The Iraq War as Entertainment

Images of the Iraq war are superabundant, and, in contrast to the CNN videogame simulations of the Gulf War, the style is now raw, on-the-ground, and usually in-your-face. They come not just from CNN, but from an overwhelming array of sources: frontline blogs, digital photos, terrorists' snuff movies, al-Jazeera footage of collateral damage, embedded news reports, short "War Zone" films, a dramatization of the war on cable TV, and a plethora of indy exposé documentaries like Gunner Palace, Uncovered: The Truth About the Iraq War, and Control Room.

The amateur internet and digital footage is usually too repulsive to watch, and even when it's not, a feeling of unseemly access attends it - should we really be watching this? But the slick, produced material on the news, on cable, and in the cinema - where most people still absorb Iraq, despite the new digital frontiers - now aspires to the rawness of the amateur stuff. Different genres of representation are melding together. Revelations and hard-hitting drama are promised, unprecedented access is granted, and a total view seems possible. What we're left with, though, is an increasing A.D.D. about Iraq - an inevitable effect of the glut of representations of the war, all of which claim to bring it all back home like never before. But they pose an ethical dilemma: Is it acceptable to be entertained by an "epic series" like FX's "Over There" while the war is still happening?

Another problem arising from Iraq's relentless mediation - a problem that I'm guilty of enacting right here in this essay - is that talking about media representations of Iraq becomes an easy substitute to talking about what the hell to do about Iraq itself. But one documentary in particular called Occupation: Dreamland, out in September, comes closer than anything else about Iraq to connecting us to the raw experience on the ground - and, hopefully, leading us to a real reckoning. Before we get to that, however, let's trace the winding path that will eventually lead to us to the elusive realness of Iraq.

Why "Over There" stays over there

At the end of episode one of FX's "Over There," a fictionalized drama about American soldiers in Iraq which attracted a handsome 4.1 million viewers and is already available on DVD, a troop carrier reverses gently onto a roadside bomb. We know what's going to happen because we are shown an extreme close-up of the fat tire rolling, with agonizing inevitability, towards a small white flag in the ground. Then, just before the anticipated contact, we get a zoom-out shot that neatly encompasses the whole scene for maximum explosion effect.

Film School 101: If you signal to the viewer that a bomb is about to go off, that's suspense - a classic filmic technique. If a bomb just explodes in your face out of nowhere, that's surprise - that's real, and that's how it happens in Iraq. But we can't begrudge too much that Steven Bochco, producer of the famously gritty "NYPD Blue" and now of "Over There," introduces dramatic effects - it is fiction he's dealing in, after all.

What's annoying, though, is the show's persistent claims of unflinching verisimilitude. Despite the arsenal of raw-and-real special effects employed to try to make events properly harrowing and immediate - an Iraqi's legs taking a couple of final steps independently of the severed, fallen, torso, for example - the show's ultimate special effect is to keep the trauma safely over there, on the other side of the world, and in the periphery of our consciousness. You can do about ten things while watching "Over There" and still maintain the necessary concentration - about the same required for a music video.

"Over There" is so obsessed with realness, yet so impatient with it, that it lapses in to the hyper-real: In the shoot-outs, we get juddery sequences that occasionally have the feeling of being played backwards - maybe to signal the disorientation of the battlefield. Lenses are warped, camera angles jagged and tilted, colors saturated. But the viewer retains her privileged perspective of events, and the stylization is so intense that we are never allowed to forget that we're watching "high" TV.