The local alternative weekly newspaper, which I read faithfully but only in private lest I inadvertently do harm to the demographic profile it peddles to advertisers — being neither young nor hip, nor much of a club-goer, I’m not the ideal consumer — poses an interesting question in its current issue: Why have the recent crop of movies about Iraq flopped at the box office?

The answer, according to an essay addressing this matter, is that they’re not very good, by and large, particularly “Redacted” by Brian DePalma. (That’s the author’s judgment, not mine. I haven’t seen the movie and probably won’t, considering how uniformly bad the reviews have been.) I’ll come back to this, but first let’s consider the corollary question embedded in the essay: Why did the war in Vietnam produce so many notable films while the war In Iraq hasn’t produced even one?

The author brushes by the most obvious answer a little too quickly, I think. He says:

It’s true that most of the Vietnam movies were made after the end of hostilities there, but it’s hard to imagine a similar generation of movies emerging from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, even after they end (whenever that might be).

Why is that so hard to imagine? Good movies, like good literature, are those that reflect nuance and subtlety. They explore the fissures between virtuous and craven behavior, between principle and practicality, between morality and wickedness. But those fissures only become apparent after time elapses and our understanding matures. We are still too close to this war to be confident in our judgments.

Let’s get back to the original question, though. The essay offers several other reasons as to why movies about Iraq haven’t done as well as movies about Vietnam: The desert isn’t as visually interesting as the jungle, for one, and in a cultural sense the Sixties were a more captivating time than the present is, for another. Ultimately, the essay cites the modern, familiar plague of sensory overload.

The problem may be too much information. That is to say, despite all this information, we have so little power to stop George Bush’s dumb, destructive war.

If the supply of information increases without a concomitant increase in power, the information becomes devalued. Knowledge is no longer power. But maybe art is.

That’s where the author lost me. If you can figure out that knowledge/power/art algebra, drop me a line. I’m still scratching my head.

I suspect the reason that the American public hasn’t responded to films about Iraq is actually pretty simple. We’re still trying to figure out what to think about the war. Despite the efforts by some partisans to paint it as another Vietnam, we know it’s not. The communists in Vietnam posed no direct threat to the United States. Radical Muslims, in contrast, are a real menace, not only to America but to many other regions — as citizens of Spain, Britain, Bali and Darfur, among others, can attest. We have to worry about the jihadis in a way that we never had to worry about the Vietnamese.

Remember that two movies about 9/11, “United 93″ and “World Trade Center,” brought in healthy box office receipts. The oversupply of information about that horrible event didn’t seem to dampen the public’s enthusiasm for those films. Maybe the unpopularity of movies about Iraq specifically is exactly that: They’re about Iraq specifically. And moviegoers understand that the important job of confronting terrorism has a larger context.

In short, who wants to see movies that are all close-up and no wide angle?

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