The Shining
we'll always have paris (hilton)

Now, who does that soldier remind me of? The one, crouching under cover of darkness, whispering to the camera on CNN or BBC World or Euronews. He may have a different name, and a different rank, each time, but essentially he looks like the same man each time. The same soldier. Why? Because he has that same look in the eye. The look of a bunny caught in the headlights. And I'm not talking metaphorically, but literally. He has that same ghostly flash in the eyes: like when a deer, or a cat, or a bunny is caught in the car headlights, and the back of the cornea flashes that amazing glowing glimmer - as if this creature were a visitor from another world, another time, another place on the UV light spectrum.

For that is finally what makes all these men look the same: the increasing use of night-vision "image-intensifying" camera technology. For whether they are the soldiers themselves, or the whimpering Iraqi families that such soldiers are rounding up in the middle-of-the-night, something about this spectral special-effect turns everyone into the same species. They all suddenly appear on TV as simply "the night-lit people": the green gremlins of nocturnal war-torn countries. They become the washed-out figures of a sickly shining, shuffling like the living-dead, ironically beamed via satellite to our tastefully-lit "living"-rooms.

But that still doesn't answer my question. Who exactly do all these infrared people look like? Ah yes! Now I remember. Paris Hilton. No, not the actual hotel, but the heiress of the Hilton family fortune, with the preposterously perfect name. The very same "heir-head" who has been in the news for the past few weeks; less because of the Reality TV series which she currently stars, "The Simple Life," but because of the pornographic footage which has been circulating on the Internet. This footage also happens to be shot in ghostly night-vision, and the eyes of the 19 year-old Paris flash just like the soldier's, just like the Iraqi families, and just like the cats, bunnies, and deer caught in the headlights.

This footage is a remarkable document, because it illustrates just how far we've come since those relatively carefree days of the late 1990s, when the scandal du jour was a stolen home-video of Tommy Lee boning his wife Pamela on a boat in the California sunshine. It may seem ironic, talking about do-it-yourself pornography with nostalgia, but when we look back on that particular cultural moment, everything seemed so . . . well . . . innocent. Tommy and Pammy were living out a white-bread, white-trash, geez-I-love-you-who's-your-daddy type fantasy. It had a robust straight-forwardness about it; bursting with that rude and lurid kind of American health the Europeans so envy. In fact, in retrospect, I would go so far to say that there was something vaguely touching about this couple's horny ignorance to the troubled world beyond Los Angeles in 1997.

The video featuring Paris is a sobering contrast, perfectly capturing the spiritless zeitgeist of the post 9-11 era. It is bored and boring, creepy and claustrophobic. Indeed, the participants seem barely able to muster up enough energy to copulate for the camera (a technology which cultural critic Donna Haraway calls "deeply predatory"). For a start, the TV seems to be on during the whole session, providing a surreal random soundtrack, and even expounding the virtues of the "proud African blackman, motherfucker" while this milktoast moppet sucks the equally blanched sausage of some guy who seems to be a rather porky-trucker. Paris' cell-phone rings at one point, and she goes to check it, prompting her partner to make the eloquent request: "Fuck your phone." And all the while, the heiress cannot drag her eyes - those glowing, ghostly, caught-in-the-headlight eyes - from the camera, in an act so supremely narcissistic that one wonders if Victoria Beckham could compete. (For her part, Pamela Anderson-Lee was obsessed enough with her heavily-tattooed paramour to forget about pouting for the camera, at least for the duration of the sex.)

I have unpacked this form of post-millennial malaise in my book After the Orgy: Toward a Politics of Exhaustion, and I only wish that I had this document at the time of writing to add to the pile of evidence for our current libidinal ennui. Whatsmore, this infamous video has given birth to an avalanche of spam, the likes of which I have not seen since the Tommy and Pammy extravaganza. For the last few weeks I have received over fifty messages a day, promising me access to the "full and even more explicit" version of the tape (of which the readily seen footage - it claims - is but a teaser). Moreover, because of the increasing sophistication of spammers, the scale and duration of this unsolicited tsunami must have broken all previous prurient records.

Which is extremely annoying, but it also tells me something. It tells me that this unassuming piece of amateur smut has struck a nerve, and my guess is that it is a combination of Paris' superfluous celebrity status, her distracted depravity, and the night-vision photography which makes it look like they could in fact be humping inside the Baghdad version of her father's chain of hotels. (And speaking parenthetically for a moment: wouldn't it be wonderful if Paris ended up marrying some guy called Fresno Holiday-Inn or Detroit Travel Lodge?)

Feminists like Judith Butler have spent a lot of time trying to point out the strong link between pornography and war in both the public imagination, and the media which fuels the public imagination. It is now established that during the First Gulf War, the US airforce instigated a policy of showing pornography to young pilots in order to inflame the blood, before sending these horny whipper-snappers off on sorties to ejaculate bombs over the feminized enemy. "Wargasm," is the name given to this confusion of sex and death, which channels the erotic life forces towards death and destruction.

And so a strange thing happens when we see the naked Paris, splayed in the green spot-light, as if she is a ravished victim of Operation Iron Hammer: the latest name given to the coalition campaign against Iraqi insurgency. (And quite an ironic name at that, since the US military pride themselves on their technical sophistication and surgical strike superiority.) In the seething unconscious of the public mind, Paris-the-spoiled-princess morphs into Paris-the-hunted-and-vanquished. Vidi, vici, veni. . . . I saw. I conquered, I came. And in a strange twist: the grotesque excess of the post-9-11 socialite becomes confused with the fantasy-felled saga of the Jessica Lynch affair, and this video symbolically stands-in for the one those nasty foreign rapists failed to provide. (Since "they" were actually too busy tending to Lynch's wounds, and helping her escape to think of acting out such demonized, stereotyped propaganda.) No surprise, then, to hear that professional "ghost-hunters" use night-vision to detect visitors from another dimension, and from beyond the grave. The equation between night-vision and pursuit, voyeurism and violence, sex and technology, comes full circle.

Indeed, it may only be a matter of time before the studio heads combine with today's jaded couch-potato to demand that Paris leave the relatively simple challenges of rural life, and be parachuted into Tikrit. Then we could all gather around to TV to follow her quest to find both Saddam Hussein, and a decent pair of Prada cocktail shoes. All captured in full night-vision glory.

© Dominic Pettman