The Theatre of War

The Theatre of War, or ‘La Petite Mort’ Stephen Mayes and Tim Hetherington

Tim Hetherington, photojournalist and filmmaker, was killed in Misrata on April 20th 2011 while covering the civil war in Libya. Shortly before his death, Hetherington’s friend and colleague Stephen Mayes talked with him about his fascination for the front line and what it had taught him about masculinity, aggression and war. Tim Hetherington won the prestigious World Press Photo Award for his coverage of the Afghan conflict for Vanity Fair, which he later worked into the Academy nominated film “Restrepo” (co-­‐directed with Sebastian Junger). This is a continuation of his ten-­‐year exploration of aggression and masculinity that began when he lived in Liberia for five years, during which time he covered the brutal civil war with visceral intimacy. Stephen Mayes is a writer and commentator on photography and culture, and is Director of VII Photo Agency, representing many of the world’s most eminent photojournalists.

Death cannot exist without sex. There’s an obvious connection that without sex there is no life and without life there can be no death. It’s about flesh, pulsing blood and that hot, wet loss of control that marks the start of life and its end. We seek to manage the vicissitudes of life, to control our destinies but we abandon that control at orgasm and at death. It’s no accident that the French capture the experience of orgasm in the phrase ‘la petite mort’, expressing our joyous fear of the release that transports us from the world in the pure physicality that is the body taken out of the control of the mind. Shakespeare revels in the salacious metaphor of death meaning sex and in Sanskrit nirvana means to extinguish, to be blown away. Susan Sontag wrote, “What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn’t sex but death.”1 We fear it yet we seek it, and we will find it. And what man cannot control society seeks to contain. The experience of both sex and death is held distant from polite society; we don’t see it, we don’t hear it and we don’t speak of it except in metaphor and the theatrical circumstances of fiction and of course in some representations of war. We must understand though that the out-­‐of-­‐control experience of war and the sexualized fetishes we attach to it, is experienced differently on the front line and on the home front. The theater of war means one thing to the actors and another to the audience and as we cannot witness the performance first hand (or so most of us hope), we are dependent on the image-­‐makers to mediate the reality for our consumption. What better than photography to bring us into intimate yet vicarious contact with the action? The sweaty, bloody physicality of men performing society’s wishes is caught in the frame for our prurient fascination. “Society back home tends to eroticize war, to fetishise it and tends also to pathologise it,” says photographer and filmmaker Tim Hetherington, referring to the 300,000 American veterans currently known to be on medication, and also to society’s coy

1