{"id":52420,"date":"2015-01-12T12:00:22","date_gmt":"2015-01-12T12:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=52420"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:27:04","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:27:04","slug":"how-clint-eastwood-ignores-history-in-american-sniper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/01\/how-clint-eastwood-ignores-history-in-american-sniper\/","title":{"rendered":"How Clint Eastwood Ignores History in \u2018American Sniper\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"american-sniper-article-display-b\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Just a few pages into \u201cAmerican Sniper,\u201d Chris Kyle used an epithet to describe the Arabs on the wrong side of his gun scope. \u201cA lot of people, myself included, called the enemy \u2018savages,\u2019\u201d he wrote. \u201cI only wish I had killed more. Not for bragging rights, but because I believe the world is a better place without savages out there taking American lives.\u201d A decorated Navy SEAL, Kyle killed more than 150 \u201csavages\u201d in Iraq, becoming the deadliest sniper in the annals of American warfare.<\/p>\n

Kyle\u2019s memoir has been turned into a film starring Bradley Cooper and it\u2019s an Oscar contender<\/a> even before its national release on January 16. The Los Angeles Times<\/em> hails its action scenes as \u201cimpeccably crafted<\/a>,\u201d while The New Yorker<\/em> salutes Clint Eastwood for making other directors \u201clook like beginners<\/a>.\u201d Unfortunately, Hollywood\u2019s producing class, taking a break from exchanging catty emails<\/a> about A-list stars, has created another war film that ignores history, and reviewers who spend too much time in screening rooms are falling over themselves in praise of it.<\/p>\n

They should know better. In 2012, \u201cZero Dark Thirty,\u201d about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, was lavishly praised by most reviewers, and it wasn\u2019t until criticism emerged from political reporters like Jane Mayer<\/a> and others (I wrote about it too<\/a>) that the tide turned against the pro-torture fantasy at its core. The backlash, coming after the film made \u201cbest of the year\u201d lists, was probably responsible for it (fortunately) being all but shut out of the Academy Awards. Hopefully the praise-and-reconsider scenario will recur with \u201cAmerican Sniper.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just as ZDT director Kathryn Bigelow insisted her movie took no position on the use of torture, the makers of \u201cAmerican Sniper\u201d tell us the film takes no position on the war in Iraq. Cooper, who in addition to having the lead role was one of the producers, has said<\/a> \u201cit\u2019s not a movie about the Iraq war; it\u2019s about the horror of what a soldier like Chris has to go through. It\u2019s not a political movie at all. It\u2019s a movie about a man\u2014a character study.\u201d I talked to the movie\u2019s screenwriter, Jason Hall, and he said, \u201cFor me, this is not a war movie.\u201d<\/p>\n

The film faithfully recycles Kyle\u2019s crude language, and while shocking to some viewers, his slurs are the least surprising or objectionable part. Dehumanizing the enemy is common in almost any conflict, particularly for snipers, who see their foes up close. If you regard your target as a savage or an infidel, it\u2019s easier to squeeze the trigger. Kyle\u2019s blinkered attitude was not unusual among the fighters I spent time<\/a> with in Iraq. It\u2019s the truest part of the movie and belongs in it.<\/p>\n

The problem is that the film makes no attempt to tell us anything beyond Kyle\u2019s limited comprehension of what was happening. More than a decade after America invaded and occupied Iraq, and long after we realized the war\u2019s false pretense and its horrific toll, we deserve better. There\u2019s a dilemma at work: a war movie that is true of one American\u2019s experience can be utterly false to the experience of millions of Iraqis and to the historical record. Further, it\u2019s no act of patriotism to celebrate, without context or discussion, a grunt\u2019s view that the people killed in Iraq were animals deserving their six-feet-under fate. When the movie\u2019s villain, an enemy sniper named Mustafa, was killed by Kyle, the crowd at the theater where I was watching broke into applause.<\/p>\n

If Cooper, the film\u2019s star, means what he said about its lack of politics, he fails to understand how war movies operate in popular culture. When a film venerates an American sniper but portrays as sub-human the Iraqis whose country we were occupying\u2014the film has one Iraqi who seems sympathetic but turns out to be hiding a cache of insurgent weapons\u2014it conveys a political message that is flat wrong. Among other things, it ignores and dishonors the scores of thousands of Iraqis who fought alongside American forces and the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians who were killed or injured in the crossfire.<\/p>\n

While it is about a certain type of bravery, the film itself is not brave. One of the things it does well is highlight Kyle\u2019s post-traumatic stress disorder. But there is no mention of the problems returning soldiers often encounter when they try to get treatment at military hospitals\u2013even though the disturbed veteran who killed Kyle in real life, at a Texas shooting range in 2013, had been denied the care<\/a> he desperately needed. Why ignore an issue of national importance that is also the reason Kyle is no longer with us? I asked Hall, the screenwriter, and he said that while the government\u2019s inadequate care of veterans is worthy of criticism, this was a movie about Kyle\u2019s experience, and he didn\u2019t have problems with the Department of Veterans Affairs. \u201cI think that without the time to adequately explore that, and just take a swing at the VA\u2014that\u2019s ill-mannered and ineffective,\u201d Hall said.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not so surprised about Hollywood\u2014the making of great and true movies is not a feature built into its strange operating system amid the palm trees\u2014but I am dismayed with the reviewers who should know better. As Alissa Quart wrote<\/a> for Reuters during the backlash to ZDT (full disclosure: Quart is my wife), today\u2019s critics tend to avoid cinematic politics, in contrast to their predecessors, like Mary McCarthy and Pauline Kael. If a movie is well acted and nicely shot and carries the viewer along, that is enough to earn five stars in their reviews, because history does not matter to them. They are ideology-agnostic formalists, and this hurts us.<\/p>\n

We got Iraq wrong in the real world. It would be nice to get it right at the multiplex.<\/p>\n

_____________________________<\/p>\n

Photo: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures<\/em><\/p>\n

Email the author: peter.maass@theintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 firstlook.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cA lot of people, myself included, called the enemy \u2018savages,\u2019\u201d he wrote. \u201cI only wish I had killed more. Not for bragging rights, but because I believe the world is a better place without savages out there taking American lives.\u201d A decorated Navy SEAL, Kyle killed more than 150 \u201csavages\u201d in Iraq, becoming the deadliest sniper in the annals of American warfare.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[167],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52420\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}