Posted on 01/25/2015 12:32:49 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
I saw American Sniper last night, and hated it slightly less than I expected to. Like most Clint Eastwood movies – and I like Clint Eastwood movies for the most part – it's a simple, well-lit little fairy tale with the nutritional value of a fortune cookie that serves up a neatly-arranged helping of cheers and tears for target audiences, and panics at the thought of embracing more than one or two ideas at any time.
It's usually silly to get upset about the self-righteous way Hollywood moviemakers routinely turn serious subjects into baby food. Film-industry people angrily reject the notion that their movies have to be about anything (except things like "character" and "narrative" and "arc," subjects they can talk about endlessly).
This is the same Hollywood culture that turned the horror and divisiveness of the Vietnam War era into a movie about a platitude-spewing doofus with leg braces who in the face of terrible moral choices eats chocolates and plays Ping-Pong. The message of Forrest Gump was that if you think about the hard stuff too much, you'll either get AIDS or lose your legs. Meanwhile, the hero is the idiot who just shrugs and says "Whatever!" whenever his country asks him to do something crazy.
Forrest Gump pulled in over half a billion and won Best Picture. So what exactly should we have expected from American Sniper?
Not much. But even by the low low standards of this business, it still manages to sink to a new depth or two.
The thing is, the mere act of trying to make a typically Hollywoodian one-note fairy tale set in the middle of the insane moral morass that is/was the Iraq occupation is both dumber and more arrogant than anything George Bush or even Dick Cheney ever tried.
No one expected 20 minutes of backstory about the failed WMD search, Abu Ghraib, or the myriad other American atrocities and quick-trigger bombings that helped fuel the rise of ISIL and other groups.
But to turn the Iraq war into a saccharine, almost PG-rated two-hour cinematic diversion about a killing machine with a heart of gold (is there any film theme more perfectly 2015-America than that?) who slowly, very slowly, starts to feel bad after shooting enough women and children – Gump notwithstanding, that was a hard one to see coming.
Sniper is a movie whose politics are so ludicrous and idiotic that under normal circumstances it would be beneath criticism. The only thing that forces us to take it seriously is the extraordinary fact that an almost exactly similar worldview consumed the walnut-sized mind of the president who got us into the war in question.
It's the fact that the movie is popular, and actually makes sense to so many people, that's the problem. "American Sniper has the look of a bona fide cultural phenomenon!" gushed Brandon Griggs of CNN, noting the film's record $105 million opening-week box office.
Griggs added, in a review that must make Eastwood swell with pride, that the root of the film's success is that "it's about a real person," and "it's a human story, not a political one."
Well done, Clint! You made a movie about mass-bloodshed in Iraq that critics pronounced not political! That's as Hollywood as Hollywood gets.
The characters in Eastwood's movies almost always wear white and black hats or their equivalents, so you know at all times who's the good guy on the one hand, and whose exploding head we're to applaud on the other.
In this case that effect is often literal, with "hero" sniper Chris Kyle's "sinister" opposite Mustafa permanently dressed in black (with accompanying evil black pirate-stubble) throughout.
Eastwood, who surely knows better, indulges in countless crass stupidities in the movie. There's the obligatory somber scene of shirtless buffed-up SEAL Kyle and his heartthrob wife Sienna Miller gasping at the televised horror of the 9/11 attacks. Next thing you know, Kyle is in Iraq actually fighting al-Qaeda – as if there was some logical connection between 9/11 and Iraq.
Which of course there had not been, until we invaded and bombed the wrong country and turned its moonscaped cities into a recruitment breeding ground for… you guessed it, al-Qaeda. They skipped that chicken-egg dilemma in the film, though, because it would detract from the "human story."
Eastwood plays for cheap applause and goes super-dumb even by Hollywood standards when one of Kyle's officers suggests that they could "win the war" by taking out the evil sniper who is upsetting America's peaceful occupation of Sadr City.
When hunky Bradley Cooper's Kyle character subsequently takes out Mustafa with Skywalkerian long-distance panache – "Aim small, hit small," he whispers, prior to executing an impossible mile-plus shot – even the audiences in the liberal-ass Jersey City theater where I watched the movie stood up and cheered. I can only imagine the response this scene scored in Soldier of Fortune country.
To Eastwood, this was probably just good moviemaking, a scene designed to evoke the same response he got in Trouble With the Curve when his undiscovered Latin Koufax character, Rigoberto Sanchez, strikes out the evil Bonus Baby Bo Gentry (even I cheered at that scene).
The problem of course is that there's no such thing as "winning" the War on Terror militarily. In fact the occupation led to mass destruction, hundreds of thousands of deaths, a choleric lack of real sanitation, epidemic unemployment and political radicalization that continues to this day to spread beyond Iraq's borders.
Yet the movie glosses over all of this, and makes us think that killing Mustafa was some kind of decisive accomplishment – the single shot that kept terrorists out of the coffee shops of San Francisco or whatever. It's a scene that ratified every idiot fantasy of every yahoo with a target rifle from Seattle to Savannah.
The really dangerous part of this film is that it turns into a referendum on the character of a single soldier. It's an unwinnable argument in either direction. We end up talking about Chris Kyle and his dilemmas, and not about the Rumsfelds and Cheneys and other officials up the chain who put Kyle and his high-powered rifle on rooftops in Iraq and asked him to shoot women and children.
They're the real villains in this movie, but the controversy has mostly been over just how much of a "hero" Chris Kyle really was. One Academy member wondered to a reporter if Kyle (who in real life was killed by a fellow troubled vet in an eerie commentary on the violence in our society that might have made a more interesting movie) was a "psychopath." Michael Moore absorbed a ton of criticism when he tweeted that "My uncle [was] killed by sniper in WW2. We were taught snipers were cowards …"
And plenty of other commentators, comparing Kyle's book (where he remorselessly brags about killing "savages") to the film (where he is portrayed as a more rounded figure who struggled, if not verbally then at least visually, with the nature of his work), have pointed out that real-life Kyle was kind of a dick compared to movie-Kyle.
(The most disturbing passage in the book to me was the one where Kyle talked about being competitive with other snipers, and how when one in particular began to threaten his "legendary" number, Kyle "all of the sudden" seemed to have "every stinkin' bad guy in the city running across my scope." As in, wink wink, my luck suddenly changed when the sniper-race got close, get it? It's super-ugly stuff).
The thing is, it always looks bad when you criticize a soldier for doing what he's told. It's equally dangerous to be seduced by the pathos and drama of the individual solider's experience, because most wars are about something much larger than that, too.
They did this after Vietnam, when America spent decades watching movies like Deer Hunter and First Blood and Coming Home about vets struggling to reassimilate after the madness of the jungles. So we came to think of the "tragedy" of Vietnam as something primarily experienced by our guys, and not by the millions of Indochinese we killed.
That doesn't mean Vietnam Veterans didn't suffer: they did, often terribly. But making entertainment out of their dilemmas helped Americans turn their eyes from their political choices. The movies used the struggles of soldiers as a kind of human shield protecting us from thinking too much about what we'd done in places like Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos.
This is going to start happening now with the War-on-Terror movies. As CNN's Griggs writes, "We're finally ready for a movie about the Iraq War." Meaning: we're ready to be entertained by stories about how hard it was for our guys. And it might have been. But that's not the whole story and never will be.
We'll make movies about the Chris Kyles of the world and argue about whether they were heroes or not. Some were, some weren't. But in public relations as in war, it'll be the soldiers taking the bullets, not the suits in the Beltway who blithely sent them into lethal missions they were never supposed to understand.
And filmmakers like Eastwood, who could have cleared things up, only muddy the waters more. Sometimes there's no such thing as "just a human story." Sometimes a story is meaningless or worse without real context, and this is one of them.
Saw American Sniper last night with my husband. Husband and son knew Chris Kyle so it was especially difficult to watch. That said, it has to be so disheartening for these soldiers to be overseas fighting such unimaginable evil only to come home to fighting over deflated footballs, homosexual marriage, looting and rioting over thugs being shot by cops, etc. It’s all so very sad.
The author exemplifies what is wrong with today’s men; a lack of responsibility and sense of duty. I would expect this author to be a metrosexual living in the comfort afforded him by manly men. He’s also very liberal, anti-war and failing to grasp the terrors awaiting America. Time spent on the movie is about zilch and he certainly failed to grasp the themes therein.
Film-industry people angrily reject the notion that their movies have to be about anything (except things like “character” and “narrative” and “arc,” subjects they can talk about endlessly). “
The author gets this right. then he proceeds to most earnestly imagine that the basis of all Morality and Truth resides in the points of his own delusional leftist ideology.
Got to give him credit for writing an interesting expose of the govt racket mortgage industry , the corruption of HUD, the housing crisis and the role played in its inception by andrew Chomo as HUD secretary
At least I think it was tabibi writing for Rolling Stone
Whew!!I just can’t get past Matt Taibbi’s sense of self regard and superiority. Has Matt ever produced a great anything? Movie, novel, bookcase? Anything? Has Matt put his own life at risk for anything? Has Matt ever shot anything?
Has Matt Taibbi accomplished anything more significant in his life beyond ranting with a huge ego?
ISIL and other groups were natural developments from groups that already existed, had the same long term goal, and committed the same types of real atrocities.
Talk about not thinking about the hard stuff too much.
The difference between the author and Chris Kyle is that Chris’ name and memory will be honored one hundred years from now, while I never took the time to even read this author”s name.
Oh the horror!
It’s liberals like this who decry “civilian casualties” like the useful idiots (for the enemy) they are.
After seeing this movie, I am more convinced that next time (there will be a next time) we are in a situation like Fallujah, we give 72 hours notice to evacuate and carpet bomb the place into rubble. Rinse and repeat.
The barbarians are not worth the price of brave American lives. Kill them, break their stuff and let Allah sort it out. Anyone who does not see the moral differences between American values and jihadist values is either purposefully ignorant or a garden variety America-hating leftist.
> Well, what else can one suppose of Rolling Stone? Unbiased reporting?
It’s like reading newly released WH unemployment figures. You know it’s going to be skewed, full of lies, and full of crap provided by a liberal 0 supporter.
The walnut sized brain president who de-facto declared war, at the behest of a unanimous congress, was Bill Clinton.
Ii 1998 Congress authorized the removal of Sadaam Hussein by any means possible including force.
IT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN, NO MATTER WHO WAS PRESIDENT.
Translation: Oh no! The masses are not buying the intellectual complexity of my skewed, anti-American perspective! They're thinking for themselves!
> I generally do not repeat posts, but...
Matt Taibbi, I will bet my life, has trouble changing a tire by himself. And I know with the utmost certainty, has less than 3 power tools in his “loft”. Not counting the vibrating jelly kind... F-him with a cactus...
I will thrown in with you on that bet and say he’s probably also a of the LGBT persuasion and loves Barbara Streisand albums, Judy Garland, and Sharon Osbourne...
Is this the book he wrote that's been on the top bestseller lists for the last 4-5 years?
(snort)/sarcasm
“I’ll take elitist progressive shiiteheads who have never done a damn thing in their life but write for irrelevent magazines for 1000, please, Alex”...
RLTW
I have said it before... Textbook stupidity is pissing off an entire class of warriors that are skilled at killing you from a very long distance without ever being detected.
Any ideology that is built upon the foundation of fetal goo can’t be any good.
I’ll Bet American Sniper would be really popular in Kurdistan and Khobani.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.