For a few years, I've been fascinated -- that is, obsessed -- by the convergence and blurring of documentary reality with fictional entertainment. At each moment along the way, sometimes appalled but also amused and mostly just astounded, I've thought: this time it's gone over the top, this time it's really like something in a comic novel.

Like this time, at the end of 2002.

If you've been to a movie theater lately, you may have seen what looks like a slick trailer for an expensive new war movie. It's not. It's a five-minute promotional film for the new war.

Those are actual Marine commandos and Navy Seals on location in the Indian Ocean and Afghanistan. It's called "Enduring Freedom: The Opening Chapter" and cost $1.2 million dollars to produce.

I'm hawkish when it comes to the war on terrorism. But was this bit of agitprop really necessary? Those of us who feel patriotic don't need the show-biz reinforcement, and antiwar Americans aren't going to have their minds changed by a military music video.

Last week, the Regal theater chain decided to stop showing the Pentagon promo film. Which is OK, because the full-time private-sector providers of entertainment are doing a very effective job all on their own of turning war into entertainment.

On December 7th, one of the AOL Time Warner cable channels will premiere a new film called Live From Baghdad. I don't mean the AOL Time Warner cables channel CNN -- I mean HBO. Live From Baghdad is not a documentary, it's scripted and acted and stars Michael Keaton and Helena Bonham Carter. It's set during the Gulf War, in 1991.

According to HBO, Live From Baghdad "mixes outrageous humor and blistering drama as it tells how the brash CNN producer made history and reported it, giving the world its first live war."

Meanwhile, on the actual CNN today, I watched a splashy, branded on-air promotion for their new nightly show, Showdown: Iraq. Over at CNN, they're gearing up to give the world its second live war. Actually live from Baghdad.

As I said, astounding. No one can tell me that synergy is dead.

This is Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.

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