Clint Eastwood treats Iraq like Iwo Jima. Will Americans really go for this horseshit? [View all]

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from In These Times:


American Sniper: Guns, God and Gallons of Testo’
Clint Eastwood treats Iraq like Iwo Jima. Will Americans really go for this horseshit?

BY MICHAEL ATKINSON


Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper perfectly epitomizes a certain kind of American horseshit: the militaristic anthem thinly disguised as a sob story, the spray of nationalism scented with humanist rosewater. In telling the potentially resonant life story of Chris Kyle—a Navy SEAL who survived four tours in Iraq, where he reputedly became “the deadliest sniper in American history,” with 160 confirmed kills—Eastwood picks gently at the scabs of war, never questioning the wound or the society that inflicted it.

It’s all guns, God and gallons of testo’, delivered in the check-box fashion of the modern biopic. We follow Kyle from deer-shootin’, schoolyard-brawlin’ Texas tyke to aimless-n’-wild twentysomething (enter Bradley Cooper) to buffed-up SEAL recruit, and then it’s off to the circus. Kyle’s unit gets the deployment call, wouldn’t you know it, right in the middle of his wedding reception.

Eastwood treats Iraq like Iwo Jima, an unambiguous battle against Evildoers, with Kyle an honest-to-God American hero picking off headshots from rooftops. Nowhere in sight is the simple awareness that we were the invaders. This is another one of those movies, like Zero Dark Thirty, that makes me worry for the country, if only because it implicitly extols the virtues of xenophobic slaughter in lieu of even a glancing awareness of political facts.

Sure, Kyle is haunted by having to pop women and children from hundreds of safe yards away, but he’s Us, after all—a little guilt with the badassery is our holy burden. The Iraqis, on the other hand, are black-clad, sneering, Nazi-ish monsters, opening kids’ skulls with hand drills and hiding in shadowy villain dens. Like a superhero, Kyle even has an evil counterpart, a handsome arch-nemesis sniper who dares to shoot American soldiers. Cue the Act Three triumph via a slo-mo bullet and an inspirational exhortation after a comrade dies, “Do it for Biggles!” ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/17515/american_sniper_guns_god_and_gallons_of_testo