Get the popcorn, there's a war on!

] The start of the war caused business at movie theaters to
] drop by 25 percent on Wednesday as people stayed home to
] watch the war, and snack-food sales and restaurant
] deliveries thrived. The opening salvos of the war had
] taken the place of prime-time entertainment, and
] television stations did their best to serve up gaudily
] produced coverage: the war in Iraq as the ultimate in
] reality television, as the apotheosis of every favorite
] Hollywood genre, from the combat thriller to the
] coming-of-age tale to the blow-'em-up, special-effects
] extravaganza.
]
] As he watched the "shock and awe" bombing that lit up the
] Baghdad sky on Friday , the veteran reporter Peter Arnett
] exclaimed, "An amazing sight, just like out of an action
] movie, but this is real." In the last week other
] commentators and viewers were drawing a lot of movie
] analogies too.
]
] The burning oil-well fires elicited comparisons to
] science-fiction movies; the plight of seven Tennessee
] families who had sent pairs of fathers and sons off to
] the war brought comparisons to "Saving Private Ryan."
] Allusions to the HBO mini-series "Band of Brothers" were
] ubiquitous, and the postbombing videotapes of Saddam
] Hussein (which might have starred one of his doubles)
] drew comparisons to the comedy "Dave," in which a
] look-alike fills in for an ailing American president, and
] "The Prisoner of

] The first gulf war of 1991, which kicked off the
] cable-news mini-series form, pioneered this sort
] of hype, but the coverage of the current war has
] taken it to a new level. "The characters are the
] same: the president is a Bush, and the other guy
] is Hussein," Erik Sorenson, president of MSNBC,
] told USA Today. "But the technology — the
] military's and the media's — has exploded." He
] likened the change to "the difference between
] Atari and PlayStation," and added that "this may
] be one time where the sequel is more compelling
] than the original."

] Though some television teams with the troops
] provided us with remarkable scenes of the war,
] giving us unprecedented glimpses of fighting as it
] unfurled in real time, such images were rarely
] situated by producers in any meaningful context.
] Glimpses of firefights, shot in the green Kryptonite
] glow of night vision, ran on the cable networks
] like outtakes from one of those car chases that
] routinely run on local television in California,
] and many cable channels kept split-screen shots of
] Baghdad on for the better part of the day,
] determined not to miss the dropping of a single
] photogenic bomb.

More on Iraq media coverage.