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Landscape Of Horrors. The Obscenity Of Real War

The end of the year means the release of serious films jockeying for Oscar contention. This year, violence and gore play the leading roles in many heavyweights: Apocalypto, Blood Diamond, The Departed and Flags of Our Fathers.

These movies excel in make-believe violence that keeps getting more graphic and extreme over time. Hollywood is forever chasing realism even though we see the movies to escape. No matter how real the bloodletting – the screams of anguish, the reverberations of explosions – we know it’s staged.

Yet we block out the real violence in front of us. Even as the Iraq War dominates the news month after month, we have insulated ourselves from it.

Recently, Bob Herbert commented on this in the New York Times. He noted that the media images the day after Thanksgiving were of more than 200 Iraqis massacred by car bombs in Sadr City the previous day juxtaposed with “holiday shopping zealots… storming the department store barricades.”

We don’t want to know what the war looks like. That’s why, when I heard about nowthatsfuckedup.com last year, I had to see it. Part of it was voyeurism, but I also wanted to see the sordidness of the Iraq War, the military and America all at once: soldiers trading pictures of war gore for access to amateur pornography.

More than that, I simply wanted to see what the war looked like. I’ve been writing about the Iraq War for four years running. I’ve read well over 30,000 articles about Iraq in that time, but the war still seemed distant and antiseptic. I wasn’t disappointed.

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posted by ... @ 8:51 PM