Live blogging American Sniper [View all]

[markpkessinger]

Last edited Mon Feb 2, 2015, 01:34 AM - Edit history (1)

I posted this just now on Facebook. I watched American Sniper online, and wrote this as I watched.

Mark Kessinger

So, I saw that American Sniper is available for viewing on Putlocker. Since I have been critical of the film's premise, I figured I have a responsibility to at least see it (although Ill be damned if I will enrich Clint Eastwood by paying for the privilege!). So, this post is a kind of live blog of my reactions as I watch it.

- Opening sequence. Chris Kyle in Iraq, lying prone, staring through his rifle's scope, his sights trained on a particular house, while engaging in banter with a fellow soldier. First, he sees a "military age" man talking on a cell phone. Then a woman and a boy of maybe 10-12 emerge from the house. The woman hands the boy something that looks like an IED. Kyle's fellow soldier reminds him, as he focuses on the boy, that if he is wrong about what the boy is carrying, hell be headed to a stint at Leavenworth prison (my reaction: as if). Boy starts running in the direction of American solders on the street. Kyle trains his sights on the boy -- just at he fires the shot, the film cuts to Kyle, as a boy, hunting with his father, and the shot takes down a deer. (So we don't (yet?) know whether he actually shot the boy, or what the boy was actually carrying.) As Kyle runs to check out the deer he has killed, he briefly puts his rifle down on the ground. His father then scolds him: "Chris! Don't ever leave your rifle lying int he dirt!" (I guess that's like desecrating the flag, or a holy relic, or something . . . ) His father then adds, proudly, "That was a heckava good shot, son!"

Okay, so I'm not exactly sure what the point is here. Is he suggesting that taking out a 12-year-old boy is no different from hunting?

-- Next sequence -- Kyle, still as a boy, sitting in church with his family, at the end of a sermon in which the preacher is invoking the actions of the apostle Paul as recorded in the book of ACts to extol the virtues of "standing up" for what one believes is right. Kyle picks up a pocket-size bible from the pew rack and begins leafing through it. His mother silently scolds him for doing so. He stops, but then surreptitiously stuffs the bible into his pants pocket. (I guess pilfering the bible from the church is okay.) Cut to a long shot of the same bible, lying atop a dresser in what is presumably the boy's bedroom. (I guess it's saying that what follows in the film is about the bible, or God, or something . . . .)

-- Cut to the family's Sunday dinner table. Kyle's father is lecturing his two sons about the "three types of people" in the world (nothing like a limited set of options, eh?): 'sheep' (those who don't believe evil exists in the world, and are thus clueless as to how to respond), 'wolves' (those who prey on the weak, helpless sheep), and 'sheep dogs' (those who are "blessed with the gift of aggression" (omg-did he REALLY just say that?) and who live to confront the wolf).l His father continues, "We ain't raisin' no sheep in this family." Then, removing his belt and violently slamming it on the table, adds, "And Ill whup your ass if either of you becomes a wolf!" Then we see the two boys seated at the dinner table, Chris's younger brother has a black eye. Chris interjects, "But the guy was picking on Jeff! (his brother). "Is that true?" asks his father. The younger brother nods. The father then asks Chris, "And did you finish it?" Chris nods. "Good," says the father, "you know who you are, you know your purpose."

(Okay, so the impression Im getting is that he had a father who was an extremely violent man who raised his sons to be just as violent, while rationalizing that violence so he could claim not to be a "wolf." Yet I get the impression that Eastwood somehow thinks he is presenting a model upbringing here. Strange. The way I see it, if that's how Kyle was raised, he was damaged goods long before he got to Iraq!)/

I won't go into quite so much detail from here on -- it will take all day to get through the film if I do that. But these opening scenes seemed to be portentous as to what is to come (as opening sequences tend to be).

A few other scenes from Chris's life prior to Iraq, then we see him watching news coverage of the '93 bombing of the World Trade Center. Chris's face registers some sort of inchoate distress. Cut immediately to Chris signing up at his local navy recruiter's office. Then we see Chris enduring the rigors and sadisms of SEALS training, meeting his future wife, sniper training. (Gee, that wasnt AT ALL predictable, was it?)

Then we see Chris and his fiance watching news coverage of 9-11. Chris gets married, and then we're back in Iraq, in the opening scene, where Chris has just killed the boy. The boy's mother runs and retrieves the IED from the boy's body, then hurls it towards a group of American soldiers, where it explodes. ("See? Killing the boy was justified!" -- so the film seems to scream.)

Before long, Kyle is shown in a military briefing about Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and a discussion of al-Zarqawi, one of its leaders. Note that there is no mention that there would never have been an "Al Qaeda in Iraq" but for the American invasion. Note also that the film has not even mentioned the fact that Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11, and that the sequence of events in the film implies it did.

The film goes on to show scenes from all four of Kyle's deployments, while his own mental health deteriorates and his marriage nearly falls apart. Seems he had a bit of a habit of telephoning his wife -- while in the midst of firefights. Each time, his wife is traumatized whenever he goes silent, as he must, to focus on the battle at hand. Between his 3rd and 4th deployments,. his wife has had just about all she can take, and warns him that if he goes again, she wouldn't guarantee that she and the kids would be waiting for him when he got home. And one can hardly blame her.

Kyle finally calls it quits in Iraq, when -- once again in the midst of battle -- he telephones his wife. Only this time hes at his breaking point, and tells her he is ready to come home. Once home, there are numerous scenes of Kyle having difficulty readjusting to ordinary family life -- at one point nearly killing the family dog as the dog and his daughter engage in a little horseplay. In a scene with his therapist -- one is relieved at this point in the film that he is actually getting help -- his therapist, having been informed by Kyle's wife about the incident involving the dog, asks him if perhaps there were things that happened in Iraq, things he might have done or participated in, that he regretted. "No sir," Kyle answers, "that's not me -- I'm ready to meet my maker.and to answer for every shot I took." (At that point, I was practically yelling at the therapist on my screen to probe that more deeply, and not to just let it lie. But, according to the film, there was no further probing. The therapist instead, mentioning Hyle's professed desire to "protect his own," introduces him to a support group of returning Iraq/Afghanistan vets.

Near the end of the film, Kyle is seen doing much better, continuing to work with returning veterans, his marriage and family life back in order. One day he decides to take one of the veterans he has been helping to a shooting range, where that veteran kills him. I found it interesting that this film, which does not hesitate to show dead and mutilated Iraqi men, women and children, chose not to depict this part of Kyle's story, but simply to display a caption against a black screen explaining what happened. (I have to say I am farily astounded that anybody would think that taking a veteran suffering from PTSD to a shooting range was a good idea, or that anything good would come of it! That decision, I think, reflects Kyle's own dysfunctional understanding of violence, which, if the film is accurate, was inculcated very early in Kyle's life.) I saw that choice (of merely captioning the circumstances of Kyle's deawth) as partaking of a subtle message that underlay the entire film: that only American lives count. The reality of the war in Iraq is that there was nothing "apolitical" about it -- from the planning of it, which was in the works even before Bush took office, to the decision to use 9-11 as a pretext for an invasion, to the refusal to allow U.N. inspectors to complete their work before invading, to the largely uncritical and unquestioning support for the war initially by Congress and most of the American public.

One argument I've seen in defense of the film is that the film was about a guy's commitment to doing an impossibly difficult job right, of doing the best possible job a human being could do in impossible circumstances. A similar argument is made regarding certain events in Vietnam. But I think there's a profound difference. In Vietnam, most of the soldiers were not there by choice == they were drafted into service. Thus, there is a solid argument to be made that the brutality of that war arose from soldiers who themselves were brutalized -- often unwillingly -- by that war. But the war in Iraq was fought by our 'all volunteer military' (with no small halp from highly paid mercenaries). Those who fought in Iraq were there of their own volition. In choosing to enlist in the military at the time they did, they chose to participate in the enterprise of war generally, and of the war in Iraq specifically, and thus bear a share of moral complicity for that participation, and for all that attended it, in a way that most Vietnam veterans do not.

Having watched the film -- and I found it difficult to sit through -- my earlier criticisms are only reinforced. The film's repeated references to "those savages" grated on my nerves. We had no right to be there in the first place, and to call people "savages" who were defending against an unjust invasion and occupation by a foreign government is a moral outrage in itself. And I dare say that if America ever found itself the target of such an invasion and occupation, Americans would resist just as savagely, and would be within their rights to do so.

I have a theory about why this film is so popular. Granted, it is a compelling story (at least if one divorces oneself from the realities of the Iraq war), is very well-acted and well-directed. But I think part of what is driving the popularity of this film is the fact that most Americans now understand that all of the justifications given for the war in Iraq have now been conclusively proven to have been false. There thus remains a conflict in the consciousness of those who reflexively and uncritically supported that war. But to confront that conflict would require scrutinizing many of America's long-held and deeply cherished national myths -- myths we have been indoctrinated to accept from a very early age -- about the nature of America's actions in the world. The fact of the matter is that we only ever fought ONE defensive war in our history, and that was the war of 1812 (and that war, ironically, barely merits a footnote in most of our history books). (Sure, one can argue that WWII was defensive following Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor, but it is highly doubtful Japan was seeking to conquer the U.S. Rather, it was seeking dominance of the Pacific's trad routes, and to attain that dominance, it needed to take out the U.S. naval fleet in the Pacific -- which it damn near succeeded in doing.) The uncomfortable truth is that all of the rest have been wars of empire. Americans don't want to confront that reality, but they still are left with this crisis of conscience over recent wars for which the usual justification narratives are inadequate. And so, they focus on the plight of the soldier in the midst of battle, in complete and total isolation from the true circumstances that placed that soldier there. We want our consciences to be cleared, but without having to experience any of the prior remorse necessary in order to be able to forgive ourselves. The problem is that this is a pursuit of absolution without penitence -- a pursuit that always was, is, and always will be morally hollow.