Yes, American Sniper is very largely a meretricious piece of crap

Director Clint Eastwood, quoted by the Hollywood Reporter after a screening of his new film American Sniper, did not sound like a clone of William Kristol:

“I was against going into the war in Iraq since I figured we would probably trip over ourselves in some way,” I had a big question when we went into Afghanistan. Did anybody ever study the history of Afghanistan, not only with the British, but the Russians? Contrary to public opinion, I abhor violence.”

Then why is his new film delighting the right and outraging the left? Well, American Sniper is in fact not simple propaganda, yet the worst the film can say about its protagonist, Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), who kills 160 men, women, and children, effectively shooting them without warning from ambush—virtually none of them is even aware of his presence—is that he isn’t “open” with his wife. For a man who “abhors” violence, Eastwood has made a film that, if it does not celebrate or glorify violence, certainly argues for its necessity.

American Sniper, based on Kyle’s book of the same name, tells its story without the theatrical flourishes of the traditional action film. There are no gleaming pecs or machetes, no obsessive cocking and recocking of already cocked weapons, no ammo belts draped across the hero’s chest. Although Kyle is a member of an elite unit, he functions as part of a team, dresses like anyone else, and never triumphs alone against impossible odds. He does have a suitably high-tech and suitably phallic sniper’s rifle, which Eastwood’s camera examines with near-worshipful devotion. Though we’re a long way from Dirty Harry, Clint’s gun fetish is still alive and kicking.¹

Eastwood puts his film together in quasi-documentary fashion. We are shown “what happened” in a more or less random manner, leaving it up to us to decide what it all means. After an opening teaser of Kyle in Iraq, struggling to decide whether to waste a young woman and her son (eventually, he does, because they’re both “evil”), we cut back to young Kyle (Cole Konis), growing up in rural Texas, with his younger brother Jeff (Luke Sunshine), his mom Debbie (Elise Robertson), and his father Wayne (Ben Reed). Daddy Wayne comes across as a domineering sadist, flaunting his massive leather strap in front of his terrified sons and even more terrified wife.²

In a “foreshadowing” sequence, we see Wayne take Chris out for his first deer hunt. His first shot is a beauty—“you’ve got a gift!” dad exclaims—but when Chris throws down his rifle In excitement as he approaches the deer, he gets a stern warning. “Always hold onto your rifle, son!”

At the dinner table, big daddy explains the facts of life to the kids. There are three kinds of people in this world—sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. “Sheep”, in this case, is just the dinner-table term for “pussy,” but we’ll let that pass. It’s the duty of the sheepdogs to protect the sheep. It’s hard to see why, really, since the sheep are, in Wayne’s accounting, morally contemptible, but, apparently, them’s the rules.

This is, obviously, the moral of the picture, but the fact that it’s delivered by a guy who looks, and talks, like Hitler’s father, it doesn’t sound like a moral. It isn’t delivered the way Hollywood traditionally delivers morals. If daddy had been, you know, genial, if he had delivered this message while bathed in golden sunlight while the two boys played with border collie puppies with stirring music playing gently on the soundtrack, we’d know where we stand. But Clint’s gotten all post-modern on our asses, and won’t tell us how we’re supposed to feel.

Well, Chris grows up and joins the Navy, volunteering for the elite SEALS program, and we get a long and not terribly interesting sequence on SEAL training. It is interesting that none of the training we see looks all that demanding—the guys do leg lifts, which do get tiring, and sit around for a long time in what is presumably cold sea water (not fun)—but there’s no rappelling, rope-climbing, or swimming with a forty-pound pack. Well, Brad was in his late thirties when he made the film, so it’s not too surprising.

Eventually, Chris gets his flippers, or whatever it is SEALS get, and gets married as well, to an obviously classy broad³, but the important thing is, obviously, 9/11 and Iraq, a place that is, Chris tells us earnestly, full of “evil.” The Iraq that Eastwood shows us looks nightmarish enough, but he neglects to mention that we made it that way. We turned its cities into rubble. It was our brutal, illegal, and entirely unjustified invasion that prompted the fierce resistance that Chris and his buddies label as “savage.” Clint has some brasshat telling the guys that all the top, top al Qaeda dudes are now flooding into Iraq, but no one tells us that, prior to the U.S. invasion, al Qaeda had zero presence in Iraq. In our compulsive desire to do good, or at least kick ass, in the Middle East, we destroy existing social power structures and are amazed when the result is chaos rather than “Denmark”.⁴

Virtually all of what Eastwood shows us in Iraq is embroidery or outright invention. We’re told that the Iraqi resistance has put a reward of $180,000 on Kyle’s head. In fact, there were offers of $20,000 to $80,000 for any American sniper, but no more, and neither Kyle nor any other sniper were ever singled out by name. There was no “butcher” who tortured and murdered little kids with a power drill. In his book, Kyle makes passing mention of an expert sniper for the Iraqi resistance, but does not claim to have killed him. Eastwood, of course, ramps up the reality dramatically, presenting “Mustapha” as the Muslim Chris Kyle, a near superhuman foe who leaps from rooftop to rooftop just as Dirty Harry did in Mangum Force so many years ago and, when the final showdown approaches, ties on his headscarf with a theatrical, “gunfighter” flourish.

For me, Eastwood’s most striking, and most repellent, invention occurs when a superficially genial Iraqi invites Kyle and his fellow SEALS to have dinner with his family. Let us bridge this gap between our two cultures! Kyle finds all this Middle Eastern bonhomie just a little too cozy and, sure enough, it turns out the dude has a cellar full of grenade launchers. Naturally, the SEALS haul ass out of that death trap. Once they’ve departed, a beautiful young woman in a headscarf, who has remained mysteriously silent throughout, picks up a cellphone and makes a call. They’re all in on it! You (and we) can’t trust any of them!

In depicting Kyle’s final showdown with Mustapha, however, Eastwood strikingly cranks up the ambiguity level of the film. Out on a mission with his buddies, Kyle takes out Mustapha with the shot of his life—a killing shot from over a mile—but it appears that in doing so he gives away the Americans’ position, involving them in a prolonged firefight with a superior force. Oh, and there’s also a sandstorm coming.

Confronted with unfavorable odds, the Americans retreat, which is what usually happens in real life, though almost never in the movies. But that’s trivial, really, because what’s really important is the Kyle throws away his sniper rifle, the thing dad told him never to do! What does that mean, that he ain’t gonna study war no more?

Well, sort of, but not really. He does go home—it was his fourth tour, so he’s certainly entitled—but there’s no indication that he feels that killing 160 evil savages wasn’t a good thing. In fact, with no evil savages to shoot, there just isn’t much for a sheepdog to do, until he discovers a new calling—comforting disabled war veterans! At last, he can do some real good in the world!

Well, there’s nothing wrong with raising the spirits of disabled war veterans, and Eastwood shows Kyle/Cooper hanging out with real disabled veterans, with, I think, the implicit intent of reminding us of their sacrifices. But if the Bush Administration hadn’t lied us into a completely unnecessary war, which they managed with stunning incompetence, none of those men would be disabled, and the 5,000 plus Americans who died there would still be alive⁵, and so would Chris Kyle (shot and killed at a shooting range by a troubled vet whom he was trying to introduce to the joys of target practice).

Eastwood’s final touch is to end the film, not with Kyle’s death, which is not shown, but with actual film of the turnout for Kyle’s funeral—hundreds of ordinary folks holding American flags in silent tribute. Touching, yes, but where is the turnout for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died because the U.S. invaded their country? Chris Kyle was brave and competent, but he was the tool of corrupt, incompetent, and dishonest men. Supporting the troops does not wash away the blood the U.S. shed, for no good purpose. Furthermore, it’s quite likely that none of the people Kyle killed was in any sense an enemy of the United States. None of them, I’m sure, had any plans for coming over “here,” as Eastwood has Kyle say in the movie, and as in fact the real Chris Kyle believed.

Afterwords
Over at Slate, Courtney Duckworth explains how Eastwood rearranged Kyle’s story to make sure we “know” that all the people Kyle killed deserved it, though I would not be at all surprised to learn that many of his kills were “militants” whose only crime was being a military-age male.