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Using American Sniper as a microscope to examine America

Published by marco on

I have not seen American Sniper for the same reason that I have not seen Act of Valor, Zero Dark Thirty or Lone Survivor. I did watch one season of Homeland and lasted that long only because my watchin’ buddy refused to stop mid-season. This type of entertainment is mostly just the U.S. military advertising itself through Hollywood’s mouth. I’d rather read the news and come to my own conclusions without the hagiographies.

I watched Battleship ‘cause it had aliens and The Hurt Locker ‘cause the woman who directed it won an Oscar for it. Funny story: it turned out she won the Oscar because she’d managed to make a movie about American war in just as unquestioning a hoo-rah, patriotic manner as any man could have. So when Bigelow’s next paean Zero Dark Thirty showed up, I was once-bitten-twice-shy.

And now we have another hoo-rah movie over which the Academy has spooged six nominations and in which America onanates about its greatness on-screen, all directed by éminence grise Clint Eastwood, whose extreme rightward swing we’re all supposed to ignore in his oeuvres. That should be no problem: I never understood why Republicans hate George Clooney movies just because they don’t agree with his politics and I certainly don’t avoid Bruce Willis because I think his politics are laughable. Because they are. But he’s still a fun actor.

Anyway, I haven’t seen the movie, but I’ve read some interesting takes on it. The first of these was the article Learning from American Sniper by Rory Fanning (Jacobin), which advises us to learn what we can from the movie, even if you think it crude to claim that a movie about a highly politicized war that only just ended (kind of) is non-political.

As Fanning put it,

“And American Sniper deserves every bit of criticism the Left throws at it. But the film’s racism and enthusiastic support for American empire shouldn’t blind us to its lessons about the sociological and ideological factors that have allowed the US to stay at war for fourteen years with at least the partial support of an all-volunteer military.”

That the movie has broken all records for January and for movies of this kind says a lot. Anyone with a social conscience and a hope for America should take heed: dozens of millions of people loved this movie, not because they wanted to wallow in the shame of having sent a military to a foreign country to indiscriminately slaughter its populace as “animals” and “savages” but because they approve of all of this. U-S-A. Say it with me.

Even if Eastwood and Cooper have managed to bury some critique of the occupation somewhere, most of the people watching do not notice and they do not care.[1] Most went to watch because they read the best-selling novel about a soldier whose only regret was that he could not kill more of the animals. Hoo-rah.

Fanning continues,

“To simply write off Kyle as a monster would be to ignore the people, institutions, and history that helped create him. […] Eastwood also does a masterful job showing us how a soldier’s view of the world can be narrowed to the size of a rifle scope, of showing us how bonds between soldiers are formed: in combat, it seems the only people in the world are those standing to your left and right, keeping you alive. For someone like Kyle, all he sees beyond his fellow soldiers are wolves. After combat, particularly if a soldier loses a buddy, the racism that is used as a killing and survival tool can be hard to discard.”

Fanning here possibly elicits more nuance from the film than was probably intended, but still it’s a point worth noting: from the soldier’s perspective, the treatment of other people in this way is completely justified. But we should absolutely not inherit the perspective of the most traumatized and damaged among us. While it’s understandable that they feel like that, in the situation that they’re in, with the training they’re given, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right way to feel about it. Soldiers “in the shit” will always slaughter everything around them to save their own skins and those of their bodies. It’s been that way in every war or conflict since time immemorial. Instead of getting sucked in to that mindset, people should think about not putting soldiers in such terrible situations for literally no reason. The innocent civilians of every other country would thank you.

While I agree that the movie could be understood to be teaching a lesson about hegemony, blood-lust, alienation of the other and colonization, that lesson will go unseen, ignored and unlearned by almost every single viewer. Most are going to sympathize with Kyle, reaching out with their whole hearts in sympathy with his regret that he just couldn’t kill enough Iraqi animals. This is wrong, horribly, horribly wrong.

However, for anyone who does see the well-hidden lessons in a film like this, there is work to do. It’s time to point it out to others, let them know what you’re seeing if they can’t see it for themselves. Make movies like this—because there will be more—do some work for good instead of letting it serve purely as propaganda for further, future military interventions. It’s an uphill battle, fighting against decades of propaganda and brainwashing about militarism and nationalism.

Fanning again,

“American Sniper can help antiwar activists understand what continues to drive many American teenagers to the military. […] But it is important to say more about the film than the obvious. We can start by asking why it is so successful and why it is appealing to large veteran organizations. […] As Vietnam taught us, if we want to build a successful antiwar movement, we have to engage the soldiers fighting the wars. American Sniper, if we take it seriously, might help us do just that.”

There seems to be less regret about the latest U.S. wars than Vietnam. There are a lot of soldiers and former soldiers whose attitude is no longer nearly as hoo-rah as it once was. The shine is off that apple, but there aren’t nearly enough resisting because the U.S. military still has enough soldiers to keep doing what it’s been doing for dozens if not hundreds of years.

Another review that is more nuanced than the standard “it’s awesome—hoo-rah!” or “it’s imperialistic trash!” is “American Sniper” and the culture wars: Why the movie’s not what you think it is by Andrew O'Hehir (Salon), which discusses how the source material is abhorrent but the quality of the cast and director carry the film to unexpected places—again, as noted above, once if you’re willing to look hard, though.

““American Sniper,” the movie, is a character study about a guy who sees himself as fundamentally honorable and decent, but whose simplistic moral code turns out to be exceptionally poor preparation for the real world and real warfare. How well Eastwood accomplishes that goal, whether or not it’s worth doing and how much that may or may not reflect the real story of Chris Kyle are all matters for debate.”

The movie seems to conveniently skip a lot of information about the third Iraq War[2]: it doesn’t prepare the viewer at all, instead dropping him or her into an ongoing conflict, the origins of which are not questioned, in veracity or morality.

A final take on this film worth reading is the article I Served in Iraq, and American Sniper Gets It Right. But It’s Still Not the War Film We Need. by Brian Turner (Vulture), written by a former soldier and which says that a lot of what’s in the film jibes with reality. That is, if the movie is a racist, hoo-rah, unquestioning, propagandistic pile of shit according to any right-thinking or even partially moral individual, that’s because that’s exactly what the war in Iraq is. The movie gets it right; the problem is the audience. Instead of being appalled by what they see, they scream “America! Fuck, yeah!” and queue up to watch it again. That the movie is being feted to the high heavens by actual supporters is a judgment of our decayed culture.

In the reviewer’s words,

“Those scenes dredged up memories of Mosul and Baghdad, where I once heard the words You are authorized to shoot children come crackling over the radio. I also remember watching soldiers in my own platoon lob plastic water bottles filled with their own urine at village children who would run to us as we drove by — thirsty children who motioned with their thumbs to their mouths in a gesture pleading for water. There is truth in American Sniper, whether you think the film is crass jingoism or a portrait of a hero. (Emphasis added.)”

While the author is “grateful that Eastwood chose to visually elide Kyle’s own tragic death”, I’ve read in other places[3] that this elision allows the further canonization of guns. The film can be seen as a paean to the gun, whose overwhelming power to solve any situation for good could be the overarching message of this film. Again, that could be taken both ways: Guns help America gets its message of democracy and freedom across and that’s awesome…and, well, the same message, but with that conclusion being oxymoronic and not awesome at all. Guns are one of America’s big problems domestically and America’s guns are everybody’s problems internationally. But Kyle was killed by a gun wielded by a PTSD’d fellow veteran, but this murder was crucially off-screen, so we don’t get to see a gun doing anything that even avid supporters of Kyle in all that he does would consider to be definitely bad.

I’m going to quote Turner at length, because he writes quite well,

“This isn’t the defining film of the Iraq War. After nearly a quarter century of war and occupation in Iraq[4], we still haven’t seen that film. I’m beginning to think we’re incapable as a nation of producing a film of that magnitude, one that would explore the civilian experience of war, one that might begin to approach so vast and profound a repository of knowledge. I’m more and more certain that, if such a film film ever arrives, it’ll be made by Iraqi filmmakers a decade or more from now, and it’ll be little known or viewed, if at all, on our shores. The children of Iraq have far more to teach me about the war I fought in than any film I’ve yet seen — and I hope some of those children have the courage and opportunity to share their lessons onscreen. If this film I can only vaguely imagine is ever made, it certainly won’t gross $100 million on its opening weekend.”

Chris Hedges saw the movie as well and his reaction is predictable: nuanced and probably mostly right, but very predictable. He also cites the scene where Kyle’s father teaches him about wolves who “prey on people” while at the same time menacing his children with the business end of his belt. The tells of a film that depicts a culture utterly unaware that cheering a film that depicts “the belief that we have an innate right as a “Christian” nation to exterminate the “lesser breeds” of the earth”—quoted bits are from the movie dialogue—may reflect poorly on the viewer, or at least reveal rather more than the viewer may have wanted, much as a rebel-flag belt-buckle would.

Hedges also writes well, so I’ll cite him at length, on the anti-intellectualism, the insularity of American thought, the depth of brainwashing:

“There is no shortage of simpletons whose minds are warped by this belief system. We elected one of them, George W. Bush, as president. They populate the armed forces and the Christian right. They watch Fox News and believe it. They have little understanding or curiosity about the world outside their insular communities. They are proud of their ignorance and anti-intellectualism. […] And when they get into power—they already control the Congress, the corporate world, most of the media and the war machine—their binary vision of good and evil and their myopic self-adulation cause severe trouble for their country. “American Sniper,” like the big-budget feature films pumped out in Germany during the Nazi era to exalt deformed values of militarism, racial self-glorification and state violence, is a piece of propaganda, a tawdry commercial for the crimes of empire. That it made a record-breaking $105.3 million over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday long weekend is a symptom of the United States’ dark malaise.”

Where Hedges and some others he interviews about the movie were made “physically ill with its twisted, totally one-sided distortions of wartime combat ethics”, they should be careful not to miss the point that this might be a very accurate portrayal (as noted by Turner above). Apocalypse Now was a visceral, horrifying movie but it was accurate. So was Full Metal Jacket. It’s more horrifying because it’s true. American Sniper may turn out to be that movie, whether it intended to be or not.[5]

That is, the 9-figure opening weekend means that almost no-one else seemed to mind the one-sidedness of it and most probably no-one even noticed it as such. Even the pairing of Iraq with 9–11 in a causal chain is, while factually wrong, correct in the context of the film. Most of America still believes that Iraq sponsored the attacks; most think we found WMDs. Most of the soldiers do too. Their simple mythology is undisturbed by reality. This movie is for them and, for the rest of us, it shows us what we’re dealing with when we try to right this heavily listing ship of state. It’s a lesson we would do well not to ignore.

Hedges quotes at length from the book that inspired the film—and the text is clearly much, much worse than the movie could be. Truly hateful, small-minded stuff. And, yet, this man is a hero. Again, do not look away; learn from it.


[1] And the part of an interview I saw with Cooper had him going on at length about a “presence” he felt during filming and he ascribed it to the “Chris [Kyle]” watching over him and the set. So dispel any notion that good old Bradley Cooper might have had a less jingoistic ulterior motive to making the movie. He’s all but joined the Army himself (and no, I do not care at all of which branch of the military Chris Kyle was actually a member.
[2] The U.S. supported Saddam in his war against Iraq, then turned around and bitch-slapped him in what most consider to be the first Persian-Gulf War and then there is, of course, the war that lasted a dozen years and that is only technically over—because we don’t count the dozens of bases and dozens of thousands of “U.S. military advisors” left in Iraq to this day.
[3] No link, sorry.
[4] The first American boots on the ground were in August of 1990. That’s almost 25 years ago. We never left. Sorties. Every. Day. Imagine what could have been done with that money.
[5] I know, I know, I’ll have to see for myself.