February 3, 2105--Sniping

We finally got around to seeing Clint Eastwood's Western, American Sniper.

This is not a typo, since Sniper is more a conventional Western of the sort Clint used to make than a traditional war movie.

In full Manichean mode, Eastwood is in familiar territory with forces of good confronting and overcoming, if somewhat ambiguously, evil. Good guy against bad guys.

It is also a biopic about Chris Kyle, the American sniper who during four tours of duty in Iraq is credited with at least 160 "kills." He is a Rambo figure. As Sly Stallone's Rambo single-handedly took on and defeated our stealthy enemies in Vietnam (a war we otherwise in real life were losing) Kyle takes on al-Qaeda fighters and through sniping and pitched firefights wipes out dozens of them though in real life they were and are winning.

Superheroes Rambo and Kyle help reconcile us to defeat by providing an alternate reality--that what we see on TV and read about in the papers is less real than what is on the big screen. Thus perpetuating the illusion that America has never lost a war.

One has to wonder why Sniper is doing so incredibly well at the box office, having already taken in more than $200 million. The highest grossing "war" movie of all time. What about it is appealing to Americans' consciousness?

The film puts on vivid and overwhelming display American exceptionalism, showing a self-made, unencumbered man taking on the world's evil forces. And, in a cool 2015-version of winning, prevails.

Eastwood and Stallone in their eras of American self-doubt have made careers out of such films.

But ironically, since I am certain this was not Eastwood's intent--he is a well-known conservative hawk--Sniper is more than anything a powerful antiwar movie.

Kyle is represented as heroic and undoubtedly deserves to be (sorry Michael Moore), but his heroism is not worthy of the situation--the Iraq War--in which it plays out. The war on the ground, in which Kyle and his comrades are unremittingly exemplary, is not worth the human cost. On either side. Even the heroic are drawn into the blood and gore, the purposeless and waste, and, yes, the evil that wars of this kind are.

In Sniper, in Western terms,  good outcomes prevail--more bad than good guys are killed, the principal evil-doer, Mustafa, an al-Qaeda sniper who was a Syrian Olympic marksman, is shot by Kyle after he kills three or four American soldiers; but in the end, as represented in Sniper, it means nothing, amounts to nothing.

Though our boys kill more of the elusive enemy than in turn get killed and maimed, as we are shown at the end of the film's climatic battle, which ends without a clear sense of outcome, as Kyle and his comrades withdraw from the field of battle more and more al-Qaeda fighters are shown to be streaming in.

With that, with his kills tallied, though the war will continue--it continues to this day (al-Qaeda has become ISIS)--Kyle decides it's time to go home.

And then when he does, he appears to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder but, as could only happen in a Rambo or Eastwood movie, is "cured" in less than 15 minutes of film time. At first shown sitting alone at a bar nursing a beer and brooding, after spending a few minutes with a VA psychologist, who takes him on a walk down the hospital corridor where he meets cheerful veteran amputees, Kyle is back to himself and is ready to return to his wife and children, where he is soon shot by another returning veteran, who presumably has a more enduring case of PTSD.

This, of course, is not shown on screen and thus is another way Eastwood attempts to sanitize and camouflage the reality of war's horrors. In Westerns, for the same reason, the good guys are never killed on screen. They head for the sunset.

With all this absurdity and horror to obscure and cover up, how could anyone claim that what we have been up to in Vietnam and more recently Iraq makes any sense or has any clear purpose? Including Clint.