acting as the wick. The legs and arms don't burn either because they are not clothed or they can't maintain the heat to do so. It normally occurs when people have a heart attack and fall on a fire (or drop their cigarette into their lap).

No, if you look at that clothes scene in the woods it came after the tripods were shooting people with the heat ray. The heat ray therefore zapped the people, sending their clothes into the wind. It rained down on Ray. There were a lot of hollocaust images in the film (human dust on his face) and I think that was one of them from the burning pyres of humans (the clothes would burn off and rain down on the camp).

The heat ray doesn’t just blow up humans, it blows up bridges and planes too…remember?

R

[Spirit of Man]

With regards to the clothes raining, if you look at the people being zapped on the hill in the distance, just before they run through the woods, you can see the clothes being flung into the air. I imagine they must have floated across a little and landed in the woods.......and probably elsewhere aswell.

[Lensman]

A good summary RickyB! Of course there's nothing "spontaneous" about these cases of human combustion. It is quite weird to see much or most of a body burnt to ash while limbs remain untouched. Physical analysis indicates this happens only in small, tightly closed rooms. As RickyB says, the victim falls asleep, often on a couch or bed, and a cigarette or other fire source sets fire to their clothes or the fabric of the furniture they are resting on. The fire flares up for a few minutes but then uses up so much of the oxygen in the small, nearly airtight room that the fire dies down to a smoulder... lack of oxygen also renders or keeps the victim unconscious. Most of the body is consumed as the smouldering fire burns the fat around their torso, but the limbs (most often the legs) may be left unburnt as the fire dies out before it spreads to them.

There may be associated strange phenomenon; superheated air above roughly waist level may melt plastic objects in the upper part of the room, but the lack of vertical circulation in the room leaves lower items unmelted. Also, light bulbs may be coated with an orange or reddish film; a film deposited on the hot light bulb by vapor from burning fat.

Of course, when the remains are discovered many hours or days later, the heat has entirely dissipated, leaving the average person totally mystified as to what happened. In fact, I think it was not that many years ago that experiments finally showed what was really happening.

[beagle]

The only time we see clothes raining down, is when they(Ray Rach and Rob) are amongst the tripods.. (just after the ferry scene)
The clothes are not clothes as such, but rags of clothes.
These I take to be the the ejected leftovers from the human fuel/food/fertilizer process that we see later on in the film.

[sunnyrabbiera]

AHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! MARTIANS ARE PERVS!

[BrutalDeluxe]

Yeah SHC is a load of b0ll0cks. The Mythbusters team pretty much proved that. They showed how it *could* occur but as was said, you need something to occur to trigger combustion, i.e. lit cigarette. Great show.

[HTT]

[glow=purple,2,300]As there was a great shower of clothes, I got the impression that they came in a batch from above.

As people get blasted, their clothes don't fly up to a great height - they simply drift to the ground. As the blood is extracted from clothed figures (as seen by Ray), then they're not from the captured human if they're being fed on.

My thought was that perhaps the harvested humans were stipped, and then the body parts rendered down to create the Red Weed - perhaps the Red Weed is humans mutated into a network of living veins or some such?
[/glow]

[draggedaway]

Glad to see some replies to this, as I was really curious about what it could of meant. I am leaning more towards lensman and HTT`s idea that the clothes had been removed from bodies pulped for fertiliser, but Brutal deluxe`s idea is interesting and that had not occured to me at all. To be honest, there are a lot of questions regarding all aspects of what they did with human bodies, did they use them as fertiliser, did they drink the blood, did the red weed carry blood, suck blood or was it fed on blood, and in all honesty I think its just morbid curiosity on my part! I dont think I am alone in this, and its not because I like the idea of people being horribly killed its just that I want to be truly apalled by events in horror films as opposed to merely thrilled or mildly scared...I suppose the sense of relief that it is just a film is all the greater if the things that are happening are really horrific.

[Zoe]

brutaldeluxe said:

I thought the effect of the clothes being the only thing left behind a kind of reference to spontaneous human combustion. If you look at that (whether you believe it or not) all that is left is a pile of ashes and unburnt clothes. I think the theory is the body burns up so fast from the inside out that it doesn't have time ignite the clothes. I think Mythbusters disproved this theory, but anyway.
In terms of it "raining clothes" I think that was just to kind of give the impression that a whole crowd of people had just been vaporised and their clothes were floating on the hot air created by their demise. I dunno, I'm not Spielberg. Wait for the director's commentary.
I don't know if I missed it, but was there any indication in the film that people were shredded for fertilizer? I thought they were just drained and their blood expelled over the red weed. I could be wrong, which is why I am asking.

There is a modern folk tale about a young woman who wants a good sun tan but finds that the beauty salon with a sun bed won't let her go on it often enough to get the deep tan she wants in only a week so she goes to two or three salons. Then she doesn't feel well..... She goes to the doctor who informs her she is dying because the sun lamp has cooked her insides. This is nonsense of course. Sun lamps do damage skin if used in excess and are quite risky anyway but they do not cook your insides. People who tell this story have it mixed up with microwave ovens which 'everyone knows' cook things from the inside out..... only they don't this is another urban legend where the woman (they are always supposed to be women ) puts her dog in a microwave to dry it after washing its fur and the poor pooch explodes!

These stories are very common in America and circulated in emails as well as person to person (where they are generally told in the format "A friend of a friend of mine...." hence they are known as FOAFtales) so it is possible that people are intended to imagine that the 'rays' the aliens fire at people cook people's insides causing them to explode et voila! Flying clothes!

Zoe

[Lensman]

Zoe: In my experience these are more often called "Urban myths" than "modern folk tales" or FOAF tales.

WWW.snopes.com is a great place to research Urban Myths and sort the true stories from the fake ones.

[dalek]

Hi,
If you watch the tripods in the background, just after Ray and co. get out of the ferry river and run through the woods, you can see them exterminating the people on the hill and if you look closely you can see the peoples clothes being blasted off by the heat ray. This is why the clothes are raining back down as they head off into the forest.
dalek

[smugster2000]

Perhaps they came from another blasted aeroplane?

[Marcus]

"If you watch the tripods in the background, just after Ray and co. get out of the ferry river and run through the woods, you can see them exterminating the people on the hill and if you look closely you can see the peoples clothes being blasted off by the heat ray. This is why the clothes are raining back down as they head off into the forest."

JACKPOT.

Lets not over analyse people, the simple fact is Speilberg had the clothes float off dead bodies to make a nice scene out of it, a disturbing, but someone captivating sight.

Pity it was without order or a goal. I imagine the deleted scene in the forest, covered in Red Weed wouldve made this scene better, and maybe even the entire film, help with pacing and all - and give a reason for Robbie being so whinny once we see them again.