Posted on 26-3-2003

Shock, Awe and Razzmatazz in the Sequel

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI, NYT, 23 March03

A decade or so after the Vietnam War ended, in the wake of a legion of Vietnam movies, some veterans put bumper stickers on their cars that read, "Vietnam was a war, not a movie." They did not want people to forget the losses that they and their comrades had sustained during the war. They did not want people to relegate their memories of that bloody and divisive war to flickering images on the silver screen.

With the new engagement in Iraq, however, the Pentagon and television news coverage are blurring the lines between movies and real life as never before, turning viewers into 24-hour couch voyeurs. In the opening days of the war the focus on television was almost entirely on the fireworks spectacle of the American air attack on Baghdad which looked on the small screen like a son et lumière show, not the deadly bombing of a city of 4.5 million people and on heroic and often unrepresentative images that deliberately recalled photographs and famous cinematic sequences: soldiers planting an American flag in Iraq with Iwo Jima-like determination; caravans of our troops driving across the desert, made famous by "Lawrence of Arabia"; a soldier tearing down a billboard of Saddam Hussein while video cameras rolled and smiling Iraqis looked on.

There were fewer images thus far on American television of the painful costs of war. While much of the world from the Middle East to the Philippines had seen videotape of American prisoners of war, broadcasters here initially elected not to show these scenes, and the networks said they would probably never broadcast the full version of the tape. American television showed little tape of Iraqi civilians affected by the bombing of Baghdad and little of the sometimes fierce resistance American, British and Australian forces are meeting.

The start of the war caused business at movie theaters to drop by 25 percent on Wednesday as people stayed home to watch the war, and snack-food sales and restaurant deliveries thrived. The opening salvos of the war had taken the place of prime-time entertainment, and television stations did their best to serve up gaudily produced coverage: the war in Iraq as the ultimate in reality television, as the apotheosis of every favorite Hollywood genre, from the combat thriller to the coming-of-age tale to the blow-'em-up, special-effects extravaganza.

As he watched the "shock and awe" bombing that lit up the Baghdad sky on Friday , the veteran reporter Peter Arnett exclaimed, "An amazing sight, just like out of an action movie, but this is real." In the last week other commentators and viewers were drawing a lot of movie analogies too.

The burning oil-well fires elicited comparisons to science-fiction movies; the plight of seven Tennessee families who had sent pairs of fathers and sons off to the war brought comparisons to "Saving Private Ryan." Allusions to the HBO mini-series "Band of Brothers" were ubiquitous, and the postbombing videotapes of Saddam Hussein (which might have starred one of his doubles) drew comparisons to the comedy "Dave," in which a look-alike fills in for an ailing American president, and "The Prisoner of Zenda." Even the Iraqis got into the act: in the days before the war, Iraqi television played music from the movie "Gladiator" to rally Baghdad residents.

References to the movies also occurred in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, planned by media-savvy Al Qaeda operatives who presumably knew how their acts would play on television around the world. But in that case, the comparisons with "Independence Day" and "Towering Inferno" were expressions of people's inability to get their minds around the horror, their failure to find real-life precedents for what they had seen.

There is an element of this inability on the part of eyewitnesses to the war, but there is also an element of willful sensationalism and sentimentality on the part of producers who want to keep viewers from switching channels. As for Pentagon planners, who have had a longtime alliance with Hollywood and who spoke of their "shock and awe" campaign in terms of high-tech special effects, they hoped from the start to present a sanitized view of the war, a strategy inevitably foundering.

In the hour before President Bush's ultimatum to Saddam Hussein expired, cable channels ran ticking clocks on their screens, the same sort of clock that ABC would later use in counting down to the Oscars. There were also the portentous logos: "The Final Hour" and "Zero Hour." After Friday's air assault on Baghdad, television anchors took to promising viewers that there was more "shock and awe" to come, and military analysts talked about how new technology had made the Pentagon "more imaginative than it's been in the past" and "more creative." It all might have been a trailer for the new disaster movie "The Core," due this month, in which the Colosseum in Rome and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco are destroyed with a "Matrix"-worthy volley of special effects. But here it may be recalled that many television networks, including ABC, CBS, CNN and Fox, are owned by multimedia corporations well practiced in the manufacture of entertainment.

Happy-talk anchors, more accustomed to talking about DKNY and MTV, giddily tossed around terms like "MOAB" (Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or the "mother of all bombs") and "B.D.A." (bomb damage assessment), while fashionistas debated who was this war's hottest Scud Stud and Studette. ABC featured computerized graphics called "Virtual View," which took the audience on video-game-like tours of Iraq from the air. Fox ran exclamatory headlines like "The Ultimate Sacrifice" and "Weapons Scandal." And MSNBC which concocted patriotic promos for itself with American-flag-draped photomontages, martial music and the words "Our hearts go with you" peppered its coverage with Olympics-style profiles of American soldiers and "Top Gun" shots of airmen climbing into their planes.

The first gulf war of 1991, which kicked off the cable-news mini-series form, pioneered this sort of hype, but the coverage of the current war has taken it to a new level. "The characters are the same: the president is a Bush, and the other guy is Hussein," Erik Sorenson, president of MSNBC, told USA Today. "But the technology the military's and the media's has exploded." He likened the change to "the difference between Atari and PlayStation," and added that "this may be one time where the sequel is more compelling than the original."

Though some television teams with the troops provided us with remarkable scenes of the war, giving us unprecedented glimpses of fighting as it unfurled in real time, such images were rarely situated by producers in any meaningful context. Glimpses of firefights, shot in the green Kryptonite glow of night vision, ran on the cable networks like outtakes from one of those car chases that routinely run on local television in California, and many cable channels kept split-screen shots of Baghdad on for the better part of the day, determined not to miss the dropping of a single photogenic bomb.

Just as news and entertainment have developed a cozy relationship, so have war and war movies developed an increasingly incestuous relationship. Following the first gulf war, CNN cashed in on its coverage by selling videotape highlights of the war, including a six-cassette gift pack. Three months ago, hoping to have a timely hit like the post 9/11 success of "Black Hawk Down" (which dramatized the failed United States mission in Somalia), HBO broadcast "Live From Baghdad," a television movie about CNN's live coverage of the first gulf war from the Iraqi capital.

It is a measure of our post-modern age of information overload that people increasingly see themselves as performers or spectators, roles that lend a self-consciousness to their own actions and detachment to the experiences of others. The Los Angeles Times reported that when the military liaison at Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, saw ABC's recent documentary "Profiles From the Front Line," which featured soldiers from the base, he observed, "It wasn't `Saving Private Ryan' that's what everyone was hoping for."

Because this impulse to blur the lines between the real and the fictional is so potent, newscasters repeatedly reminded audiences that the live scenes of the war they were seeing weren't a movie. But coming in the midst of television's razzmatazz coverage of the war, those reminders felt a lot like those coy titles that run at the end of docudramas: "This was based on a real story." In this case, reminders are meant to give the audience a racy frisson of danger, rather than a sober appreciation of the solemn business of war.