American Sniper
“American Sniper (2014)”
Text By: Patrick Williams
Original Publication Date: January 27th, 2015
For context, Clint Eastwood's American Sniper now sits at a total domestic box-office of $200 million dollars (that's almost quadruple its $58 million dollar price tag) and it's almost guaranteed to make more in the coming weeks. In fact, it is now being slated to become the highest grossing film released in 2014 (even though most of its money has been made in 2015) ahead of other box-office smashes like Guardians of the Galaxy and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1.
First of all, let's start with the title because it is indicative of how thoroughly Clint Eastwood is dedicated to painting everything in this film with as broad and unsophisticated a brush as possible. The term “American” has become synonymous with the United States. People from the United States are indeed “Americans”. However, people from Canada are also “Americans” being that Canada is part of North America. To that same point people from Brazil are also “Americans” because Brazil is part of South America. America is a term that can refer to any part of the two massive continents that make up the western hemisphere. Calling the film “American Sniper” seems to ignore any of this nuance that the term “American” might imply. It is a term that is slapped on the title to mean what the lowest common denominator perceives it to mean, which is “A Sniper from the United States” because to them, the U.S. is the only “America” in the world. I suppose “U.S. Sniper” doesn't have the same ring to it though. This is crass bullshit, but it's not usually something that would ruin an entire movie for me. However, when viewed in the context of all of the film's other problems, it becomes the first of many red, white and blue flags.
American Sniper opens with Chris Kyle, played by Bradley Cooper, as just another cowboy from the state of Texas. He goes to rodeos, he gets drunk, he does not give a fuck if his girl cheats on him, because he doesn't really care about her anyway. The only thing he does seem to care about is seeing images of United States embassies being bombed on the news. “Look what they did to us” he says as the images flash before his eyes. This is where the film begins with its black and white view of the world. American Sniper is a film that treats grey areas like they are too sissy a concept to even be considered. “You are either with us or against us” it seems to suggest in relation to the military conflicts depicted in the film.
From there Chris Kyle goes and finds the most badass military unit he can find (The Navy Seals) and joins up. The film tosses out some pretty generic training scenes. Other soldiers washout because they can't hack it, but not Chris Kyle though. He may be a little older, but he can still run with the young boys. The film even includes a black drill instructor in what feels like a very calculated move to deflect any claims of white washing.
From there we go to the inevitable “OMG 9/11 just happened” scene and now Chris Kyle is off to war. In an early, pivotal scene, we see Kyle overseeing a house to house search by a company of soldiers. He spots a man on a rooftop possibly reporting troop movement on a cellphone. Kyle is in doubt whether the man's intentions are nefarious. The soldier next to Kyle says “Maybe he's just calling his old lady”. This phrase is important, because it is revealing about Eastwood's attitude toward the world around Kyle in Iraq. He couches the man's actions on one side as the ignoble actions of a terrorist. Reporting troop movement as if there was no other reason for doing so than to start an ambush and ignoring that the man could both be reporting troop movement and also not have nefarious ends. Maybe he's telling people to run away from the soldiers because, you know U.S. Troops are also dangerous men with guns. On the other side, the actions are couched as possibly being completely benign with the very normal Western ideal of reporting in to one's wife as a chore or “just calling his old lady”. So on the one hand evil Iraqi stuff and on the other side benign Western stuff.
Of course, the man is evil because he is a brown person and in this film brown people (no matter their nationality) are either scared, faceless victims or heartless monsters. You'll know the scared faceless victims because they are always falling to the ground and screaming for the U.S. Forces to save them. Any amount of competence shown by a brown person immediately equals evil.
So back to this scene, the man leaves the rooftop and momentarily Chris Kyle seems at ease, but we -- having watched any action or horror film in the past 40 years -- know what that momentary lapse means. Something exciting is about to happen. A woman and a small child slip out of the door of the same house and there is a moment of uncertainty in Chris Kyle as to what they are doing, but of course the audience knows what's going down. They are evil, because they aren't falling on the ground screaming for the U.S. Forces to save them. He watches as they pull out the largest, most obvious grenade in the history of insurgency, and then he proceeds to have small internal conflict before shooting both of them dead. I say small internal conflict, because Bradley Cooper may be acting like the decision is a tough one, but the film clearly feels he is justified in blowing away this woman and child. In fact, the film wants to act like Kyle himself is conflicted, while at the same time making the audience feel secure in knowing that what he did was the right thing. Again, grey areas are for sissies in American Sniper world.
In a scene late in the film we see a gruesome endpoint to the demonizing of the brown characters. The character who is targeted (literally) in this scene is introduced earlier in the film as being a Syrian who competed in shooting in the Olympics. It's significant to the plot that he is Syrian because this allows him to have competed because, as Chris Kyle says, “the Iraqis didn't have a shooter in the competition”. The secondary element of this detail about his home country is that it widens the brush the film uses to paint Middle Eastern characters. What Eastwood seems to be saying with this detail is anyone from any country in the Middle East is the same. It also holds a little dark nugget of justification for the current Syrian conflict. The Syrian sniper is never given any lines, we only see him glaring malevolently or shooting U.S. Soldiers with his rifle. In the climactic showdown between he and Chris Kyle (although only Kyle is really involved because the Syrian sniper never even sees Kyle), Kyle has to make a ridiculously long shot to take the sniper out before he kills any more U.S. Engineers trying to construct a wall. The final shot that Kyle fires to kill the sniper is shown in slow motion and we get to watch the man's head explode in gruesome detail. This is something the film handles as a triumph, with the music swelling as though the evil has finally been defeated. Something about feeling elation about watching a man's head explode in slow motion (and remember that this is based on a true story) doesn't strike me as particularly revelatory, but I suppose it's easy when you just see him as a brown devil and not as a person.
If it weren't for Eastwood's interest in also exploring some of the mental strain of warfare on Kyle and other soldiers around him, this film would be an unwatchable experience for me. Ironically, this may also be what is keeping others from seeing the egregious demonization of Middle Easterners as clearly as they might. By placing the focus late in the film on the toll that war has taken on Kyle, the film seemingly deflects any criticism that it is painting things as black and white. This is surely what fans of the film will point to as its “moral grey area”. However, the film itself never has any doubts about whether what Chris Kyle did was right. It goes out of its way to justify every kill he makes. He never shoots the wrong person or shoots someone for the wrong reasons. Every person he kills is clearly established as having had it coming. The woman and child he shoots were carrying a grenade the size of a football; they deserved it. The Syrian sniper was shooting U.S. Soldiers; he deserved it. At one point an Iraqi man is forced to help the U.S. Forces find an insurgent headquarters. He immediately picks up a gun upon leading them to the hideout and prepares to shoot back at the U.S. Soldiers only to be immediately mowed down by gun fire. He also deserved it. Anyone who in anyway defies the U.S. authority to act in whatever manner they are ordered to act in the Middle East is subject to death by Chris Kyle's bullets. The movie never makes any bones about that.
American Sniper has an 80s action movie mentality layered on top of real life events taking place in one of the most morally grey conflicts in United States history. And the United States is totally okay with this. They have spoken with their dollars, two hundred million of them in two weeks and at this point the sky is the limit. The most disheartening thing about this success, is that it seems not to be predicated solely on the quality of this film. Most of it seems to be based on outside political motivations spurred by certain right wing news organizations and as a reaction to the criticism about the wars in the Middle East. Some of it even seems to be in response to the perceived “terrorist hacking” perpetrated on the United States over the 2014 Christmas season. It's like 'Muricans needed a tentpole to rally around to show the foreigners that they weren't afraid to still throw their hard earned dollars at something so explicitly racist.
-Patrick Williams, 2015
