War and media in modern conflict

War and Media

In the epilogue of the Battle of Algiers (1997), director Pontecorvo, known for his "crowd scenes," give us a panoramic view of the city filled with hundreds of thousands of people who have emerged from their homes to make a great show of solidarity and support for the FLN. The war is over. They have won. The bigness of the scene brings a moving sense of unity, peace, and hope for the future. During the scenes of the war, however, we seldom, if ever, got a sense of the grand view.

For example, in one scene the camera is down a darkened well with two members of the resistance hiding from the Army in fear for their lives. In another scene, a father and son hide silently behind a wall in a small bedroom as soldiers search the house for them. The father, knowing that death is only moments away, tries to reassure his son. The small space makes for a poignant and intimate moment in which the "little people," children, suffer greatly from the war going on around them.

Only a few remarkable works really encapsulate accurately some aspect of the war experience. Most media portrayals focus on the destruction of buildings and city and fail to tap into the horrific imagery of real war with all its implications: lengthy and exhaustive trauma for the people caught up in the events. The emphasis on the landscape distracts our view from the true abomination of war and likewise, the unusual spatial attributes of the city at war. Erik Larsen (2004) argues that although war in literature is often presented as intimately connected to landscape -- either in the promise of a rich land the victors will win, or in graphic portrayals of the devastation to the land wrought by the violence -- but the landscapes are only symbols and metaphors for war, not what war is really about. For example, Iraq presently seems to be the landscape of war, but "there is no guarantee...that it is the most necessary or essential landscape of the conflict in its true global sense" (p. 470). That it seems so important is a problem of mediated images.

Larsen (2004) argues that media creates reality. War does not become "real" until it has been brought to our attention. Bloodshed and suffering are going on right now in Chechnya and Africa, for instance, but the media isn't showing it to us, so it has no reality for most Americans. The actual landscape of a war, which we see on television, for example, is not what is primarily important: "Literature offers a perspective on the relationship [of war to the land] at the same time that it constructs a specific version of it" (p. 470). Although war has always been a crucial focus in literature, the landscape is never an essential element of the war itself. The importance of landscape in literature is as a setting for the military action or to show an obstacle to the army's success: "The landscape can also be understood as a functional aspect of the movement of the army if a description is necessary to underline the heroic nature of the warriors, maybe as an insurmountable obstacle, which is, nevertheless, surmounted" (Larson, 2004, p. 473). Moreover landscape is often used as "a device to underline [the heroic warrior's] thoughtful character and indefatigable prowess" (p. 475).

Media portrayals of the war use the landscape as a metaphor for the war, and in people's minds, "The destruction of landscape...becomes the destruction of the natural and essential basis of cultural identity" (p. 475). In other words, the viewer confuses the two and sees the landscape itself as having primary importance in defining the war.

It is cultural identity, according to Larsen (2004), that truly defines the war, its behavior, and goal. We can see this clearly in the Battle of Algiers (1997), a film about how guerilla resisters won back Algiers from the French. Landscapes only enter the picture in terms of the strategy and tactics of the war, "battles, skirmishes, combats, and so on, or the campaign, as the actual slaughter is euphemistically called," but landscape itself "plays no role in the identity or the nature of the war or of those involved" (Larsen, 2004, p. 472). Not the landscape, but the social community shapes a war by establishing a political goal, a grand Cause worth fighting and dying for.

In the film the Battle of Algiers (1997) the backdrop or setting is the ancient city with its narrow winding passageways, tunnels, stairways, and arches. The old city is complex, full of danger and hiding places, a metaphor for the war itself and the participants who must survive. The issue is to whom the country should belong and who should have power, the French colonialist invaders or the indigenous people. It is about the indigenous people gaining their rights and benefiting from the country's resources. It is not about the physical landscape. The social community that has set up a Cause is a group of resistance fighters -- guerillas or terrorists, in contemporary terms.

According to Larsen (2004) Plato taught that war was a way to assert cultural identity, and the rules of war develop from this sense of how the warriors see themselves collectively: "Cultural identity defines the war, its behavior, and its goal" (p. 472). During Plato's time war was seen as a positive thing: "From antiquity until the nineteenth century war is the true confirmation of identity" (p. 475). We have not entirely given up this view -- at least the military hasn't. Advertising on TV, for example, still promotes the idea that military service can make a man out of a boy. But our values and beliefs about war have changed a great deal. Media has played a strong role in changing and transforming human values regarding war: "...from the nineteenth century onwards this martial attitude has been reversed or at least contested" (p. 475).

Ambiguity about war developed in literature during the Renaissance, when a shift in human consciousness manifested itself in the invention of linear perspective (in art) that allowed human beings to individually control spatial experience and location. Spatial manipulation became an "interpretive norm for human identity" (p. 480), and the landscape became a focal point for the ambiguity. If humans establish their identities through war, they cannot get it through landscape because war destroys the landscape. If location confers identity, that identity cannot be confirmed during war "because it is a self-defeating activity" (p. 480).

We are left with a paradox. On one hand, landscape seems to confer identity. But "the landscape of war is always the landscape of the others, the barbarians, the enemy, or the monsters. War as a quest for identity has nowhere to place that identity, no landscape proper, only a tactical landscape that belongs to others..." (p. 477). Moreover, soldiers in the field invariably invoke "concrete scenes and details from the daily life of the place left behind. This is the only landscape that confirms and supports the identity of people during war" (p. 477), the landscape that lies in the warrior's memory of home.