In the blitz of images, a defining moment

What is it about this war -- or about television -- that required three weeks to produce an image that will stick in our collective memory?

Start with the fact that we are seeing this war as no other -- immediate, breathless, unedited, fragmented, thanks to technological advances and the presence of embedded reporters. Remember, too, the ambivalence many viewers have about the complexities and outcomes of the war, whether they support it or not. And finally, look at the way television has increased the speed at which it shows images, until they now sometimes outstrip the mind’s ability to keep up.

The rigidly censored 1991 Persian Gulf War wasn’t like this. If you close your eyes and try to picture that conflict on TV, most likely you’ll choose one of two images: nighttime tracers over Baghdad at the beginning, or the bodies and equipment littered in the desert over the “highway of death” at the conclusion.

Now try it with this Gulf War. Before Wednesday’s toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad, you were deluged by so many hundreds of immediate, raw, fragmented images that they seemed to cancel each other out: roving tanks, a rescued POW, Marines under fire, jerky videophone dispatches, soldiers tossing candy, David Bloom, sandblasted orange sky, lilac-colored mushroom-shaped missile explosions, jubilant Kurds, Iraqi prisoners inside coils of barbed wire, chaos at a food giveaway, soldiers seizing an opulent palace, wounded children and captured caches of real or suspected chemical weapons.

Never had television besieged us with as many images so rapidly or simultaneously -- or, in some observers’ minds, so incompletely. Only Wednesday did we get what Richard Dubin, a former network television writer and director who teaches TV and film at Syracuse University, called a “plot point.” After a long, often-contradictory buildup, it was a moment that finally anchored the story and overwhelmed all the smaller images that had come before, moments Dubin described as “a series of postcards from someone on a long trip.”

The problem for viewers is that television is based on those postcards -- moments that have little significance individually, and are hard to interpret when they are laid end to end.

To appreciate why so little of the previous coverage had filtered into the collective memory, consider this everyday report, lasting one minute, 39 seconds, that NBC ran on April 1 about U.S. ground forces making headway to Baghdad. Reporter Jim Miklaszewski was on camera with 18 seconds of introduction. Then, in the next one minute and three seconds, as he continued his report, a viewer was subjected to 20 video images, each lasting an average of three seconds. Tanks. An explosion. A missile intercepted. A helicopter. Night combat infantry. Troops knocking down a gate. An American flag with choppers flying in the background. Troops seizing local Baath party headquarters. A locator map. A tank artillery gunner. Troops advancing on road. Shelling. Bombs landing in a field. Another explosion. File footage of Iraqi guards. Another map. Helicopters. Planes bombing. A fighter plane. A burned plane. Report over.

This is, from a producer’s standpoint, great TV because it seizes your attention with a staccato rhythm of action. Producers have also been employing simultaneous images -- on occasion, cable networks show a background combat scene and two talking heads at the same time, with headline updates crawling across the bottom of the picture.

Whether all this tells you anything -- whether it leaves an emotional legacy -- is a question that media experts and historians are grappling with.

“Because your brain is processing the images as they are unfolding on the TV, it does not allow you to think,” said Susan Moeller, a University of Maryland journalism professor who has written books on war photography and media coverage of international crises. “It is not provocative or evocative. You’re a passive receiver of images.” The most powerful visual story of war is told in still photography, she said. “I walk into class and I see my students lingering over an image, trying to figure out what’s going on, looking at the faces, the gestures ... making a narrative in their minds of what they’re seeing.”

Interviewed on Tuesday, Moeller compared the televised images of the war to “wallpaper.”

“It will be an essential backdrop,” she said. “If you think of it as a theater production, that’s the set. The characters who play out there will be the still [photographic] images that we see.”

Then on Wednesday, she turned on her TV at home, saw the statue torn down and agreed that, finally, television had produced a transcendent moment.

Watching Iraqis wield hammers against concrete, “I flashed back to 1989, the crowds attacking the [Berlin] wall, for souvenirs but also for getting back in a vehemently, passionate way at the literal foundation. Not only is [Wednesday’s TV image] a visual representation of the decapitation of this regime, it nicely illustrates the American spin of this being a conflict of liberation.”

Still, she wondered: Just what about the pictures would be foremost? The two Marines who covered the face of the statue with an American flag, or the Iraqis who put a rope around its neck? “Will this be seen as an American liberation or an Iraqi liberation?”

Paul Levinson, a Fordham University professor who specializes in the impact of media on society, suggested that viewers are better served by having to ford through a stream of conflicting images than settling on a single dominant one, like Wednesday’s.

“If we agree it’s better to be more in touch with reality, the single image standing out [in past wars] was more a projection than a mirror of reality,” he said. “This flow, these grainy images, quick shots, are really closer to the tedium of war, which is what war really is.”