In this paper, I examine the emerging phenomenon of literary and filmic works that take as their subject, various types of “backward glances” at the Lebanese Civil War, by or about eye-witnesses or those who experienced it directly, from the vantage point of thirty years from the time of the events portrayed. In addition to the topic/subject matter of these works and their specific distance in time from events portrayed, one of the distinctive features that these works exhibit is the highly stylized and aesthetically self-conscious representations of the violence of the Civil War, some of which clearly deliberately juxtapose or bring within the same frame the horrific and the graceful or beautiful. In this paper, these instances of aestheticized violence are shown to only partially fall within the purview of Baudrillard’s well-known formulations about the aestheticazation of violence, which highlight the operations of simulations and the play of images and signs, much of which is produced uncritically (i.e., without casting a critical lens on the violence represented). For in the representations I examine, the highly stylized modes of representing violent scenes from the Lebanese Civil war contribute to the construction of a critical discourse about and deconstruction of the violence represented, not simply a reproduction of it. The three main works I will discuss (selected from a larger set of works, due to time constraints) are Lebanese- Canadian Wajdi Mouawad’s play “Incendies”/ Scorched (2003) [specific productions of it] Israeli Ari Folman’s graphic/animated film “Waltz with Bashir,” (2008), and Lebanese author and artist Lamia Ziade’s “Bye, Bye Babylone: Beyrouth 1975-1979. In Incendies, I focus on the portrayal of Nihad, or Abu Tareq, a sniper who dances with his machine-gun as an intimate partner to music, while also making photographic artwork of his kills. I analyze a similar scene in Folman’s “Waltz with Bashir” in which an Israeli soldier “waltzes” while shooting in the streets of Beirut, as well as the film’s extended stylized representation in its graphic form, with this brought starkly into view with the sudden “real” footage of the Sabra and Shatilla massacre at the film’s end. Ziade’s “almost” graphic memoir is full of the author’s drawings/paintings of popular cultural images (e.g. brand names and packages of western products) woven seamlessly with “pretty” military and violent images.