Popular Culture
The fires were the subject of a 1992 IMAX documentary film, Fires of Kuwait, which was nominated for an Academy Award. The film includes footage of the Hungarian team using their jet turbine extinguisher. The Kuwaiti oil fires are also featured in Werner Herzog's 1992 film Lessons of Darkness. There was also a flyover as well as some ground shots of the oil fires in the movie Baraka, which was shot on 65mm.
The 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate included a scene set in Kuwait in February 1991, with burning oil fields visible in the background.
In the movie Jarhead, the oil fires burn continuously throughout the invasion of Iraq, and its effects--an unceasing rain of unburned oil and smoke-filled skies, feature prominently in the story.
The 2012 music video for "Bad Girls" by M.I.A. features scenes in which a burning oil field in the desert is visible in the background of a few scenes. These scenes were likely influenced by the Kuwaiti oil fires without actually referencing the historic event.
Read more about this topic: Kuwaiti Oil Fires
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead-drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Both cultures encourage innovation and experimentation, but are likely to reject the innovator if his innovation is not accepted by audiences. High culture experiments that are rejected by audiences in the creator’s lifetime may, however, become classics in another era, whereas popular culture experiments are forgotten if not immediately successful. Even so, in both cultures innovation is rare, although in high culture it is celebrated and in popular culture it is taken for granted.”
—Herbert J. Gans (b. 1927)