American Sniper: Revisionist History and Hypermasculinity

With the Oscars on Sunday, there continues to be nauseating talk of "American Sniper" winning the Best Picture award.  Should that happen, it will underscore the fact that America - especially red state America - learned absolutely nothing from the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan by the evil duo of George "I'm a cretin" Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney.  Thankfully, a number of veterans have condemned the movie and even its false hero, Chris Kyle, but for the most part average Americans, notably those in a heavy military area like Hampton Roads, continue to drink the Kool-Aid and close their eyes to fact that America should never have invade Iraq.  Indeed, much of the disaster unfolding with ISIS stems directly from the mess unleashed by Bush/Cheney's fools errand.  A piece in Salon is yet another that looks at the falsehoods put forth by this foul movie.  Here are highlights:

In a recent interview with Terry Gross, Bradley Cooper described how he and screenwriter Jason Hall initially envisioned “American Sniper” as a revisionist western. “The idea was to have a construct of a western, but play with it a bit in the way that ‘Unforgiven’ did, you know?…I like that idea of playing with these archetypes.” 

Like so many westerns, “American Sniper” revolves around the tensions between a hypermasculine hero, who only feels at home on the frontier of “civilization and savagery,” and a heroine who embodies domesticity.  Like so many westerns, it has been defended and attacked on the basis of the authenticity (or lack thereof) of its representations of a distant “frontier.”

From Taya Kyle’s repeated testimony at the film’s promotional events proclaiming that the film is like “seeing Chris again,” to former SEALs criticizing the film’s failure to represent Kyle using a rifle scope cover, there is a remarkable consensus around the idea that what the film should be is a documentary account.

The aspects of “American Sniper” that conform to western archetypes are easily recognizable. As a young man, Kyle is portrayed as adrift, an ersatz cowboy whose exploits on the rodeo circuit fail to secure the fidelity of a girlfriend who cheats on him while he is on the road. Having failed to realize his dreams of frontier masculinity as a rodeo cowboy, Kyle turns to the military. He is trained and deployed to “the new wild West in the old Middle East,” where he is able to realize his true calling as a latter-day western lawman, serving as the lone wolf representative of the civilization whose sovereign violence he embodies. 

Kyle’s frontier masculinity is threatened not only by the violence of the “savage,” but also by the feminine domesticity of his wife, whom he marries on the same day that he gets his orders to deploy. In his trips home between tours, Taya, who needs Kyle at home to raise their children, pleads for his return.  Kyle defies his wife and returns to Iraq for a fourth tour, during which he kills Mustafa in a long-range, “High-Noon”-style shootout. It is only then that, by his own choice, he returns home to begin the process of reintegrating himself into the “civilized” life he had been working to protect.

If “American Sniper” was a film with “no nuance, no context and no subtlety,” as Sophia McClennen described it recently in Salon, that would be the end of the story. But Hall’s script, Eastwood’s direction and Cooper’s masterful performance give us a film that accomplishes much more than the failed biopic so many critics have described.

Cooper’s visceral physical performance portrays Kyle as wracked by the emotional responses that those of us who have never been on the front lines can identify with, even as he delivers lines so racist that we recoil against them. In its deliberate collision of liberal humanism with frontier violence, “American Sniper” is reminiscent of one of the most brilliant revisionist westerns ever made – John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”

In the climactic shootout in Ford’s film, lawyer Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart), the film’s representative of liberalism, reluctantly, and only after legal avenues had failed, kills the vaguely ethnic outlaw “Liberty Valance” (Lee Marvin).

In the film’s famous conclusion, Stoddard (at this point in the film’s chronology, a U.S. senator and Hallie’s husband) confesses the truth in a report to the Shinbone paper. The paper editor refuses to publish the story, declaring as he is tearing up his notes that “this is the West sir. When the legend becomes fact, you print the legend.”

In metaphorically refusing to “print the legend,” “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” forces us to grapple with the secret complicity between American liberalism and the racist violence of the frontiersman. In a representation of “The Legend” Chris Kyle that draws liberal viewers closer to his worldview than they feel comfortable being, “American Sniper” does the same thing.

The tragedies perpetrated and experienced by men like Kyle are not a conservative problem; they are an American problem. In one of the more insightful criticisms of “American Sniper,” Lakota/Dakota scholar James Fenelon argues that Kyle’s invocation savagery to describe his enemies cannot be understood as an invention of neoconservatism. The imagination of a category of human beyond the limits of reason, “the unreconstructed Other that needs to be obliterated,” enabled the violence that facilitated the settlement of the territorial United States long before it enabled American militarism abroad.

In condemning westerns like “American Sniper” rather than the ongoing political realities that drive their appeal, critics mistake a symptom for a cause.