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.
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