America may be very much at war, but in the nation's pop culture trenches, telling stories about Iraq is a losing battle.
That truth has become increasingly clear as the same American majority that supported the start of the war in 2003 has come to consistently tune out feature films, TV series, books and nightly news accounts about the conflict today.
In July 2005, cable channel FX introduced producer Steven Bochco's Over There, the first TV drama to air concurrently with a war in which it was set.
Despite much advance praise, the series about a platoon of Army soldiers fighting in Iraq bombed in the ratings. It was canceled after just 13 episodes.
In the past two years, there has been a steady stream of theatrical films, some by such acclaimed directors as Brian De Palma and Kimberly Peirce, that have all flopped at the box office. They include Redacted, No End in Sight , In the Valley of Elah and Stop -Loss.
As HBO prepares for a July 13 launch of the most expensive TV production yet on the Iraq war, Generation Kill - a seven-part, $55 million miniseries about a battalion of young Marines in the lead of America's invasion force - analysts wonder about the cable channel's big gamble and whether any film or TV series can penetrate America's pop culture aversion to the war.
And though a debate over the war is still part of the presidential campaign, experts question how it is that so many who wanted the nation to invade Iraq now seem to be going out of their way to avoid bearing any on-screen witness to the results.
"I think most of America has kind of become numb to it," Eric Kocher, a senior military adviser for the HBO miniseries, says of the conflict in Iraq.
"I mean it's the same thing: Where are all the yellow flags on the cars, you know? You saw them big in the beginning of the war, but with America's attention deficit disorder, they lost interest in it now, and they don't want to see it anymore," says Kocher.
He was one of the Marines depicted in Evan Wright's Rolling Stone articles and book of the same title, on which the cable channel's miniseries adapted by Baltimore's Ed Burns and David Simon is based.
Philip Seib, editor of the journal Media, Conflict and War, uses the term "Iraq fatigue" to describe the mood of the American public when it comes to Iraq.
"You can see it in the political polling, with people saying that the economy is the big issue and they are not interested in the war," says Seib, a University of Southern California professor of journalism and public policy.
