Let's Take A Look At The Real Reasons American Sniper Is Getting So Many People Worked Up.
After nabbing six Oscar nominations, American Sniper made Marvel money at the box office and immediately caused a cultural rift online, its unexpected popularity fueling heated debate that drew a dividing line between “liberals” and “conservatives.” You’re either for the movie or against it.
Most celebrate the loose depiction of deadly sniper Chris Kyle as a salute to the nation’s military. Soon after seeing the film, Sarah Palin showed her enthusiasm by tweeting, “God bless our troops, especially our snipers.”
Some got rankled at the movie’s glossing over Kyle’s ugly side. The sniper, who claims to have killed over 250 Iraqis, wrote in the autobiography the movie is based on that he “hate(s) the damn savages” and “couldn’t give a flying fuck about the Iraqis.” The movie’s Kyle, played with extreme likeability by Bradley Cooper, is a consistently upstanding triggerman whose only flaw (if you could call it that) is that he is haunted by what he witnesses during the call of duty.
Knee-jerk leftist Michael Moore chimed in on Twitter calling snipers “cowards” and Seth Rogen made a regrettable gag that American Sniper reminded him of the Nazi propaganda film premiered in the last act of Inglourious Basterds. The Twitterati has charged both men with treason, but those guys are not alone in dubbing American Sniper a pro-Iraq war movie.
Others take issue with robot baby used in the film during Kyle’s domestic interludes, which has become its own viral gag. Make no mistake — the robot baby is the real indicator of American Sniper’s problems.
The Gray Zone
While the raging debate would rather you pick a side, American Sniper is neither a pro-war celebration of U.S. heroism nor is it a completely honest depiction of the invasion on Iraq and its subsequent horrors. The film is meant to exist in the gray zone, but does a poor job staying there and lends itself to misinterpretation.
Sure, Kyle is propped up as a steadfast, morally sound representation of the soldier’s plight in Iraq and almost every “brown” local opposite him appears to be a fatal threat. I say “almost.” There is also an Iraqi informant aiding the U.S. soldiers who ends up witnessing what a power drill can do to own his son. In a moment like this, Eastwood and screenwriter Jason Hall remind us that this war also took a toll on innocent civilian lives, not just Kyle and the rest of his invading forces.
Then there’s, Mustafa (Sammy Sheik), the mostly fictional Syrian sniper who is made out to be Kyle’s enemy doppelganger in the film. There is a moment where we see Mustafa with his wife and child, a reminder that even the ultimate enemy can be a family man, not simply a “savage.” He too is making a sacrifice for a cause. Humanizing Mustafa, along with the Iraqi informant, are moments that thwart any idea that American Sniper is a rah-rah pro-military movie, as is the metaphorical sandstorm that engulfs Kyle in the climax, shrouding his victory in confusion.
However, unlike the movie version of Kyle who never makes a mistake, Eastwood and his writer are prone to flubs that cost them their “fog of war” stance. The rubber baby is an example of Eastwood’s sloppiness as a filmmaker. Using a rubber baby is fine, since it saves tormenting a real child, but Eastwood should have taken the time to frame the scene in a way that didn’t look so grotesque and mechanical; we should never have been wise to the robot baby.
The lack of care in that robot baby scene is par for the course in Eastwood’s work over the last decade. He’s the 84-year-old who churns out two movies a year while most (much younger) directors can only put out one every two years. Eastwood does this by rushing through productions, refusing to develop or rewrite first draft scripts. He leaves no time for actors to rehearse or reshoot bad takes. The slapdash filmmaking style shows in his movies. Eastwood has been directing like he’s functioning on Viagra and his loyalists (the Academy included) have remained on his d*ck.
Taking the time to rewrite and develop American Sniper could have made for a more nuanced look at how nobody wins in war. Instead, the script pares down Kyle’s story into a lazy, archetypal mano-a-mano showdown with Mustafa, a completely fictional conceit that excites and instigates choosing a side.
The Problem With American Sniper
Perhaps the most baffling aspect to American Sniper is how Kyle never makes a mistake. While America has an issue with holding back on the trigger when facing innocent guys like Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown, every one of Kyle’s supposed 250 kills come off as righteous. The film’s depiction of Kyle, true to his own autobiography, is that of a sniper who didn’t hesitate at pulling the trigger, justified by simplistic reasoning between good and evil. “Savage, despicable evil” is how Kyle describes what he was fighting in his autobiography’s prologue. Kyle didn’t acknowledge the gray that Eastwood tries to. Such bifurcated terms would seem necessary in combat, since struggling with morals, in turn hesitating, would only help you lose.
The film never questions whether a single target could have been an innocent victim. Kyle doesn’t admit such a thing in his book, and the military certainly wouldn’t be eager to reveal such circumstances, so perhaps Eastwood and Hall would be out of line to suggest any doubt. They are sticking to the book, right? Well, no, actually.
The film makes some minor but significant alterations to one key scene, the prologue, where the sniper actually hesitated. An Iraqi woman walks out of a building with her child and towards a convoy of Marines, all while Kyle peers at her through his scope. According to Kyle’s autobiography, only the woman acts. He writes: “As the Americans organized, the woman took something from beneath her clothes, and yanked at it. She’d set a grenade. I didn’t realize it at first.” In the autobiography, Kyle admits to not seeing the grenade, easily concealed in the woman’s clothes. Instead his chief notices the “chinese grenade” moments later, yelling at Kyle to fire. He does.
However miniscule, there is a moment of doubt in that kill, which happened to be Kyle’s first. He only knew for sure that she had a grenade after pulling the trigger. After narrating that first kill, Kyle explains his reasoning for casting away doubt and a guilty conscience, insisting on the righteousness of his rifle. Nevertheless, that moment of doubt says a lot about the emotional complexity of war and the manner in which Kyle must convince himself to continue killing without hesitation.
In Eastwood’s film, the woman passes a big RKG anti-tank grenade over to her son, so that he can run it over to the American convoy, all in plain sight for Kyle. The scene bears Eastwood’s signature all over it, in that it’s preposterous and ill-considered. Why would an insurgent wait until she is out in the open to pass an RKG to her child? We know Kyle’s version of the events, where no such handoff happened and the grenade remained concealed, so why change the scene to something less plausible?
Besides amplifying the drama by making a child one of Kyle’s victims, and in turn the mother becomes monstrous, the scene casts away any doubt about his first kill and sets the tone for the rest. By exposing the RKG in that awkward handoff, the film allows Kyle and the audience to immediately see the threat, assuring everyone that Kyle’s work has conviction and stands above questioning, even if the war remains hazy.
In that moment, American Sniper subscribes to Kyle’s beyond-a-reasonable-doubt mentality that divides the world between good and evil, refusing to see the grey zone in between. Eastwood himself may not share that perspective on war, and perhaps meant for the film to be similarly murky. But he fumbled — which is nothing new.
- uk.askmen.com
