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High production values: U.S. Army Brigadier Gen. Vincent Brooks on the set in Doha, Qatar.
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Sleepless and video-shell-shocked in the CNN newsroom during the 1991 Gulf War, I marveled at how much like a movie it all seemeda theater of war. Why else would Entertainment Weekly have sent me there? Only CNN had cameras in Baghdad, and theirs was the only blockbuster movie in the global cineplex, the second-most-watched TV event in history (after JFKs funeral). Wandering around interviewing CNN newsies, I thought I glimpsed myself on camera at one point, flanked by monitors blazing with telegenic mayhem, and had a hallucinatory, unprofessional thought: What if I grabbed a microphone and seized control of the movie in progress?
But Gulf War I was a film directed by the White House and Pentagon, dominated by ridiculously unrepresentative images of smart bombs and Top Gun acro-ballets and heroic warriors recapping the battle. Time film critic Richard Corliss reviewed the Great Performance of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, our real-life Schwarzenegger, as if he were a movie star displaying all the seductiveness of the performers art despite resembling Jonathan Winters crossed with Willard Scott. Practically everyone with gung-ho footageeven the National Football Leagueput out a Gulf War video, and there was a CD-ROM of government footage, USA Wars: Desert Storm. (The game portion of the package, complained one reviewer, is both hard to install and neither easy nor fun to use.) With action like this, who needed Hollywood?
When a few regular movies finally got around to covering the war after years of avoiding the subject altogether (the same pattern of societal denial we saw after Vietnam), what came was way under the popular radar: Courage Under Fire, Three Kings, and Lessons of Darkness, a virtually unseen indie film by Werner Herzog. These idiosyncratic films lost out to Pentagon-style reality programming because they lacked the blockbuster aesthetics it takes to capture the popular imagination. They failed to reduce complex real events into simple visual symbols and formulaic narratives that slake our thirst for heroic wish fulfillment, fables of victorious virtue and vanquished villains, and happy or nobly tragic endings that flatter and reassure. Who needs first-rate movies that face the facts, as each of these three films tried to do? We need third-rate fantasies. What really sold on-screen was the reassuring image of Saddam as a harmless clown: Satans boyfriend in South Park, the Saddam look-alike actor in blockbuster farces like Hot Shots. Such entertainments offered us a cinematic version of the Gulf War that was, like the upbeat news footage, easy and fun to use.
The Gulf War II movie is not upbeat, easy, nor fun. Its no longer shocking that war comes across in cinematic terms. In 1991, it was a bit naughty of Corliss to review Schwarzkopf-as-matinee-idol; in 2003, no one finds it odd that the war is chronicled on Access Hollywood, or that Gen. Tommy Franks performs briefings from Qatar on a $250,000 set built by a designer from Disney and MGM, or that the producer of Top Gun (whose film inspired one of Gulf War IIs first U.S. flyboy casualties to enlist) is producing Gulf War news specials. Two-fisted Yale professor Donald Kagan, co-chair of the 2000 Project for the New American Century manifesto that laid out the case for the new American puissance, is entirely up-front about what were living through: You saw the movie High Noon? Were Gary Cooper. Of course the war is a movie; thats no longer news to anyone.
THE NEWS IS that its no longer one movie, but many. Instead of being force-fed one image stream from Baghdad via CNN, we face an unprecedented flood of video from all over the map. Its a free-for-all. Everybodys a director, each insisting on the right of final cut. Despite the best efforts of the White House to direct the entire war drama, not even the Pentagon will stick to the script: Commanders in the field contradict the clean, high-concept-movie message Rumsfeld and Bush strive to sell with the single-mindedness of the Weinstein brothers attempting to orchestrate the Oscars. Reality can break loose from the cocoon of orchestrated buffoonery, growled an editorial in Cairos Al-Ahram Weekly, the Arab worlds oldest newspaper. We are getting a pretty good notion about the smartness of those who think that highly complicated military operations [are] little more than a Rambo film, where the protagonist is often capable of downing enemy helicopters with the gun he has just snatched from one of the five troops he earlier stabbed with a knife, after having stormed their camp alone. Almost simultaneously with the publication of this article, Arab TV trumpeted the dubious Rambo-esque tale of the Iraqi farmer who downed a U.S. Apache helicopter with an ancient, primitive rifle.
The question of the hour is not whether the war is a formula film. The question is: Whose movie is it? Instead of CNN, this wars game-changing media entity is Al-Jazeera, beaming scenes from Iraq the most embedded Western journalist never sees, editing it into a Gulf War movie with an angry Islamic spin. In 1991, CNN showed us what Gulf War I looked like from the point of view of a camera in the nose of a smart bomb landing on an Iraqi building; in 2003 Al-Jazeera puts cameramen almost directly under the falling bombs for the Iraqi-eye view. CNNs Aaron Brown cautiously reports the smallest of hints of an uprising inside Basra; inside Basra, an Al-Jazeera reporter says, nope, no uprising. The first President Bush almost got away with hoodwinking the world about Iraqi soldiers who supposedly dumped newborn Kuwaiti babies out of their incubators until it was exposed as a hoax concocted by the spinmeister PR firm Hill & Knowlton. The second Bush must deal with unconcocted Al-Jazeera footage of an Iraqi baby with the top of his head blown off, the skin collapsing like a popped balloon. Indeed, effects-based technology causes less collateral damage than ever before possiblebut how can the dry facts compete with movielike special effects of actual butchery? Especially when the entire Iraqi strategy seems to be to stage such emotionally stunning scenes of butchery?
