Abstract
The 2003 Iraq War received a wide variety of different opinions throughout the international media. While American networks and press organizations entitled the conflict as Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Canadian media and the channels in some Arab nations referred to the conflict as "attack and occupation."
One character in this conflict was Chris Kyle, a deadly sniper in the American military whose life served as the inspiration for the film American Sniper. He wrote a book by the same name that teems with his utter disdain for the Iraqi fighters as well as with his excitement at the chance to take them down. The movie does not contain the same degree of bloodlust, instead presenting him as more of a legend.
This paper details the various opinions that appeared as a result of this movie. There were many different perspectives on the film’s quality, as well as on the perspective that the film took about the experience that Kyle had serving for his country.
Introduction
War has presented a dilemma through just about all of human history. Combat, of course, is as old as the species itself; according to the Old Testament, the third person on the planet (Cain) killed the fourth person (Abel) because he was jealous that God had accepted Abel’s sacrifice rather than his own. As societies grew larger, the potential for conflict only grew as well. The most famed writings from antiquity center on the complexities of war – knowing that such deadly confrontations could arise from trifles.
Consider Homer’s Iliad – an epic about a ten-year war that started when a Greek queen much younger than her husband fled with her lover, a Trojan prince whose looks had bedazzled none other than Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Even in ancient times, when glory at war was seen as one of the best outcomes one could derive from life, the human cost of these battles was also apparent. After one of the bloodiest battles in the Trojan War, Homer recounts the collection of the bodies the next morning: “Now the sun of a new day struck on the ploughlands, rising out of the quiet water and the deep stream of the ocean to climb the sky. The Trojans assembled together. They found it hard to recognize each individual dead man; but with water they washed away the blood that was on them and as they wept warm tears they lifted them onto the wagons” (Homer, n.d., web).
On the other side of the battlefield, the Greeks were doing much the same thing: “in the same way[they] piled their own slain upon the pyre, with their hearts in sorrow, and burned them upon the fire, and went back to their hollow vessels” (Homer, n.d., web). The implication of this passage is that war hits all sides of the combat hard; while war can seem so necessary, it is easy to forget the human cost that this decision brings. It is this same unease with war that has informed the wide variety of responses to the film American Sniper. The war that the United States has pursued against terror is not a battle between two peers, like the ancient feuds between Athens and Sparta, between Rome and Carthage, between the Greeks and the Trojans. It is not a battle between free nations and totalitarian menaces, like the battle that the Allies fought to keep the ideas of Hitler and Tojo from taking over the world.
Instead, it is a battle that an ostensibly mighty foe takes on against one that is largely invisible, as terrorists melt away, gathering not around a flag but instead in buildings that are right next to schools, to homes, to mosques, so that when the military power comes after them there are civilian casualties to add to the moral bonfire that fuels their rage. The invisibility of this foe is frustrating – and makes the use of snipers an attractive one. However, the use of a sniper is also problematic, because the tactics of the sniper are, in many ways, just as insidious as those of the terrorists. While the tactic might be effective in the short term, though, it ultimately does little to correct the larger situation and address the underlying causes of the conflict.
The Release of the Film
When American Sniper came out, it was an instant hit, bringing in $89.5 million in ticket sales during that first weekend, by far a record for a January film release (Macias, 2015). The film garnered six nominations for Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor (Bradley Cooper). Some of the initial response was all over the place. For example, the movie maker Michael Moore sent out a tweet saying: “My uncle killed by sniper in WW2. We were taught snipers were cowards. Will shoot u in the back. Snipers aren’t heroes. And invaders r worse” (Macias 2015, web).
While some might object to Moore’s comments because of his liberal stances, the fact that he had a personal connection to the use of snipers made his tweet all the more poignant. As one might expect, though, people fired back at this sentiment.
One of these people was Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. He tweeted: “Michael Moore should spend a few weeks with ISIS and Boko Haram. Then he might appreciate @AmericanSniper. I am proud of our defenders” (Macias 2015, web). Again, it makes sense that someone would leap to the defense of the American military, because they do provide a vital wall for national security.
The fact that American Sniper presents a film adaptation of a true story makes the film even more poignant. The film takes its direction from the life of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, who had 160 confirmed enemy kills (while claiming over 200), making him the most effective sniper in American military history. His death took place in one of the most ironic ways imaginable, as he was spending time with Eddie Ray Routh, a veteran who had been suffering from PTSD, when Routh shot Kyle at point-blank range.
Philosophical Questions from the Movie
There are two questions that serve as the flashpoint in this movie, as a source of disquiet for those who come to see it. The first is an analysis of the sniper as a military figure. In one sense, the sniper represents the opposite of what one might consider fair play in war. A victim never sees the bullet coming from a sniper’s gun; instead, he falls dead without ever having had a chance to defend himself.
On multiple levels, that goes against an innate sense of fairness. On the other hand, it is worth pointing out that the objectives of war are often anything but fair. After all, when Adolf Hitler started invading Western Europe, his goal – the establishment of a Third Reich under the rule of the Master Aryan Race – was anything but fair, and those who stood up to him had the moral justification to use any means necessary. In the case of the war on terror, the enemy is often invisible, frequently vanishing in plain sight.
If the tables were turned, the enemy would (and often does) use such devious tactics as suicide bombings, planted demolition devices and sniper-style shootings to achieve its objectives. So why not? Such tactics put the opponents in equivalent moral territory, but if the ultimate goal is destruction of the enemy, at what point do morals have to take a back seat to pragmatics?
The second question has to do with the way that we treat our veterans once they return from war. Chris Kyle was not murdered by a member of ISIS, al-Qaeda or any other Muslim terrorist organization. He was killed by a man who had fought with him on the same side – who had served four tours of duty in Iraq.
The truth is that there are myriad problems at work in the way that we take care of those who fight for us. We have no problem writing huge blank checks for our government to spend. Congress is notorious for pumping funds into such tricks as the “overseas contingency fund” that appears as a nebulous item in the federal budget but is dispersed without much in the way of oversight (Berman, 2015). The Republican Party has done so much caterwauling about the federal budget deficit that such programs as mental health care for veterans (indeed, much of the funding for the Department of Veterans’ Affairs) have been trimmed to the bone. At the same time, though, they pump billions of dollars into warmongering without very much in the way of meaningful insight (Berman, 2015).
When Bernie Sanders was the chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, he attacked conservatives who wanted to cut funding to the Veterans’ Administration for wanting to “radically change the nature of society, and either make major cuts in all of these institutions, or maybe do away with them entirely” (Eder & Philipps, 2016, web). It turned out that the Veterans’ Administration itself was rife with a number of organizational problems, but the takeaway from this is that the way we take care of our veterans was – and is – ridiculously insufficient. If we learn nothing else from the shooting of Chris Kyle, we should learn that.
A Firestorm of Public Opinion
The interaction of these two questions in the film is one reason why the reaction is has drawn has been so diverse – and so public. When American Sniper premiered in Washington, DC, the event took place at the U.S. Navy Memorial, inside the Burke Theatre. At the premiere was no less a dignitary than Vice President Joe Biden, who only had three words to say after the final credits rolled: “It’s intense, man” (Suebsaeng 2015, web). Three different people who were sitting near the Vice President during the show noticed that he was moved to tears (Suebsaeng 2015).
Of course, there were other people who took less patriotic inspiration from watching the movie. “American Sniper perfectly epitomizes a certain kind of American horseshit,” as Michael Atkinson put it (2015, web). What exactly is that horseshit, you ask? Atkinson goes on to detail exactly what he means: “the militaristic anthem thinly disguised as a sob story, the spray of nationalism scented with humanist rosewater” (Atkinson 2015, web). As he puts it, director Clint Eastwood “picks gently at the scabs of war, never questioning the wound or the society that inflicted it” (Atkinson 2015, web).
If you think about it, the story of Chris Kyle can read as the story of George Washington, transported in some sort of time machine to the present day. Chris Kyle did not own up to chopping down his father’s cherry tree, but he did live up to the modern American ideal, at least in the way we like our men to look and to act. He grows up shooting deer and getting into tussles in the schoolyard. He enters his twenties with a profound lack of direction accompanied by a vat of testosterone.
If you don’t think that we keep coming back to this ideal, just look at the reboot of the Star Trek backstory in the 2009 film. The film begins with a young James Tiberius Kirk just having stolen his stepfather’s sweet convertible despite being far too young to drive it. A hovering police officer chases him, but does not stop the young Kirk before he sends his stepfather’s ride off the edge of a cliff; the next scene shows him getting drunk and brawling in a bar before the kindly Admiral Pine draws him into training as a Federation officer. Kirk’s ascent through the ranks is largely based on intuition, derring-do and luck – just like we like our heroes to act. The problem is that, even though these heroes often end up ahead of the game (Lindelof & Abrams, 2009), we do not see what happens when the war is over and the heroes go home. Instead, we see the sequel, when the heroes have to jump back into action.
That’s what makes American Sniper so visceral, in a way, because it is all about what happens when the hero comes home. When Kyle returns home from his last tour, he can’t live happily at home, even though his wife is more than patient with him and his kids clearly adore him. As Atkinson (2015, web) puts it, his story is “a tragedy, in terms of his soulless patriotic skill at killing Arabs, his manipulated and common dimness about why the war happened at all, and the emotional damage he incurred, making him unfit for real life.”
It seems counterintuitive to expect a man to perch on buildings and pick off victims that are at a distance, while at hazard of having the same fate befall him, and then come home and play catch with his children in the back yard without going through any sort of emotional turmoil in the meantime. The implication of the story then, as Atkinson puts it, is that the death of Kyle is “a sort of grim social irony, as if somehow ordinary domestic life has failed returning vets by its very nature” (2015, web).
The failing is not the different routines of the home front; the failing, according to this perspective, is the neverending drumbeat of war that must never stop if we are to have economic prosperity, if we are to remain the most powerful nation in the world, if we are to stay America.
Another topic that this film raises is the shadows in which the families of American servicemen and servicewomen live. If it seems like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have always been going on, that is because for an entire generation we have been at war with these shadowy groups in that part of the world, beginning with our labyrinthine pursuit of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden in the wake of the 9/11 attackswhich took place almost fifteen years ago. Not long after that, President George W. Bush thought we should augment that pursuit with an ill-fated search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, whose leader, Saddam Hussein, had put himself in the younger President Bush’s cross-hairs for plotting an assassination attempt against the elder President Bush (Drehle & Smith, 1993).
So the nation has had two theaters going, at various levels of intensity, for well over a decade. While the day-to-day goings-on of this conflict are taking place largely behind a smokescreen in the news comprised of the latest Donald Trump audacity, the next step in the umpteenth investigation of Hillary Clinton, or the most recent adventure in the Kardashian Empire, one interesting fact has emerged: only about one percent of the current American population has actually served in combat.
This means that only about one percent of the population has families that have a very real interest in their particular member of the armed forces coming home (Barnicle, 2015). The vast majority of Americans, of course, support their military personnel and want the very best for them, but they do not have a close familial connection with someone who is facing the prospect of an IED on a road somewhere in Iraq or Afghanistan, someone who is living far from home, living in danger of death from foreign hands at any time.
This not only erodes our common sense of empathy as an American people, but it also keeps us from considering the true toll of waging war, not just on the civilians on the ground in territories on the other side of the globe, but on our own service personnel whom our leaders keep insisting on sending into harm’s way, perhaps because defense contractors (read: contributors to political campaigns) need the money to keep flowing, perhaps because of some ideological bent in our leadership (or perhaps too much of both).
There is a scene when Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) and his son have gone to pick up their car at a garage. A young Marine walks up to them, having lost his leg at fighting in Fallujah. He tells Kyle’s boy that Kyle is a real hero and that his actions “saved his life and the lives of other Marines through the devastating skill of his marksmanship, a sniper watching over the constant danger on the urban battlefield below” (Barnicle 2015, web). Kyle’s response is telling, as Cooper (playing him) does not move and hardly says anything. The pain comes from his eyes, which tell the audience that he never wants his son to have to go through what he has seen (Eastwood & Eastwood, 2014).
Conclusion
So what Clint Eastwood, for all intents and purposes, designed as a “character study” of the “plight” of American soldiers (McCoy 2015, web), has turned into one of the more polarizing films in recent years. American Sniper is powerful because it asks some central questions that probe American social priorities – why do we spend so much time fighting wars but so little time taking care of the veterans when they return home? – and some other questions that have dogged us since the very beginning of time – why do we lift our hands and take up weapons against one another in the first place?
The end result is a film that is no closer to answering those questions than the grim display of Greek and Trojan warriors, weeping over their dead on opposite sides of a gruesome battlefield, building pyres to burn their dead, but even then grimly preparing for the next round of warfare. Millennia later, we have the weaponry to do our killing from a distance, whether it is a long-range rifle or a drone controlled from the other side of the planet, but the contradictions remain the same.
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