"Powerful. Another view of Coming Home ... Bravo Clint Eastwood."
-- Jane Fonda, commenting on Twitter about American Sniper
I was among the film critics impressed by Clint Eastwood's American Sniper; I listed it among the year's notable films in my annual end-of-the-year essay that ran in this newspaper a couple of weeks ago. And when the movie opened here on Jan. 16 I reviewed it positively, albeit with the caveat that "the breeziest reading of the film is as a celebration of the warrior ethos."
I meant it was likely that some who watched the movie would see it as a glorification of Chris Kyle, the Navy SEAL sharpshooter whose memoir forms the basis for the film. People would take Kyle, portrayed in the film by Bradley Cooper, as either an American superhero blowing away bad guys in the name of truth, justice and the American way or as a repellent human being fortunate enough to have a government-sanctioned avenue for his bloodlust. Some might take the film as a blunt instrument with which they could hammer home whatever political point they wanted.
Yet the breeziest reading of any movie is rarely the best one. Eastwood, as a director, works with a certain economy and straightforwardness that belies his rather nuanced engagement with the Hollywood myth of masculinity. The Kyle in the movie is a complicated figure who does a job that requires him to suspend moral judgments. He is not given to think about whether his presence in Iraq is called for, about whether the military action he's supporting is a "good" war or simply expedient politics. Such considerations are above his pay grade.
He is expert at his job, and because it saves the lives of his comrades it is possible for him to rationalize his duty as necessary and virtuous. Still, it takes a spiritual toll on him. It is impossible to imagine the protagonist of American Sniper claiming, as the actual Kyle did in print, that killing is "fun." The Kyle in the film does not terrorize Iraqis for kicks.
In the movie, Kyle's job isolates and alienates him, spoils him for civilian life. (American Sniper demonstrates the sad estrangement of the U.S. military culture from mainstream society. Everyone used to know someone in the military--in the Vietnam era, 12 percent of the U.S. population was serving or had served in the armed forces. Today, that figure is 0.5 percent.)
Left undepicted in the film are some of the more incredible of Kyle's widely reported anecdotes--there's no scene where he drives to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to set up his rifle on the roof of the Superdome and pick off dozens of looters. No scene where he decks Jesse Ventura in a bar. No scene where he kills two would-be truck-jackers in Dallas.
Cooper's performance in the film has been rightly praised, but not necessarily because he "became" the sniper. Kyle's widow (Kyle was murdered in 2013, an event that occurs off-screen in American Sniper) says Cooper captured Kyle's mannerisms, but most of us have no objective standard by which we can judge his portrayal. Cooper feels credible in the role, his accent feels right; the movie's details (aside from an absurd doll which doubles for a baby in some scenes) match up with our expectations or surprise in ways that resonate.
But Cooper's character is not the man. (For that matter, the Kyle-created character in the memoir is not the man.) And Eastwood's story is not Kyle's. Whether or not the real Chris Kyle was moral seems beside the point. (I suspect he was a complex and deeply conflicted person who, like most of us, was capable of both selflessness and venality. Any movie about him, any book, is necessarily reductive.)
American Sniper might--as I wrote in my review--give some people the impression that murdering people from a distance is a party, but that's no more Eastwood's intent than inspiring love-it-or-leave-it jingoism was Bruce Springsteen's intention when he wrote "Born in the U.S.A." No artist ought to have to worry about how the stupidest will receive his work, or about how the cynical will re-purpose it.
That's one difference between an artist and a politician--a politician doesn't have the luxury of treating his audience members as adults.
American Sniper says what it says, and you can take it home and think about it. While we might think we know Eastwood's politics, this isn't an especially political movie, and I'm not surprised Jane Fonda was impressed by it. Still, a lot of the people who breezily receive it will miss its point.
Early in the movie, there's a scene where a young Chris Kyle listens to his father talk about the "three kinds of people in the world ... wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs." I recognized the speech as a paraphrase of a passage in Lt. Col. David Grossman's 2004 book On Combat.
Grossman (who, while at Arkansas State University in the 1990s, wrote the Pulitzer Prize-nominated On Killing) writes that a Vietnam veteran once told him, "Most of the people in our society are sheep. They are kind, gentle, productive creatures who can only hurt one another by accident."
"If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy productive citizen: a sheep," Grossman writes. "If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath--a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? Then you are a sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero's path. Someone who can walk into the heart of darkness, into the universal human phobia, and walk out unscathed."
While Grossman finds virtue in being a "sheep"--and most of the people who made American Sniper an unprecedented January box office success would probably identify with the concept--a loud minority spit the word as an epithet. (Can you be a sheepdog if you have such disdain for your flock?) Many of them may be fans of Kyle's best-selling memoir. Some of them might belong to the demographic that buys gun-porn magazines at the supermarket. Some of them might find themselves inspired, as some Twitter users were, to talk about how the film made them want to kill Muslims.
I don't hold Eastwood responsible for that sort of asinine commentary.
After my review of the movie ran, I heard from a lot of people, in particular from a self-published author who apparently styles himself a kind of globe-trotting adventurer. He said he was offended that I would characterize Kyle and other military snipers as "assassins." I did no such thing. What I said was it was possible to see how people who enjoy the idea of murdering other people from a remote distance might find the movie inspiring. The major--or whatever he is--either knew this and tried to twist my words to flatter his own sense of self-importance, or he's just dense. Whatever, I have no time for these rude people, and I don't intend to take their precious sensibilities into account whenever I write something.
I don't think Clint Eastwood ought to do that either.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 01/25/2015