Thoughts on "Over There"
Anyone else watch the premiere of Steven Bochco's new FX show, "Over There," about the war in Iraq? It's been controversial, as the idea of putting on a dramatized tv series about a war that's still in progress makes some people (myself included) uneasy.
My uneasiness is not completely quelled by watching last night's episode, in which a group of rookie soldiers tries not to get killed during its first week in Iraq. There are some awkwardly Hollywood moments in the episode, such as when the African-American recruit named Angel composes a song that just happens to be the show's theme song. (And not a particularly good one, either—it sounds like a beer ad.)
But still, there were moments when we saw a side of the war that we don't see on the nightly news. At one point, a female soldier is nearly shot when she's trying to take a nighttime crap in the desert. Not pretty, but I'm sure that this is how many of the deaths in Iraq come—in the middle of the most mundane acts, the combination of the banal and the horrific.
At episode's end, a US truck drives over a roadside bomb, and a soldier has his leg nearly blown off; another soldier tries to hold it together as the wounded man is lifted onto a stretcher. The agonized cries of the wounded man are truly haunting.
Who knows? In a culture where so many prefer reality tv to reality, and where the Bush administration won't allow photographers to take pictures of coffins coming home from Iraq, maybe it will take a fictional TV series for people to start realizing just how terrible war is—especially when it's based on lies.
