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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Rude Pundit - "I don't give a fuck it's your house": American Sniper's Failure
The Rude Pundit pushed aside as many preconceived notions as he could when he watched American Sniper, the Clint Eastwood-directed, Oscar-nominated film about Chris Kyle, the Navy SEAL who chalked up the most kills of any sniper in the military during the Iraq war. As you may know, the film has become a political battlefield between some on the left who see it as glorifying the Iraq engagement and those on the right who see it as a celebration of the innate good of the American soldier.
And even while viewing it, the Rude Pundit thought the film had been treated unfairly by many of its critics. Sure, it offers few sympathetic Iraqis, but no one faulted Saving Private Ryan for not spending time with the nice Germans. As for the racist remarks by Bradley Cooper's Kyle and the other soldiers, well, sorry, if you want polite talk about the ostensible enemy, you probably shouldn't watch a war film. Also, Eastwood and writer Jason Hall weren't really under an obligation to hew closely to Kyle's story. It ain't a documentary.
So, really, truly, the Rude Pundit is coming at this from as open-minded a position as possible. (Does he have to list all his family members who are or were in the military?) And he thinks this:
American Sniper is a film about stupid people who were brainwashed into doing something stupid and it justifies their stupidity so that the stupid people watching can feel good about themselves. See, the one thing you can't separate out from the film is history. It tries to elide over history, but just because it isn't mentioned doesn't mean it isn't there. Because of that, the overwhelming feeling the Rude Pundit had was pity, not pride.
After a set-up where Kyle is about to shoot a child in Iraq, we get what can best be described as a psycho killer origin story. Kyle learns to hunt at an early age, something his father tells him he's good at. The father fills his sons with nonsense about their place in the pecking order of the universe. This hypermasculine bullshit plays out, as it does in Texas, with Kyle becoming a rodeo rider who joins the Navy to become a SEAL after he sees the U.S. embassy attacks in 1998. That leads to his brainwashing during his training (apparently, SEALs have to constantly be wet). In short order, he meets a woman, Taya, the World Trade Center attack happens, he gets married, and then he's sent to Iraq. We get no sense that the invasion of Iraq happened 18 months after 9/11. Then, boom, we're in Iraq and the tedious pattern of the film is set: shooting people in Iraq, coming home to weepy, concerned wife, rinse, repeat for four tours.
Ultimately, the film fails not because it doesn't present the Iraqis in a more complex way, but because it banks on our credulity. It treats us like we're fucking idiots who are willing to forget anything about the truth behind the invasion of Iraq. It counts on our fucking idiocy in order to convey it's simplistic message that American soldiers are awesome and everyone else needs to shut the fuck up.
So we get scenes of Americans going house to house to find insurgents. They break down doors and rush in, grabbing anyone they can. When one Iraqi man protests that they are in his house, Kyle says, "I don't give a fuck it's your house." Then they berate and threaten the man until he gives up the name of a specific enemy torturer, "the Butcher." (Seriously, names in this film are dunderheaded. One soldier is, swear to Christ, "Biggles," like a fuckin' cat.) That family, the only "good" Iraqis we see, ends up having the father and a son brutally murdered. In another scene, the soldiers barge into an apartment and, more or less, take a family hostage so they can use the apartment for surveillance on some "Hajis." Of course, it turns out the father is hiding weapons. Of course, he ends up dead.
Through it all, all the people he shoots (and, truly, Bradley Cooper seems like he's acting in a different, much deeper film), all the scenes of him watching fellows soldiers get killed and wounded, all the psychological damage he does to his poor wife when he calls her during firefights, Kyle maintains a pathetic belief in the good of his mission and in the protection of his "brothers." It has an effect on him - he suffers from PTSD - but the film wants us to believe that it was necessary. So, in the end, American Sniper is the story of a dumb man who wrecked himself for a worthless cause and about all the young men (and it is all, mostly white, men in it) who were sacrificed for nothing.
It's not the film that tells us it's nothing. We know it was for nothing. We know that one of the great crimes of the new century is the invasion of Iraq for absolutely no rational, demonstrable reason. We know that all those "savages," as Kyle calls the Iraqis, that we killed were for nothing. We know that all those Americans who died lost their lives for nothing. Our military was protecting us from nothing. Our freedoms weren't at risk from Iraq.
And the lie many soldiers from Iraq cling to and the lie we tell ourselves, and the lie that so many have worked so hard to maintain, is that as long as we don't discuss that it was for nothing, as long as we pretend that the fact that soldiers fought when they were told to fight and, mostly, did so nobly, we don't have to face the truly gut-wrenching reality of our national complicity in the crime.
American Sniper exists, then, to play to that lie, to silence anyone who would point it out. Shit, once Kyle goes to war, the movie is so devoid of any rationale for being in Iraq that no one mentions Saddam Hussein or weapons of mass destruction. Even George W. Bush isn't mentioned. The film fails, too, because all it's really saying is that, if you put some soldiers somewhere and tell them to do something, they will defend each other and do the job. The fact that the leaders of their country betrayed them in the most elemental way possible never enters the equation. So all we're left with is killing Iraqis because Iraqis are trying to kill us, fuck if we care whose house it is.
At some points, the Rude Pundit wondered if Eastwood was trying to frame it this way, but, when the credits roll, after Kyle's murder at the hands of a disturbed vet, we are treated to scenes of the motorcade heading to his funeral, the streets lined with people with signs and American flags. No, then. We're supposed to feel proud that men like Kyle defend us. We should instead feel intensely angry that they died in vain.
http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2015/01/i-dont-give-fuck-its-your-house.html
Skittles
(153,193 posts)repuke propaganda - but hey, even some Duers enjoy a lie as long as it's disguised in a "good movie"
RedCappedBandit
(5,514 posts)Omg who cares I was ENTERTAINED, damnit!
Skittles
(153,193 posts)I cannot
artistic license is one thing; propaganda is entirely another
RedCappedBandit
(5,514 posts)Last post was sarcasm.
Skittles
(153,193 posts)sorry, hard to tell here sometimes
olegramps
(8,200 posts)It is a futile attempt by the ultra-conservatives to justify an invasion of a country based solely on lies abetted by the corporate controlled MSM. At best it is a clumsy diversion to justify the glorification of misled young impressionable men and women to believe they were serving a noble cause to protect our nation.
ann---
(1,933 posts)pay me to go see this movie or any movie where Clint Eastwood is involved in any way. And, it glorifies murder - period.
TheKentuckian
(25,029 posts)At some point this becomes like pretending Robert Duvall can't act or right wingers pretending folks like Sean Penn is a hack.
The Chair Whisperer is at worst a good director and certainly not garbage.
ann---
(1,933 posts)stage left
(2,966 posts)I'm so tired of hearing that we're fighting for freedom. The US hasn't fought for freedom, in my opinion, since 1945.
Ed Suspicious
(8,879 posts)interests on an international stage. The stories of atrocities by our enemies are simply justification for the arm and the spear. The head operates on elite preference, and let me tell you, the spread of democracy for the sake of democracy is not among those interests. Democracy and freedom may line up with elite preferences, but that is more a convenient factor than impetus.
Initech
(100,102 posts)You know - Enron, Halliburton, Blackwater/XE, Raytheon, Boeing, Exxon-Mobil, and so on. They're the ones who benefited the most from the War On Terror, and they're continuing to benefit from the unchecked billions that Congress gives them nearly every single term since the war's inception.
mnhtnbb
(31,404 posts)My husband--a Vietnam vet--and I refuse to see the movie.
muntrv
(14,505 posts)On edit: I wonder when he came to that conclusion.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/race/clint-eastwood-i-was-going-754761
ND-Dem
(4,571 posts)speaking out or offering food for thought, hesitation, or anything.
Personally, I think he's lying.
ashling
(25,771 posts)nt
cyberswede
(26,117 posts)Orsino
(37,428 posts)Mindless jingoism supporting brutal violence sounds like an arguably good picture of whatever the fuck we thought our troops were accomplishing. Perhaps despite the right-wing cheers, Eastwood deliberately showed a deeply conflicted fighting force divorced from our patrotic dreams?
Or maybe the movie's unintentionally undercutting the director's vision, as did his debating an empty chair.
I'm not going to see the movie, but RP has me half-suspecting I'm missing something. Probably something incoherent, if not actually stupid.
msanthrope
(37,549 posts)much the same vein as Triumph of the Will.
COLGATE4
(14,732 posts)SunSeeker
(51,698 posts)uhnope
(6,419 posts)yes
AlbertCat
(17,505 posts)This expresses EXACTLY what I think I will be seeing when I finally see the thing.
I don't mean to be cynical about THIS ONE PARTICULAR film. I find every film from Hollywood these days, no matter how serious or how "adult" the subject matter is (the few with adult subject matter)... I find every film from Hollywood these days is made for 14 year old boys. Period. It could be a Barbie film and it would still be made for 14 year old boys. This is not always a bad thing.... depending on what the film is supposed to be about. But every once in a while I have to hide in my room and watch something like "Z". (no one I know wants to see it... and No, I don't mean "World War Z" dammit!)
ND-Dem
(4,571 posts)but then, 1969 was a different country.
The film had a total of 3,952,913 admissions in France and was the 4th highest grossing film of the year.[2] It was also the 12th highest grossing film of 1969 in the U.S. Z is also one of the few films to be nominated for both the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Picture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_(1969_film)
villager
(26,001 posts)...if it came out in '69.
Saw "State of Siege" later, on my own. But it was a different time then. Even the Hollywood movies -- Chinatown, The Godfather, Nashville, etc. -- had politics. And the studios weren't all simply divisions of larger corporations, either.
AlbertCat
(17,505 posts)It's cool you guys know and remember "Z". No one I know remembers it or they've never heard of Costa-Gavras!
But you see what I mean about adult films (it was a foreign film too, y'know). It's not just that it is about politics, and is a great example of that late '60s early '70s gritty realistic school of film making (that brought us things like "The French Connection" and "Midnight Cowboy"
It's kinda hard to flesh out and explain. Even serious films these days will be all sewn up and explained by the end, everyone will be beautiful, even the bad guys, and (I suppose this is necessary these days) you can get up and leave for a while, come back and not have missed anything important....IOW, you don't have to really pay attention.
I'd say "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" is the most recent "adult " film I've seen....and it's hard for folks not amiliar with Le Carres' style and world.
hifiguy
(33,688 posts)"American Sniper is a film about stupid people who were brainwashed into doing something stupid and it justifies their stupidity so that the stupid people watching can feel good about themselves."
Walk-off grand-slam home run. I am in awe, Rudie.
"It treats us like we're fucking idiots who are willing to forget anything about the truth behind the invasion of Iraq. It counts on our fucking idiocy in order to convey it's simplistic message that American soldiers are awesome and everyone else needs to shut the fuck up." is pretty choice material as well.
Scuba
(53,475 posts)BlancheSplanchnik
(20,219 posts)And the lie many soldiers from Iraq cling to and the lie we tell ourselves, and the lie that so many have worked so hard to maintain, is that as long as we don't discuss that it was for nothing, as long as we pretend that the fact that soldiers fought when they were told to fight and, mostly, did so nobly, we don't have to face the truly gut-wrenching reality of our national complicity in the crime.
The Rude Pundit consistently amazes me. He's so goddamn smart. Love the guy!
2naSalit
(86,776 posts)Martin Eden
(12,875 posts)marym625
(17,997 posts)Is it possible that even the end is to show how people will celebrate those that kill at the pleasure of the President?
They died for nothing. Every one of them.
We killed so many innocent people for nothing. So many. Our military people died for nothing. The permanently disabled were injured for nothing.
We don't prosecute those responsible. We don't admit that so many more problems were caused by our gutless, illegal failure. But we celebrate it.
This is our country. This is our legacy. This is a horror we created.
daleanime
(17,796 posts)jalan48
(13,883 posts)The movie is a big money maker and the Iraq War was an even bigger money maker. Plus, the movie will help indoctrinate young people to take part in future money making wars-it's a win, win, win!
pscot
(21,024 posts)shooting a civilian in the back from 600 yards?
grasswire
(50,130 posts)I know nothing about it. But it seems likely.
americannightmare
(322 posts)comparing this Eastwood propaganda piece and its depiction of Iraqis to not spending time with nice Germans in 'Saving Private Ryan' is only a good analogy if we had stormed the beaches of Cuxhaven and not Normandy. And even that assumes a comparison of Hitler and a largely complicit Germany and Hussein and a largely innocent Iraq. And why should anyone who wants to bring some sanity to our sick, violent civilization, after years of the same rinse and repeat, give our money to anything or anyone associated with Clint Eastwood? He doesn't treat anything in an even-handed way, why should we give him the same courtesy?
spanone
(135,874 posts)[URL=.html][IMG][/IMG][/URL]
deutsey
(20,166 posts)Response to meegbear (Original post)
Name removed Message auto-removed
Hubert Flottz
(37,726 posts)The RP gets it!
lark
(23,156 posts)I do not go to the movies for war films, EVER, refuse to spend money for any film that promotes war. I especially wouldn't go to any film about Iraq that doesn't show the lies and personal profit making from the BFEE/Cheney Vader.
ND-Dem
(4,571 posts)No doubt there was some reason or gain by elites. But for the rest of us -- nothing but death.
loudsue
(14,087 posts)The acting by Bradley Cooper was awesome. He & his character in the movie grabbed you from the first frame, and didn't let you go until it was over. He deserves an award of some kind for his acting, in my opinion. The movie was full of excitement, and it was well produced & directed. It's a hit.
The movie realistically reflected what happened to a lot of people after 9/11....red-neck kids who thought they had something to fight for; that was symbolic of something important to them, and gave them a "purpose" in their lives, no matter how wrong it was. They were easily exploited by the media propaganda -- which is just about the only kind of media we have in the USA anymore -- like Pat Tillman, and so many others.
Chris Kyle really was a sniper who killed a lot of people, and when he came home messed up, he started helping other vets, which helped him reintegrate back into civilian life, as best as he could.
I'm glad that people are looking at the merits and possible problems with a movie of this type, but it realistically portrays what it set out to portray -- who Chris Kyle was and what he did. It's based on his book. The media is trying to portray it as liberals are against the vets -- shades of the Vietnam era -- hippies, peaceniks, and the like. In the media, liberals are always bad, rightwing nuts are always good.
The Iraq war was a crime against humanity & a war crime in every respect; bush, cheney, rumsfeld and rice should all be put in gitmo for all they did. If we could put the media on trial, they are as much to blame as the bush family mafia crowd. But, to me, the movie didn't make a political statement as much as it was just a good movie. It's the media that is just humping on the already divisive atmosphere so pervasive in this country.
ND-Dem
(4,571 posts)He left the service in 2009 and started Craft International the same year. He reintegrated pretty damn fast.
Craft International, LLC (CRAFT) is a consulting and training services provider offering a wide range of services and training to federal, state and local customers. CRAFT specialize in providing turnkey mission solutions to ensure complete operation success. CRAFT is driven to provide unmatched consulting and training for our nation's Special Operators and First Responders. In an ever changing world, mission preparation and training are essential to success and CRAFT is at the forefront. We were founded by a mix of Special Operations Forces Operators and successful businessmen. CRAFT is a leader in integrated training and security solutions for operations in austere environments and situations.
http://www.thecraft.com/AboutUs.html
IOW, he started a company to help train killers. his book revels in killing, unlike the film which seeks to excuse it.
rleskowitz
(3 posts)Is this the same Craft whose operatives have been linked to the Boston Marathon bombings?
7962
(11,841 posts)secondvariety
(1,245 posts)And yes, his company is fundamentally just a training ground for back shooters.
KingCharlemagne
(7,908 posts)"I wondered, how would I feel about killing someone? Now I know. Its no big deal. (Emphasis added)
These are the words of the protagonist of this film. Kyle wrote and owns them.
WillyT
(72,631 posts)lordsummerisle
(4,651 posts)RP nails it once again.
hunter
(38,326 posts)Rude Pundit's got it right.
Not only should we be angry, we should be ashamed that such people as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, or Chris Kyle represent the U.S.A.
God Bless America?
Why?
Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)wildbilln864
(13,382 posts)LuvNewcastle
(16,856 posts)Maedhros
(10,007 posts)These paragraphs are the most clear, concise description of the American Doublethink that mires our country in an authoritarian morass:
And the lie many soldiers from Iraq cling to and the lie we tell ourselves, and the lie that so many have worked so hard to maintain, is that as long as we don't discuss that it was for nothing, as long as we pretend that the fact that soldiers fought when they were told to fight and, mostly, did so nobly, we don't have to face the truly gut-wrenching reality of our national complicity in the crime.
Chemisse
(30,817 posts)I hate liars
(165 posts)"The film fails, too, because all it's really saying is that, if you put some soldiers somewhere and tell them to do something, they will defend each other and do the job."
BeanMusical
(4,389 posts)Cha
(297,655 posts)first place. I don't care how good an acting job Bradley Cooper did.
Mahalo Rude & meeg
And this probably isn't the end of the glorification. It would not surprise me in the least if we see PO award him (via Kyle's wife) posthumously with a Medal of "Freedom."
The RP nails reality.
catbyte
(34,450 posts)the criminal who sent you to invade a country for no good reason, overextending the military, causing multiple deployments, creating your PTSD, maiming and killing your buddies, yet hate the guy who pledged to end it? I read an article where a practical joking friend would put "Obama" bumper stickers on his truck. Kyle's response? He put an "I love black dick" bumper sticker on the friend's truck. The answer, I guess, is that Kyle was just another racist asshole who happened to be a good shot.
ReRe
(10,597 posts)... nor have I read any articles about him. Was this information portrayed in the movie?
catbyte
(34,450 posts)libodem
(19,288 posts)So:
AnnieBW
(10,457 posts)I substitute Bradley Cooper's lines as Rocket Raccoon in "Guardians of the Galaxy" for the "American Sniper" ones. I keep thinking of him picking up the sniper rifle and saying, 'Oooohhh, Yeah!"
Maybe that makes me a bad American. I'm not. I'm an irreverent, nerdy American.
Buenaventura
(364 posts)it will truly make my day.
raouldukelives
(5,178 posts)I wonder if he is going to give this film the Iwo Jima treatment. Is he currently hard at work on Iraqi Sniper?
Baitball Blogger
(46,757 posts)Fox News viewer.
Response to meegbear (Original post)
olddots This message was self-deleted by its author.
FourScore
(9,704 posts)he zeroes in on the real issues like non other.
The Rude Pundit has become my very favorite blogger/columnist.