War & Peace Quote by Alex Cox

Cox’s barb lands because it’s not really about sex; it’s about consumption. By comparing war footage (and the controversy around “that footage”) to pornography, he’s pointing at a media ecosystem that treats images less as evidence and more as stimuli: something to click, binge, and move on from. Porn is the charged metaphor because it implies a viewer relationship built on arousal, repetition, and a kind of isolation. You’re not meant to act; you’re meant to watch.

The line also smuggles in an indictment of distance and control. Afghanistan coverage, especially in the early 2000s, was filtered through embeds, official briefings, and carefully rationed visuals. When images did break through unmediated - the messy, unflattering kind - the story often became the image itself: whether it was “appropriate,” whether it was “too much,” whether it should be shown. That’s the pornography parallel: not just explicitness, but the way the frame turns suffering into a commodity, abstracted from politics and consequence.

Cox’s phrasing, “pretty much along the lines,” is doing work too. It’s casual, almost offhand, as if he’s describing an obvious slide everyone can see but few want to name. Coming from a director, the critique doubles as a warning about visual language: when news adopts the logic of spectacle, it starts rewarding shock over understanding, and viewers learn to crave intensity instead of clarity.