Disposable Wars, Disappearing Acts: Theatrical Responses to the 1991 Gulf War

Abstract

This essay examines how the media inaugurated certain practices during the 1991 Gulf War which have persisted and are evident in the coverage of the 2003 war, establishing both a model of reportage and an intertext between the two conflicts. The media, in turn, is inscribed within what Baudrillard has defined as the simulacrum, whereby images, or virtuality, outstrip the real and redefine events in crucial ways. The speed of information transfer, which in turn produced practices of instant narrativization and relentless visibility, operates as a vector of power: images, and how they are conveyed, become informational events in themselves, affecting perception, policy, and strategy. Censorship was an important factor in the formation of public perception about the Gulf War, but more was at work here: specifically, the unreality/hyperreality of images, endemic to postmodern life, which transforms the status of information, the knowledge derived from information, and judgments accordingly made about public events. These dynamics are, obviously, deeply consequential for those cultural products committed to political critique. The second portion of the essay analyzes one such cultural product, a play by Trevor Griffiths, written in the immediate aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War. It is examined for its capacity to offer critical assessment and to stand against the phenomena of de-realizing history into media events.

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