A saxophonist plays in a rooftop bar near Beirut, the music accompanies the ongoing party, while the dancing guests film the trails of the missiles launched from Iran towards Israel with their smartphones, crossing the sky behind him.
It's war in the time of social media, which returns surreal scenes, where fragments of nightlife in a trendy club overlap with the consequences of an escalation that is causing deaths, on both sides, and which risks bringing the entire Middle East into an increasingly widespread conflict.
The video posted on social media immediately went viral, with the recurring comment, 'Meanwhile in Lebanon', highlighting how the distance between peace and war, between music and missiles, can be shortened in a news snippet that reproduces a reality that is only apparently dystopian.
Seen from this perspective, war becomes a spectacle, the light trails of the missiles look like a video game or, at most, fireworks. But the path they take ends exactly where every single act of war leads: destruction, injuries, and death.
Just reverse the point of observation, and change smartphones, to overturn the narrative: the images that can be captured by those under the bombs are those of pain, fear, and the lethal effects produced by the same missiles.
Under the same sky
The sky is the same, the space fixed in the lens of a smartphone is relatively small, and those watching from a rooftop continue their lives.
But the music produced by that saxophone has very little to do with what happens both at the starting point and at the arrival point of those missiles. Considering, of course, that they rain down from both sides.