An unrepentant whitewash of murder and occupation, American Sniper shouldn’t be up for any Oscars
Hollywood at War
An unrepentant whitewash of murder and occupation, American Sniper shouldn’t be up for any Oscars tonight.
by Stephen Maher
Great art is always ambiguous. Rather than giving us answers, it forces us to ask new questions; complexity is its hallmark. None of this applies to American Sniper, a truly abhorrent film that cannot be confused with art, much less great art.
Yet I suspect that the already deafening praise the film has received will only grow as Chris Kyle’s image as a national “war hero” is amplified both by Bradley Cooper’s Oscar nomination and the ongoing trial of Kyle’s murderer, Eddie Routh, a veteran struggling with severe mental health problems who Kyle had reached out to after returning home.
When not articulated within hawkish narratives emphasizing the glory or necessity of war, the very real suffering of so many returning soldiers is largely framed within the familiar dovish critique of American imperialism — repeated by American Sniper — which casts the war as a misguided expenditure of “our” lives and resources.
My antipathy for American Sniper isn’t an unthinking revulsion toward any film I perceive to be conservative. It is certainly possible for reactionary films to be so skillfully and intelligently constructed that they are great works, even if the way they deal with their subject matter and the conclusions they draw from it are revolting.
Consider, for example, many of Lars von Trier’s mind-bending but often misogynist films, such as Dogville; or Stanley Kubrick’s artful affirmation of the bourgeois family in Eyes Wide Shut; or John Ford’s Stagecoach, a film that glorifies the massacre of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, but which was so well technically executed that Orson Welles claimed to have seen it forty times while making Citizen Kane.
As in countless countries, and in countless wars, American Sniper attempts to construct a war hero for us to worship that is beyond politics. What we get instead is a hackneyed paean to brutish masculinity, and a film whose banality is lessened only by the shock of its whitewashing of the crimes of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq — even as it adopts a “dovish,” critical attitude toward the war.
more: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/02/american-sniper-war-violence-oscars/
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