'American Sniper'

Joyless In Fallujah

I had never even heard of Fallujah until *we* (the Coalition of the unWitting) invaded Iraq and found ourselves a quagmire. You kept hearing this was just like Vietnam and that the *allied* (we use this term loosely) were seeing terrible casualties. If there's a place in the 21st Century one wouldn't want to know about, it would be Fallujah.

Of course in movie land, it's exactly the kind of place where curious and dubious legends are born so we had 'the Hurt Locker' depicting defusing IEDs (another abbreviation we came to learning loathe in the 'aughts) and now we have a movie about a sniper who made his name in that shitfight. If it weren't Clint Eastwood directing, I might not have watched this film.

As it is, it's a true-story-loosely-based-on-fact - the usual recipe for a misleading, misrepresentation time of entertainment. Are we assholes for wanting this entertainment? Perhaps. This film certainly lends credence to such a view.

What's Good About It

It's typical Clint Eastwood fare. It's aesthetically stripped down and pretty simple and to the point. Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller put in reasonable performances and the special effects in the war scenes are in most part not distracting or annoying. Fallujah as a theatre comes over as the shithole one expects, and the campaign is gruesome as one remembers from reports.

I have a lot of complaints about this film as well as those who are complaining about it. it's a cornucopia of reasons for complaint but one thing that it is, is competent and well done (and not necessarily well-handled). The problem is that competence alone might not get you over the line into the good graces of history. After all Nazis at Auschwitz were competent at what they were doing.

What's Bad About It

It's a film that lends you the suspicion that the times have passed Clint Eastwood by. The kind of moral compass necessary to navigate the moral signposts of this film are very old. It predates a lot of the values we've come to embrace in the lat 40 years.

Also, Chris Kyle is a dodgy witness to his own actions. Okay, he's worse than that, he's been known to be a liar, so much so that Jesse Ventura pursued him into courts and won a defamation suit against him. And while you wouldn't hold a Hollywood testimonial biopic to be representative of the man, the film is incredibly circumspect and reticent about the more obvious faults of the man.

The film also skips over the many issues of a hunter shooting animals going to being a sniper shooting people instead. I walked out of the film feeling like I witnessed a film about a man who got PTSD and his solution to his problem was to become a psychopath.

It's not a *bad* film, but it's an immensely difficult film to leave one's politics at the cinema door and just watch. You get itchy with the desire to dispute the portrayal of what is essentially a killer on the loose that has state sanction to whack people for perceived intent. It's a heavy chore, trying to ignore these things.

What's Interesting About It

The film itself is pretty prosaic. It simply describes events with the utmost of simplicity. Whether they're relevant or made up events to make a life make some kind of biopic-narrative sense, it's really straightforward. What is not straightforward is the ideological battle that has burst out in the media as a result this film, and trying to parse this film for what exactly it means.

We can dispense with the gun nut NRA defences of the film. You expect the lobby of shooters to be in praise of a shooter who shot a bunch of people regardless of faith or gender or creed or age. You expect people who like shooting to be in praise of the shooters. Empathy for the shot doesn't come into it with these people so it's worth drawing a line and saying the NRA/gun-loving endorsement of this film is as shallow and stupid as it is psychopathic and self-interested to the point of being masturbatory.

What we have to tangle with a bit is the criticism levelled at the film auto whether it is misrepresenting the truth or rewriting history. One of the crits levelled against the film is that it attempts to justify going into Iraq on the basis of 9/11. Facts of the matter are - and much as it kills me - the George W. Bush administration were at pains to paint Iraq as somehow connected to the 9/11 events in order to go into Iraq. So while there is no connection whatsoever between 9/11 and Iraq, it is true that America went to war with Iraq after the events of 9/11 using it as a pretext.

Yes, it's super-frustrating. It was even more frustrating to live through. If you have forgotten or were too young to understand, but want a flavour of what that debate looked like, you can go right back to the 2004 entries of this very blog to see for yourself how frustrating the events were. Even allowing for that, in all fairness to the film it is true that 9/11 happened and then troops were sent to invade Iraq. The film does not justify or condone it, it just delivers it as matter of fact. There is no glorious scenes of the drive into Baghdad or clips of 'comical Ali' being dead wrong about his pronouncements on behalf of the government of Iraq. And if one were a soldier, that would have been the experience of events.

It's really not a fair criticism to say this film supports the argument that Iraq was responsible for 9/11. The opposite is more true. The film is snidely ironic in showing that 9/11 led to the difficult (and probably needless) street-to-street fighting in Fallujah. The problem of arguing that the film supports such a notion is that it's not taking the film on its own terms, it's whipping it with an ideological lash.

Cheering For The Killer

The other disturbing challenge is that the film gives us a cold-blooded killer as the guy for whom we're cheering; and it's really awkward. This isn't a picaresque, and this isn't a complete bit of fiction made to challenge middleclass values. The film kicks off with accounts of his childhood where shooting animals and beating up on other kids is justified. The guy joins the SEALs and shoots things really well, so he ends up as a sniper. His first kills are a civilian woman and child who try to lob a grenade at American troops. Tell me the bit where it gets pleasant because well into the film you want  to look for an escape hatch from the oppressiveness of the killing.

This is probably what war really is like, where it's distasteful traumatic choices all round, and then you pull the trigger at the shitty challenge du jour. Even so, the film sure doesn't make you feel good about it and anybody waving the star-spangled banner on the back of this is clearly, clearly, CLEARLY, an idiot.

The criticism levelled at the film is that it shows a total lack of empathy for the Iraqis who are not given proper identities except for characters how get shot, maimed and tortured. It's true. One can only surmise that the inner world of Chris Kyle was barren as the desert. That part, I blame the sources material, his autobiography. This is not a guy I would have wanted to know or with whom have had drinks.

If people thought Chris Kyle was a great guy on the basis of this film, then they're probably mentally deficient.

All Disquiet On The Iraqi Front

Back in my 20s, I had a hunch that maybe my generation - the Generation X for whom this blog is written - would get by without a war. That unlike the Baby Boomer generation that was saddled with the Vietnam War, Gen X would merely be drawn to minor conflicts like Grenada or even Panama where overwhelming US supremacy made for short, sharp, one-sided affairs. This was true even of the Gulf war, waged to evict Saddam Hussein's army from Kuwait with a definite, self-imposed finish line. Then, the George W. Bush administration befell this earth and the rest is what we have of this miserable 21st Century so far.

The Iraq and Afghan wars became the wars for Gen X. And it has been much worse for Gen X than it was for the Baby Boomers for the single reason that both wars have driven America into the deepest debt, and the whole world economy has been dragged down by America's debt.

The war in both Afghanistan and Iraq were put on credit, so to speak as the Bush Administration went into deficit to fight 2 wars it had not financed, and then cut taxes for the rich. By the time he left office, he had given rise to the Global Financial Crisis as well as a crazy amount of national debt. Because what we borrow today subtracts from what we earn tomorrow, essentially the Bush Administration spent the money to be earned by Gen X.

The question then becomes what exactly did the Bush Administration buy with that debt. So far it seems it bought sweet fuck all. Thus it seems incredibly small potato stakes to be arguing whether this film is pro-war or not. The real question is, how on earth is anybody going to legitimate the value in the Iraq War?  Iraq is where our generation got sold down the river together with the future, for a song.

So with all that, the film singularly fails to answer the question, was the Iraq misadventure with all the chaos, mayhem, vitriol, divisions it unleashed, and the political acrimony that has resulted in our polity, the death and destruction... was it really worth it? If all we have to take away is that this guy in Fallujah killed lots of Iraqi combatants, semi-combatants, hemi-combatants and hemi-demi-semi-parital-almost-noncombatants through his great marksmanship, is that all that great? Is this film going  to be the equivalent epitaph to the Iraq War that 'All Quiet On The Western Front' was to World War I? Seems really striking in its paucity to me.