American Sniper
Relative Nuances
When American Sniper star Bradley Cooper turned up at the Democratic Convention in 2015, a year after Clint Eastwood’s film came out, it caused consternation among some Republican supporters. People took to Twitter expressing their dismay that someone could play the sniper of the title, Chris Kyle, and then appear to support the Democrats. Articles in Huffington Post, The Independent and others didn’t only report this news, they were sniffily condescending towards those on social media who had adopted such a stance. ‘‘In the most compelling demonstration of the failings of the American education system yet,’ Cole Delbyck said, ‘’many confused Republicans expressed their outrage that their hero would dare support a Democratic candidate.’’ (Huffington Post) Christopher Hooton offered a variation of this when quoting another social media user: ‘‘News flash: Arnold Schwarzenegger is not a robot and Julia Roberts is not a prostitute.’’ (Independent) Both journalists offer the patronising, and Hooton adds an assumption, saying ‘‘Several Republicans and fans of the film American Sniper (essentially one and the same) have expressed their anger over lead actor Bradley Cooper’s attendance at the Democratic National Convention.’’ (Independent) In that parenthesis lies a lot of liberal judgement, and while it can’t compete with Hillary Clinton’s famous claim that those who wanted to Make America Great Again were a basket of deplorables, and represented about half the Republican party in the run-up to the 2016 election, all the remarks can seem like contributing to a moment in time when those who weren’t on the right just weren’t getting it.
It isn’t that Clinton didn’t have a point, and while some past comments curdle like warm milk, others mature like fine wines. Clinton was surely right to be dismayed at the turn in American politics when bigotry became normalised, and was actively supported by her opponent, Donald Trump, even if we might wonder whether her smug tone did her any favours. When Obama mocked Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, many saw it as the moment when the latter decided he would run for president and get revenge. "He was not having a good time," [David] Remnick told Frontline. ‘He was being treated as piñata by the president of the United States, and I think he felt humiliated.’’’ (Newsnight)
This is chiefly an article about a specific film, and not generally American politics, but in Hooton’s comment about American Sniper as a film only of any interest to Republicans, it seemed to miss the film’s ambiguity, the movie’s ability to admire what it sees as a unequivocal American hero, still see that there are other values beyond bravery and expertise, and also whether the cause that can make a hero out of Chris Kyle, is itself a worthy endeavour. When ‘’First lady Michelle Obama urged Hollywood to give a more accurate portrayal of veterans and defended the Oscar-nominated American Sniper which has received criticism for its depiction of war’’ (AP), perhaps she saw more nuance in the work than many other Democrats. Though the film is seen chiefly from Kyle’s point of view, his wife’s perspective is far from ignored. In The Hurt Locker, focusing on a bomb disposal expert addicted to risk, his wife’s role is almost non-existent. Both male characters would probably echo a little Willard’s claim in Apocalypse Now: ‘’When I was here, I wanted to be there. When I was there...all I could think of was getting back into the jungle.’’ Yet while Willard’s wife doesn’t appear at all in Coppola’s film, as he says, ‘‘When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. I'd wake up, and there'd be nothing. I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to a divorce,’’ and in The Hurt Locker, the wife has a minor role, in American Sniper, Taya (Sienna Miller) is a constant and querying presence who wonders whether he should be over there, and is concerned over what he is ignoring at home. While he is busy saving lives in Iraq, he is ignoring family life in America. When he returns from one trip, he is reluctant to turn up at the house at all and phones from a bar as his wife tries to understand why he isn’t rushing home to see her and the kids.
One might call hers the heart of the story, and Kyle’s the action aspect of it, in a clear division of narrative labour that leaves the wife at home and the man a hunter-gatherer, culling humans instead of animals. There is some truth to this, and the film isn’t afraid to draw analogies between all forms of living flesh. Near the beginning, Kyle is training his sights on an Iraqi woman and her child as they’re involved in planning a terror attack, and Eastwood cuts to young Chris out hunting with his father and taking out an animal. His father says he ‘‘is going to make a fine hunter some day.’’ When at dinner, after Chris goes to his brother’s rescue when the younger boy is attacked, his father speaks, in a cross-cutting sequence between the fight and the father’s remarks, of sheep who can’t protect themselves, wolves who are predators, and the rare breed, the sheep dog, who will protect the sheep. Clearly, Chris will go on to become a very impressive sheepdog indeed. He became the most effective sniper in American military history, with 160 kills. But the film also wonders whether this was a sheepdog who forgot about his flock, paying more attention to killing wolves than protecting his kin.
A film simply concerned with jingoism would have cared little to ask this question, and yet though Eastwood as a star might be seen as the movie equivalent of Kyle, with numerous on screen kills (though the competition is fierce with Stallone, Schwarzenegger and others topping his count), his emotional range as a director has been broad, from the very fine Breezy to Million Dollar Baby, from Bird to The Bridges of Madison County. He may have cemented his reputation as a film star with a work that showed a sniper as a cowardly villain (Dirty Harry), but he doesn’t, in this instance, simply reverse it and turn Kyle into a saintly hero. A common trope in the war film is the tough sergeant, captain or major who can be both concerned for his troops and brutal in his treatment of them, probably exemplified by John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima, and with Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now an exaggeration of such a figure, playing up the John Wayne heroism found in the earlier film to the point of caricature. The ambivalences of character (good guy and bad guy characteristics) are played out in one field of action. In American Sniper, the division is geographical: Kyle is the hero in Iraq, a neglectful husband and father back home. The film’s purpose is to show that he has done his duty in war and that he must learn to do his duty domestically as a family man. The film’s tragedy is that just as he seems to have learnt this role, the past comes back not to haunt him but kill him. As he begins to help ex-servicemen get their lives together Stateside, one he takes on a shooting range ends up killing Kyle. It could be seen as a version of blowback, the CIA term to describe foreign military adventures that result in unforeseen consequences. This might usually be terrorist actions from a country that has been attacked, even ostensibly defeated, but here it is an American serviceman, traumatised in war, who, at home, kills one of his own. Eastwood may play with the facts in the film, but, in this instance, the gist of the irony is real. Looking to see how accurate to the facts the film is, Alex von Tunzelmann says, ‘‘There is a mostly fictional sniper named Mustafa (Sammy Sheik), a former Olympic marksman, who is mentioned in one paragraph of Kyle’s book but in the film becomes his sharp-shooting, marine-murdering nemesis.’’ (Guardian) There are pragmatic, dramatic reasons for this deviation, but the film accepts the factual irony that, for all Kyle’s attempts at protecting his own in Iraq, he gets killed by one of them on American soil. A film more determined to play up the chauvinism would retreat from such ironies, even if it meant moving further away from the facts of Kyle’s life.
Yet one could argue that it does eschew this detail. While the enemy sniper is vividly dramatised, Kyle’s death isn’t shown at all. A title at the end says ‘‘Chris Kyle was killed that day by a veteran he was trying to help.’’ Is this the film copping out, or acknowledging a truth? If we try to ignore the politics and view it dramatically (all the better to bring back the politics later), it makes sense that the film emphasises the sniper’s presence and minimises Kyle’s killer, unless American Sniper wanted to take another form, which might have resulted in a different title. The film’s dramatic through-line is that Kyle needs to take out this expert enemy sniper, one who is as efficient at killing Americans as Kyle is effective in taking out Iraqis. But while the film proposes the Iraqi sniper is a wolf who will kill indiscriminately, Kyle does so with great concern and moral fret. He is, after all, a sheepdog and not a predator. Two scenes especially make this clear. The first is when Kyle shoots the woman and the child. The film shows him training his gun on them before flashing back for twenty-five minutes as we get elements of his childhood, and also the burgeoning relationship with Taya. The film then returns to the scene as he must decide whether to take them out. His colleague says that he’d better be right about this; ‘‘they’ll fry you if you’re wrong.’’ Not only his conscience but also his very life is on the line, and yet he has American lives to save. He first shoots the boy as he moves forward with the grenade, then the woman as she picks it up and starts to throw it at an American tank. Kyle leaves shooting the latter to the last possible moment, and his shot limits the grenade’s trajectory, even if it still goes off near enough to the tank for the grenade to cause those around it to duck in fear of their lives. Kyle proves himself a hero, and his colleague confirms that she wasn’t worth saving as he calls her an ‘‘evil fucking bitch.’’
Many scenes later, another situation leaves him wrestling with his conscience in real time. Kyle shoots a man lurking around a corner with a bazooka, and moments after, a young boy sees the man dead and looks likely to pick up the weapon. In a reversal of Harry Callahan’s famous lines in Dirty Harry, where the villain has a gun beside him, and wonders whether to pick it up, unsure whether Harry has fired five or all six bullets in his chamber, he doesn’t shoot. In Dirty Harry, the viewer watches sadistically, hoping the killer will pick up the gun and that Harry’s sixth bullet will blow him away. He goes for the gun, and Harry’s sixth shot does its business. In American Sniper, the film shows the boy picking up the weapon as Kyle speaks out loud to himself that the boy should drop it. If he doesn’t, he drops the boy. The boy does indeed drop it, and a moment that in Dirty Harry is sadistic is merely, on this occasion, cinematically manipulative. Will he or won’t he kill the boy, we wonder, and hope the boy doesn’t try to fire the bazooka and, in turn, gets to live. In Dirty Harry, the viewer is supposed to want the villain to pick up the gun, and we get the chance to relish in his death.
If National Review, noted Kyle may have said that he didn’t ‘’give a flying f*** about the Iraqis’’, Ian Tuttle adds that it ‘’is not straightforward [...] It comes in the context of discussing why Kyle fought at all: ‘I didn’t risk my life to bring democracy to Iraq. I risked my life for my buddies, to protect my friends and fellow countrymen. I went to war for my country, not Iraq.’’’ The film suggests this didn’t mean he wanted Iraqis dead; he just wanted to make sure they didn’t kill any Americans. We may dispute whether the US should have been there in the first place, and believe Kyle was deluded when claiming ‘‘My country sent me out there so that bullsh*t wouldn’t make its way back to our shores.’’ (National Review). But the film proposes he didn’t have a sadistic streak.
There are various ways of looking at this. Some might see that Eastwood brings out the humanity in Kyle when directing American Sniper, which he and director Don Siegel chose to ignore when making Dirty Harry. Others could see a whitewashed account of a vicious killer. Tuttle quotes Max Blumenthal, on Alternet, who saw Kyle as an ‘’occupier” who ‘mow[ed] down faceless Iraqis”’ [and]— was ‘the perfect recruiter for ISIS,’ and also likened him to “John Lee Malvo, another mass-murdering sniper.’” (National Review) It might have been a sign of the incipient times that a film that is probably best understood as an account of a man who believes that, in saving his country, was failing his family, and who also, in the process of saving his colleagues, didn’t save enough of them, becomes a work that is a call to MAGA, one that liberals needed to dismiss as a film that wasn’t for them.
If the liberals stayed away, the film nevertheless made a fortune. Paul Waldman, writing as it came out, noted, ‘‘Hollywood was shocked when last weekend ended and Clint Eastwood's American Sniper, a film about Chris Kyle — described everywhere as "the most lethal sniper in American military history" — not only was the top-grossing film in the country but took in over $100 million, the kind of number we ordinarily associate with superheroes or teenage girls fighting for their lives. Why did it do so well? The answer is, at least in part, politics.’’ (The Week) If the film made money because of its politics, and most of those who seemed interested in it were on the right, that indicated a large right-wing base, but it may also have indicated that a country could become properly divided. Presumably, those seeing Marvel films didn’t believe themselves offering a political opinion one way or the other, but it seems American Sniper became the film to divide a nation, when the film itself appears more to contribute to defining it.
Eastwood’s personal politics haven’t always been easy to comprehend, though he has often been politically active on the right, and was, of course, the Mayor of Carmel for a while. In his films as a director, he has usually been more interested in exploring situations than polemicising for a cause, with Gran Torino a potentially stale vigilante movie that turns into a work about an eighty-year-old war veteran (Clint Eastwood) with plenty to feel guilty about, a Hmong community that he begins to understand, and of a Vietnamese family he wishes to protect against a Hmong gang. If American Sniper takes Dirty Harry in one direction as it explores rather than exploits sniper culture, Gran Torino takes the notion of a story ripe for vigilante violence into another as Eastwood confronts the gang and is shot dead rather than doing the killing. American Sniper and Gran Torino might not be better films than Dirty Harry, but they may be viewed as more liberal ones. They celebrate heroism, but they don’t quite applaud murder. There may be films that the alt-right could have got behind and that the liberals would resist, but American Sniper seems to be a film people want to come at prejudicially rather than analytically.
Critic Tyler Sage noted that while commentators were quick to draw on the political, film critics were keener to note the formal. Sage quotes articles by Thomas Powers in the New York Review of Books, Richard Brody in the New Yorker, and Andrew O’Hehir in Salon. Sage is less impressed by the film’s form than the others and gives an example of its crudeness, the scene we quoted above with the mother, the child, and the grenade. ‘‘This sequence is an object lesson in narrative cynicism.’’, Sage believes. ‘‘It presents us with what is purportedly a moment of real tension [...]But we have seen very clearly that the kid is in fact holding a grenade. The composition and clarity of the shots leave no doubt in our minds. Thus, the film builds an edifice of serious moral danger, while at the same time resolving that danger in advance; it allows us to wallow in the threat of the moment while knowing the whole time that it will be okay in the end.’’ (Bright Lights Film Journal) But it seems to us the moral danger is in the later scene, not in this earlier one, and this is partly evident in the fundamental difference between them: the woman and child are killed; later, the boy escapes with his life as he puts down the gun. The purpose of the first scene is to show Kyle’s value system, how it is acceptable to take out these two people, as it flashes back for twenty-five minutes and leads up to this scene where he kills for the first time in Iraq. It is psychological rather than moral, while the two other key scenes are morally far more intriguing: the scene where Kyle hopes he needn’t shoot the boy with the bazooka, and where Kyle takes out the enemy sniper.
If Kyle reluctantly kills the woman and the child, we might wonder if the threat of imprisonment is part of that reluctance. In the scene with the boy with the bazooka, there seems to be no such threat: he has taken out numerous people already, and yet he wants the boy to live as if his life depended on it. Sure, the film is manipulative as the boy picks up the weapon, points it in the troops’ direction, and then puts it down again. As in the earlier scene, there isn’t anything subtle in Eastwood’s dramaturgy. But if Kyle appears much more reluctant to kill the boy this time around, it is surely that he has accumulated greater responsibilities in his personal life, can seen how vulnerable his own colleagues have been as one was shot in the face in mid-conversation with Chris, attended another’s funeral Stateside, now has children of his own, and has shown signs of PTSD when he overreacts to the sound of an impact wrench at a garage. If in the earlier scene he is the man who’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, in this later one he seems a man who mustn’t do what he is expected to do if he wants to remain an integrated human being. Again, none of this is understated. As he lies on the roof aiming his gun, and before he sees the boy through the binoculars, Kyle says to the answering machine at home, ‘‘tell the kids I love ‘em.’’ But neither does it make the scene tautological: merely confirming the earlier one and insisting that Chris is a good guy in difficult circumstances. That would be so if all he had to contend with was the situation in Iraq, which is precisely what he started with. That is no small thing, and anyone who wants to attack the film politically might explore how it isn’t at all interested in the complexity of the Iraq war, and Kyle and his colleagues’ role there. Fallujah may have been a key city in the insurgency against the US’s presence, but it is reduced here to the remark offered by an army colleague who describes it as the ‘’new wild west to the old middle east.’’ Yet from a dramatic point of view, while the war remains a static event, with the viewer given no idea of the Iraqis' motives beyond their keenness to take out American lives, we can understand why, on this second occasion, Chris is far more reluctant than on the first to shoot.
While in the first scene he kills the woman and child, and in the second, lets the boy live, in the third, with the Iraqi sniper, the tension doesn’t at all rest on whether he should kill the man or not, but what would be the consequences if he misses, or even if he does kill him. Mustafa is well inside enemy territory, the soldiers will have to get in there and close to the Iraqi sniper, and Kyle will be 1900 yards away. As the Iraqi sniper picks off his colleagues, Kyle can save some lives by picking off the assassin. But the distance is enormous, and even if he succeeds, he would risk exposing himself and others on the roof, with Iraqis nearby and below. This is the most complicated of the three scenes: the one requiring the most logistical understanding on the viewer’s part, the one that contains potential failure even in success, and a high risk of failure anyway, as Mustafa is so far away. If Kyle does nothing, colleagues in the distance will die; if he does something, Mustafa may or may not die, but he risks the lives of those on the roof with him as well. He takes that shot and kills Mastafa against advice from another soldier next to him, and the Iraqis hear them from below. The commander back at base, seeing and hearing what has been happening after Kyle takes out Mastafa, says they are sitting ducks. The film by this stage has descended into the sort of sequence that ruins many an American action scene, as numerous faceless villains are taken out with next to no damage done to the heroes. Nevertheless, it is the most complex of the three scenes and also shows a clear differentiation between them. If the film wants to show Kyle as a hero, he is heroic in different ways, and the quandaries he faces in each instance are distinct.
What is also worth noting is that that none of them were factually based. Though the film retains the name of Chris Kyle and many of the biographical facts including, of course, his death, Kyle claims in his memoir that, as William Beard says in an excellent article, that ‘‘when a child later presents himself as a target he simply reports, ‘I wasn’t going to kill a kid,’ (‘The Two Sides of American Sniper’). Also, it was Steven Spielberg when he was initially involved in the project who suggested introducing the character of Mastafa. While bringing in a rival sniper makes good dramatic sense, giving the film a central conflict that can allow viewers to navigate a war situation without creating a constant array of enemies, one that would leave the film as plotless as the US and its allies were clueless in Iraq, it would seem odd to introduce another factor that doesn’t add much to the dramatic structure of the work, and that makes this figure, who the alt-right love, into someone who kills kids, despite his own insistence to the contrary. Some sort of answer for this can be found in Beard’s article, one that looks at the complexity of Eastwood’s work, and at characters in it who have positive and negative qualities that can cancel each other out, or become more apparent depending on one’s perspective. ‘‘This approach leads to a kind of fractured three-dimensionality where the two images refuse to cohere but exist as a species of double vision.’’ In American Sniper, one viewer might see someone who saves many American lives; another a coward hiding behind a sniper rifle and picking off women and children.
If all the key scenes we have focused upon are made up, and none of them necessarily show Kyle as a clearly heroic figure, we might assume that the right-wing wouldn’t take the film as one of their own, but question it as it plays with the facts. However, that would suggest an analytic moment, and maybe what American Sniper coincided with was a projective one. In analysing the work, one may inevitably see what one wants to see, but it will be tempered by the need to look at different possible arguments and specific scenes or situations. But a projective perspective isn’t interested in this; it insistently sees what it sees without the need for context or content. The point of the Rorschach test was that it was ambiguous and abstract enough to allow for multiple responses that might reveal the thoughts of the person who sees particular patterns in the inkblots. But what happens if people apply similarly projective thoughts and feelings onto a work that isn’t abstract, and requires looking at the form and content of the work to understand its meaning? American Sniper is an ambiguous film, but it isn’t an abstract one. We can concretely comment on scenes that indicate Kyle’s bravery or otherwise, his compassion or otherwise, his selflessness or otherwise. The film can be read as either a hymn to a man who fought valiantly for his country, or one who took out people defending their homeland in a nation the US had no business occupying. But to insist on the former is to bring out scenes that illustrate one’s point while accepting the possibility that the latter is also true.
After attending the colleague’s funeral, his wife asks him about a letter that he sent to his mother and which Taya reads out at the funeral. ‘‘When does glory fade away and become a wrongful crusade?’’, she reads, and Taya wants to know what Chris thinks. He says, he thinks ‘‘that letter killed him. He let go and paid the price for it.’’ Does the film approve of Kyle’s claim, or do we think he is in denial? And is this denial important so that he can keep fighting an enemy, even if the viewer might believe that he has nothing to fight for, only something to fight against? What he needs to fight for, Taya believes, is his family, and by fighting in Iraq, he is ignoring them as she threatens a divorce. A good argument could be made to say she is right, but nobody would have made a film about a man who hadn’t so many kills to his name, and this was only possible by doing several tours of duty.
Yet anyone who wants to insist Eastwood’s film is a patriotic hymn might have been paying far more attention to their own insistent biases, looking perhaps for a work that would meet with the burgeoning MAGA moment, and trying to find films that could fit into it. Even Rod Dreher at the American Conservative admitted, ‘‘I don’t get why so many people on my Facebook feed see it as a rah-rah patriotic movie. It’s not.’’ But he also noted that ‘‘it’s not a standard left-wing movie by any means. These soldiers really are going up against some evil SOBs, people who need to be killed.’’ We may disagree with Dreher’s sentiments, but also might see him as part of a moment when conservatively-inclined commentators could still just about assume that you look at the evidence before cooking up a claim, just as we might wonder if it was also the moment left-wing commentators were no longer feeling obliged to justify their asides, evident in Christopher Hooton’s remark about admirers of American Sniper, and conservatives being one and the same. When people see a cinematic work as no more than an opportunity to project their prejudices, rather than to understand the film, we are in troubling epistemological waters. American Sniper is far from the most nuanced of war films, but it demands a lot more interpretive subtlety than social media can offer, and a viewer after watching the film, taking a closer look at it, and reading both Beard and Sage’s pieces, ought to be able to see it from different perspectives. If American Sniper was taken as a sign of its times when it was released, maybe we can see, over a decade later, that it can be a sign of a better one if people can see in the work what is there, and not only what they insistently wish to find in it. Make America Nuanced Again, we might propose. A big ask, but perhaps a MANA from heaven quite distinct from the theological clumsiness practised by the administration and its remaining fans in 2026.
© Tony McKibbin