Via RCB:
The war has authored lots of odd media moments, none odder, perhaps, than that witnessed by anyone who crashed home at 3am on Sunday morning and turned on the telly to find Angela Rippon, live on the ITV News Channel, describing the skyline of Kuwait as "elegant". But one of the most consistently striking things about the coverage of the conflict – and every other conflict of the modern TV era – is the way it has been dominated by an endless flow of facts, stats and graphics about military hardware, from the sort of spoddy experts usually banished to minority satellite channels aimed at men you would rather not sit next to on the tube. (…)"As a scholar of porn, I look at this and say 'these are boys with phallic toys'," sighs Linda Williams, professor of film studies and rhetoric at UC Berkeley.
For the most part, the representations of war don't put too much store in reality. "I've never had a great deal of sympathy for Baudrillard… but there is something to be said for the hyper-reality of this situation: it is intensified reality, verging on the unreal."
All the lavishly reproduced fact files and whizzy graphics, the 3D cartoon missiles and gleaming formation of tanks, photographed from above, seem to be engaged in an enterprise as unreal as their equivalent in the sex industry – an attempt to pass something ugly off as something beautiful.
